Actor Jean Dujardin (L) poses with cast member Berenice Bejo during a photocall after …
TELLURIDE, Colorado (TheWrap.com) - It's official: Telluride is George Clooney's town now. Everyone else -- Glenn Close, Tilda Swinton, Jennifer Garner, the dogs, the hippies, even the Lauren and Bush clans up in the mountains -- just lives in it.
The 38th annual festival may have peaked at the very outset with its first screening, Friday's world premiere of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," about which it's been difficult to find a discouraging word. That eerie unanimity hasn't carried over to any other film, though the U.S. debut of Cannes favorite "The Artist" has incited nearly the same effusiveness.
Love for Payne's film would have been undiminished even if Clooney hadn't made it to town. It doesn't hurt that he's effortlessly charmed everyone in the valley, and a weekend that began with the festival's controversial -- and soon-rescinded -- edict to the press to not photograph him looks to end with the actor-director having spent quality time with everyone but the town dogs (and even they may yet get an audience).
Asked at a panel how he deals with the crush of admirers, Clooney kept his tongue lodged well into the sexiest cheek alive.
"I drink -- a lot," he said. "And up here at this elevation, you can get pretty f---ed up" with just one or two shots, he noted. "It's cheap drinkin' up here!"
Other actors have been highly accessible at this most relaxed of festivals, including Glenn Close. ("She's in it to win it," remarked one admiring publicist for a rival Oscar hopeful.) But chatter on the gondola has been divided over Close's passion project, "Albert Nobbs," as it has been for David Cronenberg's Freud-Jung-spanking parlor drama, "A Dangerous Method," and especially the unannounced sneak preview of "Butter," a broadly satirical, red-state-baiting comedy co-produced by leading lady Jennifer Garner.
Here's the buzz on 10 key films playing Telluride through the Monday night close:
1. THE DESCENDANTS. How much do audiences and critics adore Alexander Payne's first film since "Sideways"? Let them count the ways, to the probable annoyance of everyone who won't have a shot at seeing it until Fox Searchlight releases it in theaters November 23. By any reckoning, the comic drama is 25 times better than the iffy trailer suggested, with its absentee-dad-reconnects-with-daughters-via-tragedy theme just one of several wrinkles in the screenplay's tonal tightrope walk. Clooney has more heart than he's yet been allowed on screen, and even actors with only two or three scenes, like Robert Forster and Judy Greer, get enough time to do comedy and heartbreak.
Industry bloggers wore their hearts on their sleeves. Wrote Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells, "I for one love the abrupt, subtle tonal shifts between straight drama and whaddaya-gonna-do, throw-up-your-hands, low-key comedy. Perfect." "If Searchlight makes all the right movies, the movie should sail through the award season fray," said IndieWire's Anne Thompson. Only In Contention's Kris Tapley was lukewarm, calling it "a bit Payne-light" and saying he's "not really sure" if it'll "wrangle a Best Picture nomination" -- a prediction few others are holding back on.
2. THE ARTIST. If the Weinsteins play their cards -- and their title and dialogue cards -- right, "The Artist" could be the first hit silent film since, well, Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie"... if not since the actual early 1930s. Audiences haven't seemed to mind that its plot -- basically, "A Star is Born" with a happy ending -- is far cornier than any of the classic silent films whose formal conventions the filmmaker apes so well. It's playing as an across-the-board crowd-pleaser that, judging from the evangelistic zeal of Telluride attendees, may well break out of arthouses into mainstream cineplexes.
3. BUTTER. Hundreds were turned away from Saturday night's world premiere and "sneak preview" of a competitiveness-in-the-sticks comedy that's being compared to everything from "Smile" to "Little Miss Sunshine." Laughter echoed through the Galaxy, but some exited with sour faces, thanks to the film's broad Midwestern stereotypes and condescending attitude toward the flyover states.
Jennifer Garner's production company generated the project, and it's as if she and the filmmakers started with the idea of coming up with a shrill Sarah Palin-like harridan to poke fun at, then worked backward to give her some crowd-pleasing foils -- including an impossibly precocious 11-year-old black girl who competes against her for a butter-sculpture championship. Patronizing or not, there were plenty of attendees willing and able to guffaw at Iowans making butter sculptures of the Last Supper and Newt Gingrich. Garner was bold -- maybe too bold -- in making her right-winger unrelentingly shrewish. But there's some amusement to the myriad supporting turns, including Olivia Wilde being cast against type as Iowa's most stunning stripper, and fina
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