Telluride & Venice Winners and Losers: 'Primetime,' 'Wild Horse Nine,' 'Bunker,' 'Possible Love,' & More

14:25Ryan Lattanzio:Sorry. Oh, I like that movie. Ivan's Ecstasy from Bernard Rose with Danny Houston as this drug addled Hollywood agent in Los Angeles, which was shot on a raw, unpolished digital video style. So I do. I appreciate the bravura filmmaking that's going on here. And that's why I ultimately ultimately liked the movie. but I do think that Pattinson, if we're talking about Oscars, in The Odyssey, he's playing a more obvious villain, and that's the type of person that maybe Oscar voters would go for. It's a more recognizable archetype. I don't think they will there either.

14:56Anne Thompson:I don't think this is his year, as many films as he's made. I don't think that he will get nominated for an Oscar for The Odyssey either. As strong as I think the coattails for The Odyssey are, I think the supporting role there will probably be John Leguizamo. And we have to see whether they put Anne Hathaway in lead or not. That's still up in the air. And then whether they get Samantha Morton in supporting. That's where I think that will go.

15:25Ryan Lattanzio:Primetime has a kind of college dorm room poster movie quality. I can't really explain that. But you know what I'm saying. Like a fight club or American Psycho.

15:34Anne Thompson:I think it could do well. I think it could do well with a younger audience. A24 knows what they're doing. They have an amazing lineup. I don't think if this movie turns out to not be an Oscar contender, they're going to cry in their beer. It'll save them some money. But finally, what were the other hits at Venice?

15:55Ryan Lattanzio:So one of the obvious hits and a standout that I think could win the Golden Lion or at least Best Actress. my caveat being that I left the day that NASA premiered the documentary about IDF soldiers being anonymized and basically giving testimony to instructions they've been given to massacre Palestinians and people in Gaza I did not see the movie I'm seeing it next week as a New York Festival press screening this got a 25 minute standing ovation of Venice it's obviously going to win some kind of a huge prize it's the only documentary in competition at a festival that is beginning to prove itself as having a real pedigree for debuting excellent docs in the fall circuit.

16:37Ryan Lattanzio:But the movie I'm talking about is Possible Love, directed by Lee Chung Dong, which is another one of his gorgeously slippery human relationship dramas in the vein of Burning. Obviously, we both really liked that movie. That was a very good movie. Great. And he did a movie in 2007 called Secret Sunshine about a widow who going into a small town looking for a fresh start. It obviously gets much more complicated, but he recasts her. Her name is Jeon Do-yeon, and she is in Possible Love as a Korean woman who is the subject of a documentary filmmaker. You have a quartet of Korean actors that are these two couples.

17:17Ryan Lattanzio:Two of them are more working class. One of them is the wife is Jeon Do-yeon, who is sort of the heart of the movie and gives this excellent performance. And then the other half is this woman who is a documentary filmmaker and her husband. They are rich capitalist people. And this is a blue collar couple that is just reeling from the husband, having recently gone through a worker strike that left him very traumatized. So there's a huge class divide between the two of them and their lives become very unmeshed and in ways that are partially romantic. I'm not certain that a lot of people in the real world are going to stream this movie on Netflix, unfortunately.

17:51Ryan Lattanzio:It's not a K-drama. It doesn't have an algorithmically...

17:54Anne Thompson:Are they giving this one theatrical?

17:56Ryan Lattanzio:They're giving it two weeks theatrical, so it's opening October 23rd, and then they're putting it on the platform a couple weeks later. This is a movie that's cineous and serious art house goers, and I think, I would say a sizable suave of the Academy is going to go for. It's going to win a lot of critics' prizes, and it's going to be all over 10 best lists at the end of the year. It really is another masterpiece from this filmmaker that I adore. And up to that point, it got the best reviews out of Venice so far.

18:23Anne Thompson:Well, that's something to look forward to. And it isn't going to be all neon this year, the international race. So we had Fjord. We had The Fatherland. We had Minotaur. I took a picture, which I was very fond of, of your friend, Marcus Schleinzer, the director of Rose, who I fell in love with, by the way. I fell in love with him.

18:46Ryan Lattanzio:Lovely man.

18:47Anne Thompson:Sweet man.

18:48Ryan Lattanzio:Anyone who could spend some time with him, he's irresistible. He really is. Just a total charm attack.

18:53Anne Thompson:We were waiting in a long line for a while, and we hung out and chatted and had fun. And then I took a picture of the three of them with the big Telluride mountains behind. It made me happy. But, you know, those movies are going to, and of course, the hit of Telluride was La Bola Negra, which we kind of knew would play really well there. And of course, the club kid guy, Jordan Firstman, was hanging out with the Bola Negra guys, Los Javis, and they were all having a great time. You could see the vibe playing out. So that was really fun to see that the word of mouth at Telluride is a real thing, you know, and you have these word of mouth hits.

19:37Ryan Lattanzio:Well, let's talk about Everest, the new documentary from Chai Brasser-Helley and Jimmy Chin, which is about this guy Jim Morrison, who is desperately committed to scaling Everest and then skiing down it, which no one had ever done at that point.

19:52Anne Thompson:It's the North Face. You have to specify the North Face.

19:56Ryan Lattanzio:The North Face. And at that point, only five people had climbed up, but then no one had ever skied down. And skiing down is very perilous. It's a lot of ice sheets and all of these things that people will discover on IMAX. There are some things that are morally questionable about this documentary, but I think that's what's really fascinating about it. There is a major tragedy early in the documentary that is captured on film. And we see it. We see it and we gasp. We really do gasp. But also, your light bulb goes off. You can kind of all but feel the production team lighting up over this material.

20:32Ryan Lattanzio:No, you're speculating. You are speculating.

20:33Anne Thompson:No, that's not fair, Ryan. That really isn't fair. They debated it. They didn't know if they were going to go forward. They decided eventually only to go forward because they decided to go ahead and do the climb. The climb that we can say it's at the beginning of the movie. You think that they went forward for the movie? I don't think that's true. You can buy that argument or you can reject that argument. We do not know.

21:01Ryan Lattanzio:We don't know, but I'm going to say that to the level of the material that they put into the movie, you can tell that they obviously, there was an excitement about it. I'm not saying that that doesn't mean that it was exploitative, but I do think that putting in there, putting what they did in there is a choice. And there's also the element that Chai and Jimmy were breaking up while they were making this. This is a years-long project.

21:22Anne Thompson:This is the second movie where they broke up. But Las Javes stayed friends and partners. In the case of Jimmy and Chai, they've separated. They're no longer married or together, but they are definitely not happily friendly. There's no question.

21:40Ryan Lattanzio:I am not telling you to infer anything from this, but I was told that they were quite very much not sitting next to each other during the Venice premiere of the movie.

21:48Anne Thompson:We came through the whole festival with separate interviews, and I did an interview with her, and then I did an interview with the two men, and then Oprah did a whole thing, and they were separated. So it's something that has to be managed. Listen, Chai was upset because he got together with the nanny.

22:08Ryan Lattanzio:Which, when someone told me that I thought was a joke and a reference to a Jude Law thing, and nope, it really was, that's true.

22:15Anne Thompson:At the same time, we can look at Jimmy Chin as a heroic figure, and I'll tell you why. Yes, whatever their motives were for doing this, they were driven to do it, and they did it. And what I understand is that this was something of such great magnitude in terms of danger that they were crazy to do it. They really were, and there was no room for error, no room to make any mistakes at all. They actually managed to make the ascent. He actually manages on a very bad day with bad ice and everything else to go back down on skis. And the story that I got from Jimmy on the way down, the rest of them had to climb down.

23:02Anne Thompson:It's not in the movie. It's not the story of the movie, so it's not in the movie. They had to rappel down. And each time they reached a point where they could hang on the thing that's sticking out, whatever it's called, they knock in metal things so that they can hang down. I'm sounding like an idiot. They would pass out until the next person came down and relieved them and woke them up. And then they would go down to the next level. So it's that kind of thing. It's really remarkable. So I would see these guys. I talked to them. They're hugely athletic and amazing creatures in terms of their fitness and everything.

23:49Anne Thompson:But they're also heroic in a certain way. And I can't get away from admiring that.

23:57Ryan Lattanzio:One of the Sherpas has since died. And this was like a little footnote in the end credits. But, you know, I'm actually now I'm talking to myself into a corner of having a totally different feeling about this movie. When you think about the fact that all these guys had to climb perilously, risk their lives so that this other guy could realize his dream of skiing down the mountain.

24:18Anne Thompson:But at the same time, they did make a movie. So the other thing that's extraordinary about this is that Jimmy Chin is climbing up. He's the partner. He's the climbing partner because the woman is gone. So he becomes the climbing partner. He's in his 50s, which is not normal for this thing. He's the one thinking about all the time which camera is where and which thing is going on and all the support that's necessary to make the movie. He's making the movie the whole time. So that's heroic as well. and there's a whole thing where the the skiing down part had to be done with aerial photography and they had to send up two drones so that when the battery ran out on one the other one would click right on and keep going so that it was like a single take because you couldn't do it again he's he's skiing down fucking everest so yeah i admire this ryan no i reviewed it very positively there's

25:17Ryan Lattanzio:amazing filmmaking here. I'm just saying, and I'm not a moralistic viewer. I don't look to movies to tell me how to live my life. In fact, I probably look for the opposite in some ways. I do think there's some potential moral quandaries here. But what I'm saying is that that's what makes the movie so interesting and fascinating, even as those things might go over the heads of some people.

25:37Anne Thompson:No, no, no. You have valid concerns. I'm not arguing with that. Ryan, what was your absolute favorite film?

25:46Ryan Lattanzio:Well, before I say my favorite, I do want to talk about a total loser at Venice, which is going to be at Toronto, which is Florian Zeller's Bunker. His third feature film, this playwright who won an Oscar for adapting the father. Then he did The Son, which was a terrible movie with Hugh Jackman. And Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for that, right? So this is a movie where he's trying to do an eyes wide shut kind of film where he casts Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, real life couple, as a married couple where he is an architect. She's a book editor. I mean, she's barely given anything really to do in this movie.

26:20And he is being hired by a tech billionaire.

26:25Ryan Lattanzio:And once you see who's playing him, you know that it's a reference to Elon Musk to build a apocalyptic bunker. It's funny that at the world premiere at the end, there was a 15-minute standing ovation. The critics did not go over this movie at all. And then you see Penelope Cruz sobbing. And I wonder, that's perhaps because she just watched her movie in its totality. But it is bugged with these extremely heavy-handed metaphors about wealth disparity and the bunkers within all of our souls. Like at one point, Penelope Cruz says to Javier Bardem, oh, you're building a bunker in your heart or whatever.

27:00Ryan Lattanzio:Like, come on. Please. It's just, it's the problem is the performances are good. And I think that the only way it will travel is because it will attract interest with the fact that this is a real life couple, but I don't see it being an Oscar movie because the actors, they don't get the kind of writing that leads to the raw explosive emotions that happen between a real life couple in a movie like Eyes Wide Shut or in similar movies with non real life couples like Scenes from a Marriage or even the HBO show with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac.

27:31Anne Thompson:Which I loved.

27:31Ryan Lattanzio:which is amazing yeah no i re-watched that every year which uh a lot of people in my life worry for me for that reason or something like just other recent oscar nominees like blue valentine or or you know something like revolutionary road just the writing isn't there i i a lot of people in the coming out of the premiere really liked the movie itself but coming out of the critic screening no so this was a kind of a loser um other than possible love a movie that i really liked. That will be a Toronto that I think is a good seg into asking you how Fjord played in Talgeride, which is a Danish movie called Woman Unknown by May Altukey, who directed the movie Queen of Hearts that Catherine Brea remade into last summer a couple of years ago.

28:16Ryan Lattanzio:It's a Danish movie about a former maid who is now supposed to be marrying her master after his wife died. And it's set in post-World War II Denmark during the Danish resistance at a time when women were being persecuted for having sex with Nazis. And so basically this woman did fuck a Nazi and people are starting to find out and her tenuous grasp on social climbing and the social order are starting to spin out of control as she tries to control the spread of information about this dark secret from her past. And it's kind of one of those movies that's like Fjord, but I think asks the question much more provocatively, which is when a society becomes so obsessed with trying to prevent evil, doesn't that then become its own sort of authoritarianism, right?

29:01Ryan Lattanzio:And I think Fjord also takes, like this movie purports to be taking that sort of ambiguous position that a lot of directors out of Europe do that become sort of hard to swallow. I think that this movie, while very different, answered and asked some of those questions with much more subtlety. I'm just looking at reactions online and it kind of seems like Fjord isn't landing at Toronto with the press score. So I wonder how it went at Telluride.

29:25Anne Thompson:It didn't land there either. It was muted. It was a muted response. There's no question that La Bola Negra and Club Kid were the hits on the ground out of Cannes. People admire Fatherland and Minotaur, but they're both chilly movies. They're not hugely emotional movies. But Sandra Huller did really well at Telluride. She had a tribute, and people really, really, really admire her and look up to her. So she's going to go far, I think, for Fatherland in the end and maybe supporting for Project Hail Mary. So she'll be fine. I don't know what's going to happen to Fjord. I need to see that movie with an audience here in LA.

30:10Anne Thompson:I need to see how it plays here or maybe in New York.

30:14Ryan Lattanzio:That one is definitely vulnerable. But, you know, one movie that the reactions to it, viewing from afar out of Venice, it was like people saw God, basically, was the surprise screening. You can see everything directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

30:29Anne Thompson:I got to I had fun with that because Marcus Jones wrote me at some point. He said, I think that's that secret screen. Everybody was buzzing about the secret screening. he wrote me and he said, I think it's Nathan Fielder's documentary at A24. I had already heard, I'd already landed A24 and documentary, but he landed Nathan Fielder and I went to A24. I got confirmation that it was that film. And I got to break the news right at the top of the screening on Twitter. And then we had a story online. So that was fun. It was old fashioned and shoe leather journalism kind of fun. But that movie is an interesting movie to parse because, of course, everybody was very excited.

31:14Anne Thompson:But one of the things to keep in mind, how rare it is to see a movie for the first time that you absolutely know nothing about. It is very unusual in our time. It used to be true that you would go to a film festival and know nothing about most of the movies, and you would discover them. That is no longer true. We now know everything about every movie before we go. But this was kept a secret. And A24 gets a lot of points for keeping it a secret. And the thing they did with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim was to agree that they could go forward with this project even if they didn't finish it or deliver it.

31:52Anne Thompson:They paid for it anyway, whether it worked or it didn't work. And at the beginning, there's a Q &A at the end. At the beginning, Lance and Nathan really didn't know if it was going to work because you have these shots of Nathan sort of lurking. They're embedded with Elizabeth Holmes before she goes to prison. There's a period of time, very short period of time, before she's going to go to prison. She's with her husband, who is a creepy, creepy guy. And she's creepy. Let's be honest. She's creepy. She's got this affect with her eyes and her smile. And you just don't believe anything that she says.

32:29Anne Thompson:But what Lance and with the camera work and everything and they're embedded, they get in there and it evolves over time how they figure out how to make the movie. And he gets Nathan becomes a character, even though he's a funny character and it's a very entertaining movie. He is, in fact, trying really hard to be a good journalist. He's trying hard to get to get real answers from this, I think, crazy woman. And it's a fascinating movie and it moves on from there. And there are all kinds of secrets that we're not supposed to give away.

33:03Ryan Lattanzio:No, please don't. I'm very excited about this one. New York Film Festival just added it. I will say that the reactions to it are the kind that make me question. You should question. You should question. Any festival of just like complete adulation. I know. It's also like I'm not talking about this movie, but Telluride in general. Of course, you're going to tweet a rave review. Like you just had dinner with the person who directed it and starred in it like five minutes ago down the road. You know, so I think it's a lot of the proximity to Talon and Telluride. I have to say, I do think having never been there, my inference is that that possibly does inform the magnitude of these reactions, which often are quite hyperbolic.

33:42Anne Thompson:I agree with you, but I would say that the real reason they're hyperbolic is that they get better traffic and more clicks. And it annoys me so much. Everybody's like, this is an Oscar contender. This is an Oscar contender. Now, I know I play that game too. I understand. But I want to be accurate. I want to be right. I don't want to be hyperbolic. I want to say it when Julianne Moore is really good in Jesse Eisenberg's debut, yes, of course she's going to get nominated for an Oscar. If Andrew Scott, yes. The one that's a question mark more, Carrie Coon in The Liberation. Not sure how that's going to go.

34:23Anne Thompson:By the way, my favorite Telluride movie, Mike Lee's Tender Loving Care.

34:28Ryan Lattanzio:A very beautiful movie, a movie that you are invited to read as warm and hopeful or a confirmation of your feelings that everything is doomed and terrible. And that's what's great about Mike Lee is that all of his movies are kind of like this, right? And in that movie especially, I don't want to spoil it, but the second half, there's a whole, I mean, all the reviewers have sort of commented on this, but there is a grappling with dementia that is handled in a way that I don't think I've ever quite seen in a movie with such realism. That's right. It's very real.

35:02Anne Thompson:It's actually quite clinical.

35:04Ryan Lattanzio:ass covering sentimentality. It's very clinical and it's very sudden. And it's like the person you knew is just gone immediately like a light. They're just turned off. And that is exactly what happens in that movie. And it shook me and disturbed me to my core. I actually would say that that movie is up there. I know that you probably related to it in a different way. I felt like that movie is up there with Naked as one of the most disturbing Mike Lee movies. And it's one of the best movies of the year. No question.

35:31Anne Thompson:I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And I saw the three actors that were in Telluride, and I wanted to go up to them and hug them. I felt like I knew them. I knew them from the movie. They were the characters in the movie. Now, of course, these are actors who are playing parts. But that's how good he is. That's how extraordinary Mike Lee is, is that we were getting that sense. So Artificial is playing in New York as well. And there's a trailer out. And I looked at that trailer and I went, oh, this could be good. This could be really good. What do you think?

36:07Ryan Lattanzio:The trailer was very good. And this looks like more of the ilk of the social network of David Fincher than perhaps the social reckoning trailer by Aaron Sorkin. Thank you. And I haven't seen that movie, but that trailer was terrible. This movie looks really good. And I'm interested in how these movies all fall or taking on these tech moguls. You know, I saw the four-hour Musk documentary by Alex Gibney in Venice, which is not so much a bombshell, but really a summary, a very sobering summary of where we've come and who this techno rat king person is. So I'm very eager to see artificial. Me too.

36:45Ryan Lattanzio:The trailer came out on the same day that Luca Guadagnino's seven-hour Bertolucci documentary premiered at Venice. So I think there was some consonants there in bringing those out at the same time. And what's interesting about that documentary, it's a very obsessive, passionate movie that I saw in a theater. I sat through the whole thing, which is actually very good. And then there's some parts of it there where he sets up all these academics to sort of get lost in their own sauce. but he interviews James Gray, who waxes very interestingly about the state of film criticism. But what's interesting about that documentary, and I'm sorry it took us off of artificial here, is that he says at the beginning that the goal of the movie, this documentary, is to get Gen Z interested in Bertolucci, and yet he spends about 10 seconds on The Dreamers.

37:33Anne Thompson:That's the sexiest movie he ever made. I mean, that was porn. About young people, nubile young people, a triangle and, you know, having sex.

37:41Ryan Lattanzio:That was porn for me when I was of a certain age, while it also is a very good movie. I mean, I guess he's maybe averse to this idea that Gen Z is really resistant to having carnality on screen, supposedly, though I know a lot of Gen Z people who are very sexually active. So I don't know. It's weird to omit that movie, and it feels like a deliberate choice, but the fact that he did was kind of interesting. And I actually interviewed Louis Garrel when I was at Venice about a Nani Moretti movie. So I suppose things came a bit full circle for me for finally getting to talk to him.

38:17Anne Thompson:You like him. You like him because I heard that movie wasn't that good, the Nani Moretti. You know, it's not, but it was a breath of fresh air

38:26Ryan Lattanzio:in a sort of grim festival aesthetically and thematically. And also the composer of the score on this movie called It Will Happen Tonight was Alberto Iglesias. So you could kind of pretend that you were in the knockoff version of an Almodovar movie. So it was kind of fun.

38:42Anne Thompson:Okay. All right. Well, speaking of Almodovar, he's going to be at the New York Film Festival, which is coming up. And we will give you a full preview next week when we come back. In the meantime, What is your recommendation this week, Ryan?

38:57Ryan Lattanzio:Anne, I racked my brain. I could not come up with a recommendation. I've decided that my recommendation is for people to sleep if they're attending fall festivals. Here's something I'll recommend that's coming out in a week. I'm sure because next week we'll have plenty of more to talk about after the winners of Venice and all these things as we look forward to the Toronto Awards. John Wilson's The History of Concrete comes out next week. Oh, that's a great movie. Good choice. Great movie by the creator and sort of star, if you will, of How To with John Wilson, the HBO show. And in this movie, he goes through New York City and meets all kinds of crazy characters to try to understand the origins of concrete and how it has become so resonant.

39:41Anne Thompson:You've never seen a movie like this, I can assure you. And it's very entertaining.

39:46Ryan Lattanzio:What's your recommendation?

39:48Anne Thompson:I suggest that everyone catch up with Godzilla Minus One on Netflix. One of the movies I'm most excited about at the New York Film Festival is its sequel called Godzilla Minus Zero. And remember that the director, Takashi Yamazaki, and his VFX team actually won the Oscar for their low-budget visual effects. So if you haven't seen it, go for it. If you want to see it again, go for it. And I'm looking forward to seeing it at the New York Film Festival, Godzilla Minus Zero. Until next week.

40:20Ryan Lattanzio:See you then.

40:52Anne Thompson:We'll see you next time. Terms apply.