Venice vs. Telluride: The Best and Worst of the Fall Fests So Far

15:04Anne Thompson:it to crimson uh peak yes it's very it's very comparable there's a big castle that they're working in that's very beautiful and has the open that same kind of you know leaves float on the ground kind of open feeling well they've been transparent about the fact that it was

15:22Ryan Lattanzio:budgeted supposedly at 120 million dollars if you ask me it's probably a lot more than that because i feel like once they're willing to say it it means that they're low-balling it

15:31Anne Thompson:on some level you're probably right i think i think it's going to do well i think if they did have a theatrical release a proper one instead of a sort of pro forma one i think it would actually do well at at the box office but then again you know that's not that's not what they do um and And then the other one that I saw that was at Venice, but you didn't see it, was Paolo Sorrentino's La Grazia, which will probably be the Italian entry. And it's Tony Servillo, again, who he's worked with many times in Il Duce and other films. He's wonderful. And he's playing the prime minister who has to face these dilemmas about who to pardon and who to let go and all this.

16:18Anne Thompson:And it's really good. It's a lot of, you get caught up in these moral dilemmas that are intense. And it works. You actually follow it. And it's smart. And it's fun to watch.

16:34Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I skipped that. I had to report on the opening night where Francis Ford Coppola gave an award to Werner Herzog. That was very cute, very sweet. But I saw a different movie. I saw Son of Saul director Laszlo Nemesis Orphan. which is set in post-communist 1957 Hungary. And it's about a boy who's, you know, he's descended from survivors of war and he is meeting his father, who was a brutish man for the first time. A lot of people, and it's sort of about the, like the seeds of evil. It's like the white ribbon in that way. So people have compared it to come and see. And in terms of brutality, it's like come and see actual animals died on the set during the make event.

17:16Ryan Lattanzio:Like this movie is nothing like come and see, which is the one of the most harrowing fucked up movies ever made. And one of my obviously one of my favorite films. And and I was going to say, it sounds like something you'd like. I just love that movie. Orphan is not on the level of that. That's what I saw instead of the Sorrentino, which movie has. And I'll we'll get to it later. But there's one that you did see that I reviewed out of Venice very painfully. Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which you saw in LA.

17:49Anne Thompson:Okay, so that movie, A, there's no excuse for its length. It's just a straightforward drama set in academia. And there's a setup where Julia Roberts, initially you are made to think that she's quite something. She's really beautiful and cool and her husband adores her. he's played by Michael Stolbarg who I love and and that it's beautifully made you're going along with it everything's good she has a very flirty relationship with one of her fellow professors and Andrew Garfield and they're both going after tenure together and the the movie sort of indulges in a lot of heady philosophical jargon which I had a little bit of impatience with and then And Ayo Adeburi is playing the student who accuses Andrew Garfield of raping her, basically.

18:44Anne Thompson:And that opens up all this stuff that, you know, how does the Julia Roberts character respond to that? And how does she handle it? And so she's got some kind of painful thing going on. And she's heading back into some kind of drug addiction. The movie just keeps going on and on into all of these sort of terrible places. And you end up hating her and you end up not liking any character except maybe Michael Stalbarg, who's wonderful. And I would marry him in a second. Thank you very much.

19:18Ryan Lattanzio:It was hard to believe that those two people would be married, honestly, but he did sell it. there is a moment in this movie where he she has iowa debris over for dinner and he's playing music really really loudly to sort of disrupt them and he's kind of doing these microaggressions we already did this in anatomy of a fall it's the same thing as that why are we doing this again so soon oh this one's painful for me because i am obviously a luca guadagnino fan i have in met

19:47Anne Thompson:spent time with him he's a lovely lovely person and so it really pained me to have to pay on this

19:54Ryan Lattanzio:but people were not happy with it here and just to give some context first of all it was kind of a bad screening because it started 25 minutes late we were all standing outside and it became a literal monsoon i have never experienced rain like that ever and i had my umbrella but it didn't matter and so the whole screening and even into the screening i went to after which was laura waitresses cover up very good you will love that one we'll talk about another time uh i was soaking wet and shivering and cold and everybody was and so that i i it's reassuring that you didn't like it either and you saw it on home turf and not in this context then the press conference was kind of a weird vibe like julia roberts had a kind of a bad vibe and she seemed like she didn't want to be there i asked luca guanino a question that went viral about the movie's relationship to woody allen because the opening credits are literally with woody allen style credits font i noticed that yeah it was and it was like the first question somebody asked julia roberts was why does this movie undermine feminism i mean it was just like a funny press conference i don't know that it undermines feminism it really undermined my enjoyment of itself uh i don't think iowa debris is even very good her character doesn't really get much to do uh it's very muddled and incoherent.

21:13Anne Thompson:We don't know. We do not know what to think of that character. We don't. It's interesting the way the movie gives you certain information. And so you're trying to, you know, who did what to who. And eventually you do get a lot of information and you realize, okay, maybe this happened or that happened, but you're not clear for a long time. And her character is really not clear. And there's a scene, there's a couple of places as this woman is deteriorating into pain and drugs. and she's not telling anyone. She's not telling that deliriously beautiful husband of hers who's so supportive and loving.

21:48Anne Thompson:She's not telling her friends. She's not telling anyone what's going on with her. And I couldn't understand why. I didn't get it. I didn't understand. She ends up in the hospital. You know, something is wrong with her. So it's one of those very, it's like there's a lot of skill and chops that Guadagnino knows how to use, that he's applying to this. I don't have any problems with the performances of the actors. It's the writing. We have to fault the writing.

22:17Ryan Lattanzio:The script is bad. And you have to fault Luca a little bit for choosing this project. This is a first time writer. It was a script that came to his attention beginning of last year. Her name is Nora Garrett. I kept thinking if this was written by the May, December screenwriter, Sammy Birch would have been better like it just isn't if it thinks itself to be risky and dangerous but it's really actually pretty safe and I would even say pretty like black and white in its morals even I would say I don't know I just it does not work and I I think it's totally out of

22:51Anne Thompson:the Oscar race uh I think that's the other thing Amazon really truly believe they took it to to Venice. They truly believed that this movie was their Oscar move. They're opening New York with it. This is going to play an opening night at the New York Film Festival, and it will be a disaster.

23:13Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, kiss of death. It's really not good. It's like the time that they opened the festival with white noise.

23:19Anne Thompson:That's right. It's equivalent. It's like, who can you get to pay for the party is really how they have to figure that out. But they should know better because this is not going to play. It's too long. It's not going to play.

23:30Ryan Lattanzio:I was invited to competition and they decided to take it out. It certainly wouldn't have won anything. It just, oh yeah, it's not going to go down well in New York. We'll be at the party, but I'm not going to rewatch the movie in that particular screening.

23:45Anne Thompson:That's going to be a theatrical release. So they do have some movie stars to play with, although I don't think, I do think that when Roberts and Clooney were together in that wedding rom-com.

23:58Ryan Lattanzio:Ticket to Paradise.

24:00Anne Thompson:Yeah, that did well. That did well. People wanted to see that and people wanted to see them together. I'm not sure that she can pull audiences in a serious movie like this that gets bad reviews. So that's a problem. Andrew Garfield is very good in it, actually. He's very sexy and smart and he carries it perfectly well.

24:18Ryan Lattanzio:Sexy, he's a sexual assailant, allegedly.

24:20Anne Thompson:He's horrible, I know, I know. he's a womanizer something in the beginning of this movie is like and then and then we can move

24:28Ryan Lattanzio:on from it this sort of like inciting moment is that iowa debris finds a picture taped under julia roberts's um she's looking at her this isn't just just so you know why she's exploring all the cabinets in the bathroom yeah why the hell would you put that picture under your sink and not in the pied-a-terre that you have. You have another apartment that's by the wharf. You could put that picture that holds apparently the secret to all your past. You could put that in your other apartment where your husband doesn't go, not tape it under your bathroom sink. That was really weird to me.

25:04Anne Thompson:And it just like did not set a good tone for the film ahead. But it wasn't good that I owed a debris, you know, steals it. I mean, that's not good either, right? I mean, she shouldn't have done that. So here's the thing. I loved the costumes. I love the way that Julia Roberts dressed and I, I will imitate it from now on. And, and, and I had one of the nice, one of the smarter things in the movie is that she's wearing the same clothes because she sort of admires her and wants to be her. And that's part of the kinky aspect of, of what's going on. She's playing a gay character. So she has a bit of a crush on her professor.

25:40Yeah.

25:41Ryan Lattanzio:The clothes are good. It's kind of that, it's kind of that old money style. and she's got a really good white suit that she's drinking a lot of glasses of red wine in. There's much beautiful things.

25:53Anne Thompson:She's got confidence.

25:54Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, exactly, exactly. There is much beautiful stuff to look at in the movie, I suppose, but it really bombed here. People were not happy with it. But anyway -

26:04Anne Thompson:I saw some good movies in Telluride. I loved Chloe Zhao's Hamnet, which is going to give Sinners a run for its money at the Oscars. So this is part of Focus's fabulous Telluride because both Begonia and Hamnet played very, very well there. And, you know, Paul Meskel, who also was showing up there for the History of Sound, Paul Meskel and Jesse Buckley are extraordinary in this. He plays Will Shakespeare. She plays Agnes Shakespeare. They lose a kid. They grieve. And he writes Hamlet. And it's a beautiful movie. And it's going to, the question that everybody has, it's very high up in the 90s in Metacritic.

26:45Anne Thompson:The critics like it that much. The question that people have is that, is will it do well at the box office? And that's one of those things that you can't answer. But I'm going to bet, I saw it in a theater full of people crying. Men and women, the whole theater was crying. There's just no way to avoid the fact that that was true. and I believe that audiences in this case or perhaps at this moment in time will enjoy going to the movies and crying that's my bet so we'll see we'll see well she's watching

27:19Ryan Lattanzio:the reactions from afar it sounded like it's the most devastating thing that's ever been put on celluloid makes dancer in the dark look like 27 dresses oh would you stop yeah it's just like

27:30Anne Thompson:there's a big difference though I'm going to say something here dancer in the dark which made me Cry 2 is a great movie, but it's a very particular kind of stylized, you know, that is Lars Valtrier at his absolute best. This is what Chloe Zhao does is that she plunks you into Shakespearean England, the landscape, the trees, the hawks, the whole thing is so believable and naturalistic. It is not stylized in any way. That's part of its power is that you see these people as real. So I just want to give her credit for that.

28:08Ryan Lattanzio:I'm excited to see it. It's not going to be a New York film festival, so I don't know when I'll get a chance to. All right.

28:13Anne Thompson:The other one that played well at Telluride, which I enjoyed thoroughly, was Scott Cooper's Springsteen movie starring Jeremy Allen White, who's very good. He is. He's really good as Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as his as John Lando, his manager. And it isn't about the music being performed so much as it is about the music being created. Nebraska, that album in 1981. And I think they did a great job. Again, there's some faults in the screenplay. There's some expositional dialogue that you could do without. There's a romance that's pretty cliched. But the center part of the movie is extremely satisfying.

28:56Anne Thompson:And it's really a father. you know, he goes back and he does do flashbacks that work with Stephen Graham playing his father. And we know that he had a tough childhood and that works. And then you have and he's in a depression. He's trying to deal with a pretty serious depression. So there's some good stuff in this. It's very good. And I think it'll play. I think it'll work well with audiences. And and we'll get again, it won't be like best picture, best director, et cetera. It'll be about

29:24Ryan Lattanzio:the actors at the Oscars again yeah I mean is it I just I went down the road for you it may not be I think so I think fan I don't know I just don't have it's nothing against him I just don't have a relationship at all and then it was like it was like I'm so over Bob Dylan kind of because I oversaturated in in high school and college that I was sort of not on you know whatever yeah maybe it's not for me but i'll i'll certainly i'll certainly get to see what you think and then and then the other um the so the distributors you know figure out which movies are going to play

30:05Anne Thompson:which festival right so it's about which audience and critics are going to give them the best reviews that's really the calculation that they're trying to make so you can see why hamnet and Springsteen would play Telluride and not Venice. You can see that. And you can see that it worked. And Ballad of a Small Player, for all we know, might have worked better in Venice. That was a question of Netflix because they gave so many movies to Venice and didn't bring House of Dynamite to Telluride. They had to give one to Telluride. So House of Dynamite, tell me why it's so great.

30:44Ryan Lattanzio:I think it's going to win something at the awards this weekend. There's a couple other contenders in the mix. It is a very gloves off, sort of hopeless and horrifically gripping story about a quote unquote fictional missile that's heading from the South Pacific to the U.S. And there's really no way to stop it. Despite all this nuclear protocol that Idris Elba is the president has. There's like a folder of different options that he sort of likens to a diner menu of responses that we can make. And the movie jumps around. It takes place kind of all within 20 minutes. But it you see in the Rashomon.

31:25Ryan Lattanzio:Sorry, I know it's really cliche to invoke that. I'm tired in the Rashomonian way, like different sides of the points of view about the same events. Rebecca Ferguson's in the ensemble, Moses Ingram, Anthony Ramos, a very good Tracy Letts as this general who's extremely dry and matter of fact. about just like we're all gonna die um and i in some it's like something like the hurt locker i definitely wasn't pro-war but it was pro-soldier it was pro-military certainly and i think that you know katherine bigelow's work is a lot about the bravery and and and lionizing the military and and their response and so forth i don't know how brave these people are in this they're just kind of bureaucrats that are just doing their job and i don't even like yeah they're competent at their job but they're not they're not doing anything that isn't you know part of their job description so it's just interesting kind of how mundane it is and it just really is like it it it it ruined my day i did not feel good for many hours afterward which is obviously a feeling that i'm chasing when i'm at a movie so i was very happy about that there is another one that played today that I think will also win something.

32:38Ryan Lattanzio:Hold on one second. I keep missing up the name. This is Kader Ben-Anikhania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, which is playing a competition and is about an actual story of Palestinian emergency dispatchers that in January 2024 were on the phone with this six-year-old girl who was trapped in her car after her sister was killed. It's very devastating it uses the actual audio recording of this girl that the um the actors interact with gaza has been at the forefront of the conversation here because of there was a there was a march down the lido one day there was also a protest at the beginning of the festival and also jim jarmusch made headlines for speaking out about mubi and its relationship to that investor in the israel defense industry and so i do think the festival jury is going to want to align with that look this movie good it's perfectly fine this is an agit prop movie uh and i think it works better as that um there is some documentary footage it brings into it that's very very affecting people were sobbing in this movie around me snotting convulsing like making a lot of noise like everyone in theater was crying in a chorus um i i i teared up certainly uh it's it is meant to elicit emotion and it wants to get you upset and reactive about the genocide going on and so for that purpose it's it's functional as a movie i i don't think it's a i don't think it's a great film no one's gonna say that though except for me and i just did but i i still think it's gonna win something as well the other one that i think will win that i'm very excited for you to see in new york is park channel it's no other choice which again that you're you're gonna love that one completely.

34:27Ryan Lattanzio:But again, the length of these things is diluting their impact. It's 140 minutes. It definitely could have been 20 minutes shorter. There's some repetition in the story of a paper maker who is laid off from his job and so sets about trying to eliminate all of the competition to be the only standing specialist in his field. It's very relatable for people in our industry that are where they're dropping like flies and being laid off all the time. So it resonated with me. It's very funny and it's extremely well directed. There's such great use of dissolves and all kinds of pyrotechnics. I can't wait.

35:06Anne Thompson:I can't wait. Well, I'll be in New York and I will catch up. I can't wait to see the Catherine Bigelow. I can't wait to see the Jim Jarmusch.

35:14Ryan Lattanzio:Which is a lovely movie. It gives you absolutely nothing and it's about nothing. And I thought it was just wonderful.

35:21Anne Thompson:And I'm looking forward in New York to something that neither of us has seen which is the bradley cooper movie about a stand-up comic played by will arnett i for some reason that trailer really sold me so i'm optimistic about that one is this thing on it's weird that they've kind of stopped what's it called again what's this

35:37Ryan Lattanzio:is this thing on it's weird they've they've um they've styled will arnett to kind of look like bradley cooper now like in that in that one um that hero shot that's going around the one still from the movie. I thought that was Bradley Cooper. They, they, they, they, yeah, yeah. It's, it's kind of funny.

35:55Anne Thompson:Okay. Well, I'm I'm looking forward to seeing you again and we'll do a screen talk in New York. I know who we're going after, but we haven't nailed them down yet. So we'll let you know later on when we get around to it.

36:09Ryan Lattanzio:All right. Talk to you in a couple of weeks.

36:11Anne Thompson:Okay. Bye Ryan. Happy trails.

36:38Ryan Lattanzio:We'll see you next time.

36:48Ryan Lattanzio:you love with SockDoc.