![]() Asked how Payne got him to cry for a critical scene, Clooney said, “He reminded me of how he didn’t cast me in ‘Sideways’” - a subject that came up earlier in the discussion - “so I let it all go. In a departure from his character in “Up in the Air” (which premiered at Telluride two years ago), Clooney keeps the glibness off-screen this time - but there was plenty of that in his typically one-liner-riddled post-screening remarks, where he couldn’t help deriding the filmmaker’s fashion sense. In a Q&A, Clooney admitted he was “worried about the ability to be such a schlub” - albeit a wealthy, powerful schlub who just happens to do business meetings in Hawaiian shirts and sprint in unsensible sandals. Set on the Hollywood-underutilized Hawaiian islands, Payne’s first picture since “Sideways” is a pitch-perfect meditation on grieving in paradise - if you can even call it grieving, since the Clooney character’s comatose wife left so much bad blood in her wake that she’s openly berated on her deathbed by three different characters in three different tragicomic standout scenes. If those last three festival openers had trouble competing for attention, it was partly because “Descendants” immediately sucked up all the lovefest air in the room. The Colorado fest had three other notable world premieres in store in its first 24 hours: Glenn Close’s three-decades-in-the-hoping passion project, the gender-bender “Albert Nobbs” “In Darkness,” a harrowing Holocaust drama directed by Agnieska Holland that Poland put in the running for next year’s foreign-language Oscar race and “Living in the Material World,” Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary, which debuts in just a month on HBO. That didn’t take long: Reactions to “The Descendants” ranged from near-jubilation to actual jubilation when it unspooled Friday at a secret patrons-only screening with George Clooney and director Alexander Payne on hand. It’s been left up to the Telluride Film Festival to come up with one everyone could definitively place in the “in” column. () - Reports out of the Venice Film Festival have mostly been around which films we can knock out of Oscar best picture contention, with “Carnage,” “Ides of March,” and “A Dangerous Method” all suffering from scratch-that notices coming out of Italy. Like most of Godard's late work, this mosaic approach will not appeal to all who cross its path (what film ever does?) but, even if it does ultimately fall short of answering any of the questions it asks, adherents will find much to ruminate on.TELLURIDE, Colo. The quiet moments call out to be examined and celebrated as much as the grand statement while others jostle for their money, their moment, or even a simple explanation as to what it all means. The characters aggressive tussling, either through physical pulling and pushing or through their cars (reminiscent of Godard's masterpiece 'Week End'), also signify the difficulty and pain inherent in any kind of birth. This is painfully clear (and bitterly funny) when Jerzy's ever suffering assistant points out to the frustrated producer the individual cost of each item on the set in an attempt to explain where all the money is going. But that is only part of the battle - practical concerns impinge also. ![]() Jerzy's constant frustration with having to explain to others what his film is "about" is a poignant running comedic highlight. His work, however, contains no such solace and he becomes morose to the point of inertia by his task of creating a formally perfect but outwardly fragmented piece. Isabelle Huppert's stuttering, incoherent virgin loves her factory job and fights for her "right" to work, while the jaded director Jerzy, surrounded by a bevy of naked beauties during the making of his elusive film, sullenly stages his reconstructions. With these tools, Godard contrasts the passion and belief in labour the practical against the artistic. From even a purely aesthetic viewpoint, the wonderfully incongruent images (like the ship in the forest) and the beautifully lit reconstructions of classical paintings (with their attendant outpourings of classical music) are enough to hold sway. For those of us more inclined to tackle this fascinating question, there is much to luxuriate in here. ![]() To condemn it as boring or shapeless is to blindly miss the point. ![]() Godard's 'Passion' will inevitably draw violent reactions from didactic viewers with a classical Hollywood outlook, even though it expressly addresses the contradictions and pains in discerning just what makes a film "a film". ![]()
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