Telluride Film Festival Will Screen First (Small) Peek At Fincher’s ‘Benjamin Button’

We’ve never been to the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado (you’d have to send us), but it’s an amazing film festival if you consider this insanely quirky aspect of the fest: passes are sold out waaay in advance, like completely sold out. And when do they announce the line-up? What films will actually be playing? Umm, the day of, basically. Telluride starts proper tomorrow morning, but some films have been screened today and the final line-up just went out.

But they get great films and this sort of indie-spirit of Telluride, which makes it all about the films and not the glamor and stars, is the exact reason it attracts so many true filmgoers in the first place. It’s kind of a beautiful thing that that many people would show up to a film festival and they don’t even know what they’re going to see until they get there!

Anyhow, the line-up.
The Festival pays tribute to three film luminaries with its annual Silver Medallion presentation and this year they’re going to David Fincher, 79-year-old British actress Jean Simmons (“Great Expectations”) and Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell (“The Emigrants”). This means, Telluride audiences will get the first sneak peek at “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” though just some scenes and not the entire thing (similar to last year when Silver Medallion recipient Paul Thomas Anderson showed some scenes of “There Will Be Blood” for the first time ever). The guest director of the fest is that crazy philosopher/cultural theorist, Slavoj Zizek, and Fincher will also show the entire uncut version of “Zodiac,” (bring a pillow for those four extra minutes).

The line-up includes, Paul Schrader’s ADAM RESURRECTED (Jeffrey Wells called this one early); AMERICAN VIOLET, EVERLASTING MOMENTS (d. Jan Troell, Sweden, 2008); FIRAAQ; FLAME & CITRON; GOMORRAH (lauded at Cannes); Mike Leigh’s “HAPPY-GO-LUCKY” (Jeffrey Well’s favorite film of the year); HELEN ; HUNGER (another Cannes favorite directed by Steve McQueen); the very excellent animated film about the 1983 Beirut massacre WALTZ WITH BASHIR; I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG starring Kristen Thomas Scott; KISSES (d. Lance Daly, Ireland, 2008); LEARNING GRAVITY (d. Cathal Black, U.S., 2008); O’HORTEN (d. Bent Hamer, Norway, 2008)

And More: PIRATE FOR THE SEA (d. Ron Colby, U.K., 2007); PRIVATE CENTURY (d. Jan Sikl, Czech Republic, 2007); REVANCHE (d. Gotz Spielman, Austria, 2008); THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD (d. Kim Ji-Woon, South Korea, 2008); THE REST IS SILENCE (d. Nae Caranfil, Romania, 2007); TULPAN (d. Sergei Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan, 2008); WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MYSELF (d. Francois Duperon, France, 2008) and the music doc, YOUSSOU N’DOUR: I BRING WHAT I LOVE (d. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Senegal-France, 2008).

Jeffrey Wells (damn, we’ve mentioned that bastard a lot this week), just came out and said the Telluride line-up looks a “stiff” and is massively “underwhelming” and in some respects, he’s totally right. There’s little A-name American films, there’s little Oscar bait, and there’s few A-list stars or films from the fall film schedule which has bound to have disappointed half the journos and bloggers that braved the unannounced list and flew down. If you’re looking for those hotly tipped fall films, and you flew to Telluride, you’re surely kicking yourself right now. But for true cineastes there’s still a ton of good material to see and those upset folks should relax and try and take in some of the great-sounding films that were lauded at Cannes. We’re dying to see “Hunger,” “Gomorrah” and “Happy Go Lucky,” and in that vein, people should also not miss the very powerful “Waltz With Bashir,” which we saw recently.

We must admit, we are having a bit of schadenfreude over the thought of some of the bloggers who went down there thinking they were going to see hot, sexy American films that now are aghast at a line-up of foreign films. Hey guys, give these vegetables a chance and you might realize they’re just as good as any film sweets you’d normally ingest, but just in a different (likely smarter) manner.