The biggest budget movie ever made in Romanian history played for free at Telluride 2008 today. Nae Caranfil is the central figure of the current Romanian film renaissance (they call him “The Dean”). The Rest is Silence is a period piece loosely based on the true story of Grigore “Grig” Brezianu’s determination to create of the first epic Romanian movie and establish cinema as an art form. The War of Independence (1912) is about the Romanians war with the Turks, made about 35 years after the fact. According to Caranafil, the monarch at the time offered Grig 80,000 soldiers for his production.

It’s Bucharest in 1911. Live theater reigns supreme and movies are just shy of an opiate appealing to base instincts and keeping lower class citizens out of live theater houses. Drama schools only enroll those who can best impersonate the nation’s “heroes of history.” Grig (Marius Florea Vizante) is a 25 year old movie director whose theater actor father is ashamed of him. The big french studio, Gaumonde, has set up a shop in Romania and catches wind of Grig’s “film libretto” about Romania’s war of independence. The famed actor Belcea was Grig’s only advocate and shot at making the movie, but he’s dead and Gaumonde wants to steal the story. Grig runs to get the help of Leon Negrescu (Ovidiu Niculescu), an eccentric tycoon who believes God mandated him to bring arts and sciences to Romania (he wears a toga and conducts art classes). But first Grig has to convince Leon that film is worthy of his patronage. …Read more

This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.

“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again.  From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck,  had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.

Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.

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Veteran documentarian Ken Burns is on the Board of Governors for the Telluride Film Festival. The creator of classic PBS documentary mini-series like The War, Baseball, and Jazz, all of which have a total runtime of many hundreds of minutes, it’s a wonder this guy watches anything other than the archival material he uses to assemble his films. He mentions a film called Hunger by Steve McQueen that’s playing here. No, it’s not the ghost of the Steve McQueen you might be thinking of, this Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winning British video artist turned filmmaker. A full review of Hunger with an interview is coming soon.

Ken Burns talks Mad Men and David Fincher after the jump.

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Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch. Lynch, who describes himself in Black’s Learning Gravity as “a father, a husband, an undertaker,” is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under. In the film, Lynch says his poetry grew out of a desire to “leave a record” for his children of what was going on in his head while he appeared to be “staring at your ear, preoccupied.” Poetry, he says, is his way of making his subjective interpretation of his life, work and family into something concrete, an “effort to act out in language those most unspeakable feelings.” It’s a philosophy and practice tailor made for Black’s hybrid style.

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There just aren’t enough movies about old people. O’Horten is a Norwegian film about the title character coming of age, but this coming of age story takes place when he’s 67 years old, on the eve of retiring. Directed by Bent Hamer (Factotum), it’s a revealing movie about the quietly tumultuous transition in life with a soft name: Retirement.

The movie opens with Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a 40 year veteran train engineer, waking up to his morning routine, which is just as mechanical as the train station he reports to each day. Helming the engine, he drives his train in and out of dark mountain passages opening to the stark landscape of Norway in winter.

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Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky begins as a leisurely yet engaging character study, seemingly unconcerned with a traditional conflict/resolution narrative. Sally Hawkins’ performance as Poppy, a bubbly, sarcastic, and endearing elementary school teacher is a delight to watch. An hour into the film, I pleasantly resigned myself to enjoying it as a disconnected series of episodes. This could have been annoying, if not for the stellar performance by Hawkins. Her comedy and breezy demeanor nearly covers Poppy’s immaturity and apparent fear of commitment, while still giving us a glimpse that something more lurks beneath all the giggles and quips.

The character is so delightful, in fact, it almost comes as a surprise when conflict eventually erupts between her and her driving instructor Scott, played by Eddie Marsan. It’s a marvel that the animosity between these two characters, and the eventual resolution, is so well-rendered, considering how late it appears in the film. This is by no means sloppy filmmaking on the part of Leigh. On the contrary, he has perfected a sort of inverse method of story telling. Whereas normally we are dumped into a narrative-in-progress and bombarded by exposition to let us know who the characters are supposed to be, Leigh takes his time, building his characters first, then letting the drama follow.

When I asked him if the conflict between Poppy and Scott was part of the initial concept of the film, he said, “No…you explore and develop, and out of it comes the drama. It can’t be there at the beginning because you have to have the characters there before you have the drama.”

More from Leigh after the jump.

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Telluride is celebrating a great talent coming out of Kazakhstan this year, Sergei Dvortsevoy. Although he’s here with only his first feature film (which, incidentally, took four years to make), there’s a slate of documentaries he’s brought that the festival directors tout as “must sees.” In the Q&A for his first feature film, Tulpan, Dvortsevoy described shooting the first scene of the movie, a 10 minute long take of a ewe giving birth. He showed it to his small cast of Kazakh actors and non-actors and said, “That’s what we have to live up to.” And it’s true. If there were a Best Non-human Actor Oscar, this sheep would have it (although the Academy would probably give it to one of these damn Disney chihuahuas). Fortunately, the cast lived up to the animal’s authenticity with each scene and breathed life into a simple fable.

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Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as “a slightly more philosophical primer” for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, “community-based” films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech.

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Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.

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It has come to my attention, via the Rope of Silicon post and SpoutBlog commenter Gould, that there is bad buzz in Telluride surrounding David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m in Telluride, and I hadn’t heard this bad buzz––the handful of people I’ve spoken to who saw the show reel either last night or this morning had generally positive things to day, aside from some general skepticism as to what the film’s reported two and a half hour final cut will look and feel and play like.

As I responded to Gould’s comment on this post:

…it’s hard to tell from this reel whether or not the film is going to hold together. I don’t get the sense that he’s going for whimsy or magical realism, but it does seem like a real departure for Fincher. Hopefully the fanboys looking for another Fight Club won’t burn Fincher at the stake for branching out a bit.

Telluride is not like, say, Comic-Con; the crowd doesn’t boo or scream, and most attendees are less likely to walk out of a screening with a firmly settled opinion than they are to spend the rest of the weekend talking it out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m right and the naysayers are wrong, but I do hope this movie doesn’t get a leg cut off before the picture’s locked thanks to the entire internet jumping to conclusions.

Prodigal Sons aroused a bit of a frenzy in Telluride leading up to its first screening on Friday––with a line around the block an hour before the screening, many pass holders were turned away––and no doubt in part due to the Orson Welles factor. As per the Festival program notes, in the film director Kimberly Reed, who “once was a male named Paul,” revisits her “tumultuous relationship” with her adopted brother Marc “and chronicles Marc’s discovery: he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.”

But Sons is hardly the exploration of starry ancestry that the logline might lead you to believe, at least not in much of a direct way. Though Reed does travel with Marc to Croatia, where he appears in another documentary and bonds with Welles’ ex-girlfriend Oja Kodar, ultimately she’s less concerned with Marc’s geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he’s the only sibling without an LGBT identification.

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Waltz with Bashir is a stunning exploration of war, memory, and the disturbingly subjective nature of truth. It’s one of the few films that can claim to be both a documentary and an animated feature, and it uses both forms to a superb end.

The film opens with an animated Ari Folman, the writer/director/star, having a drink with an old friend from the Israeli Defense Force during the war with Lebanon in the early ’80s. His friend tells him of a recurring dream in which exactly 26 vicious dogs rampage through the streets on their way to devour him. The pack seeks revenge because of an incident in which he had to kill 26 Palestinian watchdogs so as not to be detected during night patrols. This exchange leads Folman to realize that he has almost no memories from that time. In an effort to piece together what happened and how he was involved, he begins to talk to others who were there.

A conversation early in the film strays from foggy war stories and onto the topic of memory itself. A friend tells Folman about a study in which 8 out of 10 people, when showed an photograph of a fair that has been digitally altered to include themselves as a child, will claim to remember the event, even though the memory is entirely false. It’s a strange point to make at the beginning of a film which is ostensibly about reconstructing memories to arrive at a clearer picture of the truth. Ultimately, Folman’s inclusion of that bit of pop psychology is a key step in helping it rise above films with similar subject matter. While the film does communicate a requisite amount of history, it’s really about the effect of war on soldiers, civilians, and how the sketchy nature of memory plays a role.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of it as a cross between Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I do not mean to accuse of Folman of making a knock-off of either film, Waltz with Bashir is nothing if not unique. But there are striking parallels in the flowing, roto-scoped dreamscapes of Linklater’s film. Animation allows Folman to control the image to a breathtaking degree, while keeping everything one step away from reality. It might be truth, but we can’t forget that it’s an artist’s interpretation, a memory, a dream.

As the realities of a brutal massacre come to light, an interviewee points out that Folman’s memory of the event can’t help but be influenced by his knowledge of his own parents’ experiences in Auschwitz. The parallel to Schindler’s List is not simply a mingling of subject matter, but rather the way both films probe the murky question of how humanity reacts (or doesn’t react) in the face of inhuman cruelty. While Spielberg’s film approaches this subject in classic, high-drama Hollywood style, Folman’s animation allows him to illustrate, quite literally, that war is always an inhuman act.

Tonight’s Silver Medallion Tribute to David Fincher at the Telluride Film Festival closed with a screening of 20 minutes of Fincher’s much-anticipated new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a baby born old who reverse-ages over eight decades. Fincher called the footage “a series of scenelets,” meaning that, unlike the single reel of There Will Be Blood shown at last year’s tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis, this reel was cut together to give us a teasing glimpse of the wider narrative and scope of the film.

First impression: it’s impressive. It’s absolutely gorgeous, for starters. Coming as it did after a show reel featuring excerpts from Fincher’s music videos and adverts (both cut into a montage set to “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths, weirdly and unadvisedly divorcing both pop and product promos from what they were made to promote) and each of his features aside from Alien³, it’s clear that Fincher has moved beyond the cool blacks and blues with florescent highlights that have thus far defined his visual style. It’s a period epic, so the broader visual palette makes sense, but it came as a relief that, within all this beauty, the effects used to transform Pitt first into an 80-year-old man and then backwards into a child felt of a piece and not overwhelmingly effect-y.

Also exciting: though the reel gives every hint that Button is a proper epic tearjerker about love and pain and time and blah blah blah, it’s also infused with the dry, quippy sense of humor that cuts through the darkest swatches of Fincher’s filmography. This is, after all, the man who says he wanted to make Fight Club because he thought the book was “hilarious [and] ridiculous. But I’m an asshole.”

A detailed run-down of the clip follows after the jump. Not having seen the full film, I can’t say for sure whether or not there are spoilers, so I suppose if you want to know absolutely nothing, don’t click.

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There seems to be some consensus around and abouts on the Interwebz that this year’s Telluride Film Festival line-up is a non-starter. Its collection of foreign films, documentaries and classic films - along with a smattering of the more usual fare - seems to fly in the face of the perception of the festival as a launching pad for the next great independent-minded-but-mainstream-accessible crossover hit. Considering last year’s festival included first looks at Juno, There Will Be Blood, The Savages and others that went on to some mainstream success, such reaction is to be expected.

But the - let’s generously say “oddly”  - formed 2008 list doesn’t mean a crossover success is completely outside the realm of possibility. Let’s look at five movies that could wind up getting some decent buzz coming out of Telluride and heading into the remainder of festivals and awares season.

Happy-Go-Lucky: Anything from director Mike Leigh is sure to come with some expectations around it and this is likely to be no exception. While the odds are good this will be somewhat lighter in tone than some of Leigh’s previous films I wouldn’t bet on it being any less a sharp character study. And never underestimate the power of a powerfully perky female lead, which could help Happy-Go-Lucky become a feel-good hit in the non-entertainment areas of the country that are looking for an endearing story featuring a strong love story.

Adam Resurrected: The perception - at least among the staffers at here at Spout HQ - is that a good deal of Jeff Goldblum’s appeal comes from his unpredictability. So with a career that’s had him saving the world, dodging dinosaurs and turning into a fly his latest turn is as a Jewish entertainer in Nazi Germany who survives because of his ability to entertain the children being held at the concentration camps. Combine that with the fact that he and co-star Willem Dafoe are directed by Paul Schrader and you have a film that could make a decent splash with audiences and awards voters.

I’ve Loved You So Long: Kristen Scott-Thomas stars in a story about the members of an estranged family who find themselves coming together after one of them spends 15 years in prison. The emotional arc the story is sure to take Scott-Thomas on is one that is, at least on paper, seemingly tailor-made to please critics (there’s a lot of “Best Actress Oscar” talk from those who’ve seen it). While not a crowd-pleaser it could turn out to be something along the lines of There Will Be Blood should enough critics get behind it and turn the story of someone who might not be completely likable into a must-see movie.

Youssou Ndour - I Bring What I Love: Known primarily in the U.S., I’m guessing, for his work with Peter Gabriel in the late 80’s, Youssou Ndour’s story is certainly a compelling one. There’s usually one documentary that breaks out from the pack and earns a place in the queues of people who don’t normally watch them and since the subject matter here is a tad more accessible than that of some other docs, this could be that one.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: No, it’s not actually screening at Telluride, but a sneak peak of it is being included in the presentation of Zodiac: The Director’s Cut that’s happening. If the footage that’s shown of the movie, which stars Brad Pitt as a man who ages in reverse, is any good at all, Telluride could become the launching pad for a lot of buzz going into the remainder of the year.