Telluride Film Festival: 'A good year for Cannes'

A young man and woman embrace on the bright streets of Las Vegas in "Anora."

Sept. 6, 2024 6 AM PT

It hit 100 today, and I’d like to whine about the temperature, but then I read that we’re 100 days shy of the streak Phoenix has endured this summer. So once again, I’m just going to open that frozen margarita guide that Danielle Dorsey put together for our food section and daydream about a delicious brain freeze while I put this together.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter and the guy who had been reconsidering this whole Disney adult thing until I read the story about an Arizona couple who, by the husband’s account, have spent $400,000 suing Disney after having their membership to Disneyland’s Club 33 revoked in 2017.

Spoiler alert: They lost. But don’t worry. They’re going to keep fighting.

“I’ll sell a kidney,” the wife said. “I don’t care.”

Talk about brain freeze.

Soft Telluride: ‘It was a good year for Cannes’

I just returned from the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where the temperatures were cool, the mountains were awe-inspiring and the lineup was a bit underwhelming. The world premieres at the event included a solid August Wilson adaptation (“The Piano Lesson”), an enjoyable but unnecessary outlet for boomer nostalgia (“Saturday Night”), an elevated potboiler (“Conclave”) and a challenging, arresting adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys.”

My colleague Josh Rothkopf offered thoughts on some of these films, along with “Maria,” the Maria Callas biopic starring Angelina Jolie, some of which he liked even less than I did. (And you thought I was our resident curmudgeon.) Josh Rottenberg, our other movie-loving Josh, and I also rounded up our festival favorites. Two of mine — the sweet dog movie “The Friend” and the riveting documentary about the fight for women’s reproductive rights “Zurawski v Texas” — are still looking for buyers, so I’m not sure when you’ll be able to see them. But I’ll keep you posted because they’re worth your time.

The movies that popped the most at Telluride — Sean Baker’s madcap “Anora” and Jacques Audiard’s wildly entertaining queer musical soap opera “Emilia Perez” — already had their premieres across the Atlantic in May.

“It was a good year for Cannes,” a publicist friend told me on the plane home. And Great Danes too. That 150-pound dog from “The Friend” was everywhere.

A woman exiting a New York building holds onto the leash of a Great Dane.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor thinks you can handle ‘Nickel Boys’

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor grew up on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Miss., and it was those roots that led her, indirectly, to “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel about the friendship between two Black boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s. Ellis-Taylor saw Ross’ 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and was so impressed by its depiction of the lives of Black people in a disenfranchised Alabama community that she tracked down his phone number at Brown University, where he teaches, and left him a message.

I met Ellis-Taylor for coffee a few days ago at Telluride, where we talked about her film — the best of the world premieres I caught at the festival.

“I’ve had people that have seen it tell me it’s tough,” Ellis-Taylor said. “I think that we have been conditioned as moviegoers, particularly in this country, to have an expectation of how we should feel watching a film. I want to be an advocate for cinema that is not palliative. I think a lot of times, people want to come into a space that is saying: We are unearthing a tragedy, a brutality against American children. But somehow they want to leave that space feeling good.

“And that’s unfortunate. ‘Nickel Boys’ is about brutality against American children, so we should feel discomfited. We should feel confounded. Why? Because if we can feel that just for a little bit, then we can have some empathy, real empathy, for what they endured for a lifetime.”

“Nickel Boys” will open in select theaters on Oct. 25.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor photographed at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles

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Politics and Hollywood collide at Telluride

My colleague Josh Rottenberg devoted most of his time at Telluride watching the many political documentaries playing at the festival as well as catching “The Apprentice,” the controversial Donald Trump biopic that premiered earlier this year at (yes, you guessed it) Cannes.

“The Apprentice” charts Trump’s rise to fame and power in New York in the 1970s and ’80s as he is mentored by the notorious, amoral lawyer Roy Cohn and attempts to burrow into the psyche of Trump during his formative years.

Josh sat down with the team behind “The Apprentice” — Ali Abbasi, writer Gabriel Sherman and actors Sebastian Stan (who plays Trump) and Jeremy Strong (Cohn) to discuss making the movie and what kind of impact they think it might have in this election year.

“When I first read the script in 2019, it reminded me of ‘The Godfather Part II,’ weirdly,” Stan said. “I got this feeling that if I just forgot the character names and just looked at what was on the page — which is what ultimately you had to do — it felt like I was witnessing the solidifying of a person into stone. It reminded me of Michael Corleone’s arc in a lot of ways. Once you removed your subjective judgment of the thing, then you could see it in different ways.”