It's official: Telluride is George Clooney's town now. Everyone else -- Glenn Close, Tilda Swinton, Jennifer Garner, the dogs, the hippies, even the Lauren and Bush clans up in the mountains -- just lives in it.
The 38th annual festival may have peaked at the very outset with its first screening, Friday's world premiere of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," about which it's been difficult to find a discouraging word. That eerie unanimity hasn't carried over to any other film, though the U.S. debut of Cannes favorite "The Artist" has incited nearly the same effusiveness.
Also read: George Clooney's 'Descendants' Sucks Up All the Air at Telluride Fest
Love for Payne's film would have been undiminished even if Clooney hadn't made it to town. It doesn't hurt that he's effortlessly charmed everyone in the valley, and a weekend that began with the festival's controversial -- and soon-rescinded -- edict to the press to not photograph him looks to end with the actor-director having spent quality time with everyone but the town dogs (and even they may yet get an audience).
Asked at a panel how he deals with the crush of admirers, Clooney kept his tongue lodged well into the sexiest cheek alive.
"I drink -- a lot," he said. "And up here at this elevation, you can get pretty f---ed up" with just one or two shots, he noted. "It's cheap drinkin' up here!"
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Other actors have been highly accessible at this most relaxed of festivals, including Glenn Close. ("She's in it to win it," remarked one admiring publicist for a rival Oscar hopeful.) But chatter on the gondola has been divided over Close's passion project, "Albert Nobbs," as it has been for David Cronenberg's Freud-Jung-spanking parlor drama, "A Dangerous Method," and especially the unannounced sneak preview of "Butter," a broadly satirical, red-state-baiting comedy co-produced by leading lady Jennifer Garner.
Here's the buzz on 10 key films playing Telluride through the Monday night close:
1. THE DESCENDANTS. How much do audiences and critics adore Alexander Payne's first film since "Sideways"? Let them count the ways, to the probable annoyance of everyone who won't have a shot at seeing it until Fox Searchlight releases it in theaters Nov. 23. By any reckoning, the comic drama is 25 times better than the iffy trailer suggested, with its absentee-dad-reconnects-with-daughters-via-tragedy theme just one of several wrinkles in the screenplay's tonal tightrope walk. Clooney has more heart than he's yet been allowed on screen, and even actors with only two or three scenes, like Robert Forster and Judy Greer, get enough time to do comedy and heartbreak.
Industry bloggers wore their hearts on their sleeves. Wrote Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey
