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August 2012

Telluride Diary part three: The journey (part two)

By Cinema and Travel

As I write the Telluride Film Festival pro­gramme has been released so I had bet­ter fin­ish my notes about the jour­ney before I get left behind.

When we left our hero he was sit­ting in a Motel6 in Denver about to depart for the sev­en and a half hour drive to Telluride. But first, errands to be run.

I always planned to get a US sim card for my phone so I could con­tin­ue tweet­ing etc from the road (and also use the phone for nav­ig­a­tion) and got con­flict­ing advice from vari­ous people and web­sites about the belt­way to do it. There’s an entire post to be writ­ten on how I even­tu­ally (sort of) man­aged it, suf­fice to say for now it took vis­its to four dif­fer­ent retail­ers and much driv­ing to finally sort it out. And it does­n’t work in the Telluride town so there’s a con­stant search for wifi while I’m here.

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Telluride Diary part two: The journey (part one)

By Cinema and Travel

I should warn you now, this may be bor­ing but if I don’t get this down now I’ll prob­ably lose it forever.

One of Telluride’s charms is its rel­at­ive isol­a­tion. You have to really want to come here. When I first saw pic­tures of the place I thought it was roughly the size of Picton but population-wise it’s actu­ally smal­ler. And yet, one week­end every year it fills up with film buffs, industry types, pub­li­cists and movie stars. The town has one full-time cinema but man­ages to scrape up eight screen­ing ven­ues that start as early as 8am over four extremely busy days every Labor Weekend.

I left Wellington aeons ago (actu­ally 2pm last Sunday) with your common-or-garden flight to Auckland. Then – after writ­ing my CT column in the food court – the twelve hour flight to Los Angeles.

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Telluride Diary part one: The decision

By Cinema and Travel

The first draft of history…

ABC Motel, Gunnison, CO

The ABC Motel in Gunnison, Colorado. Venue for Night Two of this odys­sey. Who could resist?

For a few years I’ve been har­bour­ing ideas for a num­ber of excit­ing pro­jects. These are the sort of pie-in-the-sky ideas that wer­en’t pos­sible dur­ing the dark days of 2009 and 2010 when work was thin on the ground and money was thin­ner, but they kept me going and I was hope­ful that one day I might be able to put one or two of them into action.

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Review: Hope Springs, Total Recall and How Far Is Heaven

By Cinema and Reviews

Hope Springs posterIn Hope Springs, Meryl Streep proves once again that not only can she play any woman, she can also play every­wo­man. She’s Kay, an unful­filled Nebraska house­wife, mar­ried for 31 years to account­ant Tommy Lee Jones and resigned to sleep­ing in sep­ar­ate bed­rooms and cook­ing him his eggs every morn­ing while he reads the paper. Except, she’s not resigned, she’s become determ­ined. Determined to prove that mar­riage doesn’t just fizzle out after the kids leave home, that the past doesn’t have to equal the future.

So, she signs them both up for “intens­ive couples coun­selling” with friendly ther­ap­ist Steve Carell, in pic­tur­esque sea­side Maine. Jones is gruffly res­ist­ant, of course, and it’s his dead­pan sar­casm that prompts nost of the early com­edy (their fum­bling attempts to spice up their life provides the rest). As a com­edy, Hope Springs is extremely gentle – much more gentle than the trail­er would have you believe – but that gen­tle­ness suits the del­ic­ate sub­ject and the script (by Vanessa Taylor) actu­ally bur­rows in pretty deeply to a sub­ject that, I’m sure, is pretty close to home for lots of viewers.

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Cinematica 2/19: Meryl’s Mature Urges Make Tommy Lee Tense

By Audio and Cinematica

It’s Back to BOURNE with Jeremy Renner; Meryl Streep gets it on with Tommy Lee Jones in HOPE SPRINGS; Hirokazu Koreeda’s I WISH is a little gem and we talk to the dir­ect­ors of the New Zealand doc­u­ment­ary HOW FAR IS HEAVEN.