Fall film festival season is upon us soon — watch for those impending prediction pieces — and the first salvo from that season has been fired.
Alexander Payne — known for directing “Sideways” in 2004, and hopefully, the comedy “Downsizing” in the near future — has been announced as the guest director of the 2009 Telluride Film Festival, which is the first big (but mini) U.S. film festival out of the gate in early August.
Running September 4-7 (right before TIFF in Toronto, gotta love their loosey goosey new poster), the insane and kinda cool thing about Telluride (now its 36 year) is that it’s kind of like the bottom of the cracker jack prize of film festivals. Buying tickets in advance? It’s a leap of faith for cineastes with deep pockets only as the line-up for the festival is only revealed the day of (and we assume if you’re booking airplane tix to Colorado the day of, it’s gonna cost you a pretty penny). Past guest directors include Salman Rushdie and Werner Herzog among others.
EW, who ostensibly “breaks” this story, says that by hiring Payne organizers are showing that they are going in a “younger, hipper direction,” but “Sideways” hip? “About Schmidt” hip? Are you guys at all paying attention during his social satires generally about middle-age people? (Why do you think “Sideways” connected with the 40-something crowd. Just cause Payne is relatively the same age of peers like Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson (though not really, he’s 48, they’re just hitting 4.0) doesn’t mean he remotely makes films like them at all. We kinda hate those lazy, throw-away lines.
We digress, good news for Telluride. Not that we’d go. Some outlet would have to pay us to make a trip to a film festival we don’t know the line-up of until we arrive, sorry. That said, we wish we could. It’s always an interesting festival and apparently has one of the coolest, low-key vibes of all of them (we’re thinking probably like Woodstock, but not as small).