Unmissable Highlights from Telluride Film Festival – Declared a Great Year for Cannes!

The mercury tipped 100 today, and although I’d love to complain about the heat, I saw that we’re still 100 days away from the oppressive summer Phoenix has been experiencing. So, as usual, I’m going to pull out the frozen margarita guide that Danielle Dorsey compiled for our food section and fantasize about a refreshing brain freeze as I write this.

I’m Glenn Whipp, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, the host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter, and someone who had been rethinking the whole adult Disney concept until I came across the story of an Arizona couple who, according to the husband, have spent $400,000 on a lawsuit against Disney after their Disneyland Club 33 membership was revoked in 2017.

Spoiler alert: They didn’t win. But don’t stress. They’re not giving up.

“I’ll even sell a kidney,” the wife declared. “I’m not bothered.”

Talk about a real brain freeze.

Telluride lighter touch: ‘Cannes had a good year’

I recently returned from the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where the weather was pleasant, the mountains were breathtaking, and the lineup was somewhat disappointing. The world premieres at the event included a solid adaptation of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” an enjoyable but superfluous channel for boomer nostalgia (“Saturday Night”), a sophisticated thriller (“Conclave”) and a provocative, compelling adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys.”

My colleague Josh Rothkopf shared his thoughts on some of these films, as well as “Maria,” the Maria Callas biopic starring Angelina Jolie, some of which he found even less appealing than I did. (And you were under the impression that I was the in-house grouch.) Josh Rottenberg, our other film-enthusiast Josh, and I also listed our festival favorites. Two of my picks — the heartwarming dog film “The Friend” and the gripping documentary on the struggle for women’s reproductive rights “Zurawski v Texas” — are still on the market, so I can’t say when you’ll be able to watch them. But I’ll keep you updated because they’re well worth your time.

The films that made the most impact at Telluride — Sean Baker’s zany “Anora” and Jacques Audiard’s wildly entertaining queer musical soap opera “Emilia Perez” — had already debuted in Europe in May.

“Cannes had a good year,” a publicist friend mentioned to me on our flight back. And so did the Great Danes. The 150-pound dog from “The Friend” was a hit.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor believes you can face ‘Nickel Boys’

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor was raised on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Miss., and it was these roots that indirectly led her to “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated novel about the friendship between two Black boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s. Ellis-Taylor was so moved by the portrayal of the lives of Black people in a marginalized Alabama community in Ross’ 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” that she searched for his contact at Brown University, where he teaches, and left him a message.

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

“I’ve had viewers tell me it’s intense,” Ellis-Taylor expressed. “I think that as filmgoers, especially in this country, we are programmed to expect certain emotions while watching a film. I want to champion films that are not soothing. I think many times, people want to enter a space that reveals a tragedy, a violence against American children. But somehow, they want to leave feeling uplifted.

“And that’s regrettable. ‘Nickel Boys’ deals with violence against American children, so we should feel uncomfortable. We should feel baffled. Why? Because if we can feel that even for a brief moment, then we can empathize, truly empathize, with what they had to endure for a lifetime.”

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

Politics and Hollywood intersect at Telluride

My colleague Josh Rottenberg dedicated most of his time at Telluride to watching the numerous political documentaries featured at the festival and also catching “The Apprentice,” the contentious Donald Trump biopic that premiered earlier this year at (you guessed it) Cannes.

“The Apprentice” tracks Trump’s ascent to celebrity and power in New York in the 1970s and ’80s as he is guided by the infamous, unprincipled lawyer Roy Cohn and attempts to delve into the mind of Trump during his developmental years.

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

“When I initially read the script in 2019, it oddly reminded me of ‘The Godfather Part II,’” Stan shared. “I had this sense that if I just forgot the character names and solely focused on what was written — which is ultimately what you had to do — it felt like I was witnessing a person hardening into stone. It reminded me of Michael Corleone’s trajectory in many ways. Once you removed your personal judgment of the matter, then you could perceive it in different ways.”