Thursday, September 1, 2011

Count down to the Telluride Film Festival



I'm going to the show again this year, what will be the 38th annual Telluride Film Festival, just a little festival, always on Labor Day weekend and at 8,700 ft. the highest film festival around. Sundance, hosted in Park City Utah is only 7,000 ft.

Many Hollywood's movers and shakers love this little festival sandwiched between the more posh Venice and Toronto Festivals. They walk around town in Levis or Wranglers, cowboy boots and very, very expensive sunglasses, breathing in the mountain air, being one of the gang and not being bugged by the "paparazzi", which are banned, officially or unofficially I do not know.

I am very ill prepared this year, having taken a part time teaching position last minute and  starting school this past week as well. So, today, Thursday, I am trying to get educated and will drive up the Dolores canyon early tomorrow and  dive in to a weekend of film.


To start off here is the 2011 poster for the festival designed by Maira Kalman, a fellow freelance illustrator...
Just like me, Kalman does work in the Children's publishing industry,recently working with Lemony Snicket on 13 WORDS. She also illustrates for such noted magazines as The New Yorker, who has not hired me yet though I do on occasion send their Art Director a postcard and Kalman just illustrated the new Strunk and White Elements of Style. I still have my very odd addition, I mean edition from college- ahhh, have not referred it in a while I confess.
It's Thursday afternoon and just got the low down from IndieWire- of the list of films and found out that to be honored and in attendence is both George Clooney, with  his new  movie The Descendants (2011)

And Glen Close with her movie, Albert Nobbs  (2011)...

 where she plays a women, playing a butler...

It is very over due movie adaptation of  a 1982 stage production Close starred in and has since worked to bring it to the big screen.

Less known to be honored is Tilda Swinton, didn't recognize her name, but most once I saw her pic. I knew she was the icy Queen in Disney's interruption of C.S. Lewis Narnia...

She stars in We Need To Talk About Kevin...

which  premiered at Cannes and  will be viewed at the festival. It about the aftermath of a High School killing spree and I confess won't be high on my list to see.

Let' s see....less than twenty four hours ago, I was in a swarm of the  first of the school year confusion,  starting my seventh year, after a two year hiatus teaching Art and various other classes in a one room school house near the Four Corner's Monument and two Indian Reservations.  60%  of the students are Navajo or Ute, 30% Hispanic, many English as a second language homes, and  maybe 10% Anglo students.

I have the cutest kindergartners and 1st graders you ever saw, many of them Navajo, with their big brown eyes and no desire to talk, they learn quickly the big kids will do their talking for them and my challenge to to get them to to talk for themselves and  trying to get all the kids to sit still long enough to do Art class...

and now for four days I am going to rub elbows with Big Wigs from Hollywood and probably some other movers and shakers, rumor has it some Bushes might be in town for the weekend and gaze upon George Clooney!

....it is a strange, strange world, I live in!



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