FilmBlather.com

All film festivals, even the great ones, understandably have their frustrations. What makes Telluride remarkable is how few of them there are compared to similarly high-profile affairs. But even Telluride has its hiccups once in a while, and this year's most notable is the addition of the dreaded Security Screening.

Anyone who attends advance screenings of films in major cities with any regularity knows all about the security screening. They usually involve dark-suited goons guarding the doors, sweeping patrons with metal detector wands, ruffling through bags, and then patrolling the auditorium with night-vision goggles, just to make sure no one snuck in a recording device via a bodily orifice. Occasionally they make you give them your cell phone, for reasons that remain unclear.

The security screenings at Telluride are somewhat classier than these city practices. The goons wear polo shirts and constrain their precautions to cold stares, stern warnings, and of course the night vision goggles. Still, up here in the mountains, it feels somehow like an invasion. The festival prides itself on keeping the worst of Hollywood out: no paparazzi (this year, signs read that "paparazzi are unwelcome and will be treated with disdain"), no competition, little talk of Oscar -- just a weekend of total cinema immersion for those who love it. The security guards are from that other world.

This would all have been far more frustrating had the film being kept under guard not been up to Telluride standards. Instead, The Last King of Scotland (A-), the first real dramatic feature by Kevin McDonald (his Touching the Void, which made an appearance here three years ago, was largely documentary), is one of the best of the festival: a searing character study about a quasi-idealistic young doctor (James McAvoy) who comes to Uganda with a vague plan to Do Good and winds up becoming the personal physician and advisor to brutal dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker).

Everyone here is talking about Whitaker's performance, and soon enough, everyone everywhere will be talking about it. It's a stunning transformation that's not a stunt, a performance so convincing you forget about it, and only in hindsight do you wonder what happened to the gentle, brooding Whitaker we're familiar with. But great though it is, his turn is not the reason to run out and see The Last King of Scotland. What fascinated me was the interplay between Amin and the doctor -- the former an impossibly charismatic, dynamic, convincing leader; the latter every bit as charismatic and magnetic but lacking the confidence and force of will that would enable him to see through Amin's charming theatrics. Their relationship is a microcosm of the process by which evil gains a political foothold. If McAvoy's exceedingly bright character could watch this film, he would be horrified at himself.

The movie is less excellent as a portrait of Uganda during Amin's reign, but its choice to make a cursory sweep of the period's political tensions was probably for the best. McDonald gets the relationship between the two central characters so right, makes it so fascinating, that more historical detail would have been a distraction. I was shocked by how powerful I found the final shot: it's nothing more than a motion of the head, but it conveys more than 100 title cards could. It is rare to find a film with such a compelling personal perspective on a famous historical event. The Last King of Scotland is thus far the discovery of the festival.

But whatever the historical mettle of The Last King of Scotland, it is surely greater than that of Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (B). The title says it all: this isn't a biography of the famous photographer but rather an imagining of the way her life might have been. Needless to say, I think this is the right way to go about it; after the film, director Steven Shainberg lamented the prevalence of boring, worshipfully accurate biopics that inevitably begin with an alcoholic father and end with triumphant redemption. Famous people don't always make interesting stories. Even interesting people don't.

And so Fur earns points for its approach, and also for audacity. Not satisfied with simply coming up with a plausible account of Diane (pronounced "dee-anne") Arbus' formative years, the film invents a very hirsute love interest -- a man afflicted with a genetic disorder that covers him in hair from head to toe. Played by Robert Downey, Jr., Lionel brings about Arbus' (Nicole Kidman) artistic awakening as he struggles with myriad issues of his own.

Conceptually, this is of course awesome; the execution is adequate, occasionally hit-or-miss. The tender romance that blossoms between Arbus and Lionel is interesting, and I liked the way Lionel gradually makes Arbus more comfortable in her own skin and with her artistic instincts. But there are times, too, when Fur doesn't seem to know what to do with what it's cooked up, and certain scenes sort of languish and play out without much conviction. And the resolution is a bit overdone even given the already out-there premise, making us sadly aware of the film's fanciful artifice.

Lest I go an entire day without seeing adorable children in peril, I decided to check out The Italian (C), which had an added bonus of being Russian. It began promisingly enough, with an intriguing premise -- life inside a Russian orphanage that sells children to wealthy western European couples looking for an easy adoption (the title character is six year-old Vanya, in the process of being adopted by a couple from Italy. The first act has an easygoing naturalism, believably setting up the dynamics of the children's home, which contains not only a host of young children hoping to be adopted, but also a miniature mafia of older kids -- presumably ones passed over by the rich foreigners -- led by a teenage boy who fancies himself a sort of amateur Godfather.

When Vanya's plight takes center stage, though, the movie abruptly becomes ridiculous. Most of the second half is a protracted chase scene, with Vanya, on a quest to find his mother, attempting to evade the evil child-seller and her henchmen, who will stop at nothing to get him back and give him to the Italians. This sort of thing has a limited appeal: the kid is cute enough, the villain is kind of amusing, but so what? We soon grow tired of marveling at Vanya's preternatural resourcefulness and plead for the thing to end -- which it soon does in the sappiest possible way, soft-focus close-up and all.

If the problem with The Italian is "too much," the problem with Philip Noyce's Catch a Fire (C+) is decidedly "not enough." Something is missing from this relatively compelling tale of a black rebel/freedom fighter in 1980 South Africa who, after being falsely arrested for a terrorist act joins the underground, increasingly violent fight against Apartheid. The film leans heavily on the contrasts between its two central characters -- Patrick (Derek Luke), who starts the film an "Uncle Tom" realist and becomes an impassioned idealist almost despite himself, and Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), the head of the South African white government's anti-terrorist operation, who doesn't have an idealistic bone in his body but brings about Patrick's transformation. Sadly, neither man is particularly compelling in himself; Derek Luke tries heroically to give Patrick almost superhuman dignity, but doesn't get very far beyond that, and Robbins' Nic Vos, though intriguing, doesn't have enough screen time for us to begin to understand him.

Noyce made the heartbreaking Rabbit-Proof Fence a few years back, in which he miraculously universalized the very recent plight and pain of Australian aborigines. Catch a Fire, though similar in some superficial ways, doesn't make the same connection. There's a lot to process here -- to its credit, the film is ambiguous in its treatment of violent terrorism to fight apartheid (though when it comes time for its protagonist to engage in same, the screenplay emphasizes his efforts to evacuate the area) -- but nothing hits on an emotional level. The film seems built to become a major multiplex release, but I wonder about mainstream reactions to something this impersonal.

Audience reaction here, for what it's worth, did seem enthusiastically positive. So what do I know?

--Eugene Novikov