Butler's Cinema Scene

“DETROPIA”   My rating: B (Opens Oct. 26 at the Tivoli)

90 minutes | No MPAA rating

For those who require them, there are plenty of facts and figures on display in “Detropia.”

Try these on for size:

In 1930 Detroit was America’s fastest-growing city; now it is the fastest shrinking.

Detroit now has 100,000 abandoned houses or empty residential lots.

Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost 50 percent of its population.

But Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s cinema verite documentary is more a mood piece than anything else, a sort of cinematic lament for the death of a once-great city.  The effect is impressionistic, with the camera wandering empty streets and shattered neighborhoods, looking for life.

It’s all the result of the shrinking auto industry, which has shipped thousands of jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap Third World labor, with the result that now the United States is beginning to resemble a Third World country.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“TOM & HARRY” My rating: C+  (Opening Oct. 19 at the Screenland Crown Center, Screenland Armour and Glenwood Arts)

115 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Tom & Harry,” area documentarist Terrence O’Malley’s latest feature,  explores the relationship between future President Harry Truman and the Pendergast political machine that ruthlessly ran Kansas City for more than three decades.

Harry Truman and his mentor Boss Tom Pendergast

It’s an exhaustive dip into local historyl and a genuinely amazing gallery of images from our city’s past.

O’Malley is an impressive collector of facts and photographs. My main beef is that he’s not much of a dramatist.

There’s a ton of information presented here (often at breakneck speed…O’Malley’s narration is breathless, as if he’s trying to cram as much data as possible into our brains  before time runs out) but no emotional hook. Too often “Tom & Harry” feels like an antiseptic classroom presentation.

Part of the problem lies with O’Malley’s role as a virtual one-man movie studio. That pretty much by his lonesome he’s been able to turn out three feature docs is nothing short of miraculous. (His earlier efforts are “Nellie Don: A Stitch in Time,” about a family member, ‘30s fashion icon Nell Donnelly, and “Black Hand, Straw Man,” an encyclopedic history of organized crime in KC.)

Actually “Tom & Harry” is less the story of two men than a history of the Pendergast political machine, formed at the turn of the century by big brother Jim Pendergast, who became the Irish kingpin of the West Bottoms and saw his influence extend to the entire city. With Jim’s early death his much younger brother Tom stepped up, perfecting patronage politics and exploiting the ward system to seize control of much of  city government.

Under Pendergast (never elected to anything, his official title was chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Club) police tolerated drinking during Prohibition and thus inadvertently encouraged the city’s jazz subculture.  Of course, you wouldn’t want to be around on election days, when armed thugs patrolled the polling places, beating up anyone who objected to the ballot-stuffing perpetrated by “dead” voters recruited by Big Tom.

Harry Truman, failed haberdasher, got his political start thanks to the Pendergast machine. But “Tom & Harry” falls short in never asking one burning question: To what extend was Harry Truman (county judge, U.S. Senator, Vice President and President) complicit in Pendergast’s corrupt regime?

The film suggests (tangentially) that Truman was his own man and never used his elected position to do anything illegal or morally questionable on behalf of Pendergast (at least nothing beyond day-to-day patronage deals, commonplace back then though considered tawdry today).

O’Malley interviews for the film a scholar who has written a book about Truman and Pendergast. This would have been a perfect opportunity to ask an expert to address that question.  But, no, the talking head comments from the historian (as well as a Pendergast descendant) are bland and not particularly informative.

Pendergast headquarters, 19th and Main

I’ve also got a few concerns about the doc’s organization, which jumps back and forth in time. Hard to follow.

And while the film is crawling with factoids, it never really lets its two leading men emerge as real personalities. Precisely what kind of men were they to deal with? The film could have used some of that sort of color.

Still,  “Tom & Harry” is a crash course in Kansas City’s political past and a useful tool in understanding how we got where we are today.

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »

“THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES” My rating: A- (Opening Aug. 24 at the Tivoli)100 minutes | MPAA rating: PGIt’s a testament to the evenhandedness of Lauren Greenfield’s documentary “The Queen of Versailles” that I didn’t end up hating its money-centric subjects. These are precisely the kind of filthy rich people who usually piss me off. David Siegel, 73, and his trophy wife Jaqueline, 43, are – at the film’s outset, anyway – among the richest people in America. He is the founder and president of the world’s biggest time share operation, which typically dangles free show tickets or other perks in front of vacationers if they’ll make room in their schedule to hear the sales pitch. She’s the stay-at-home mother of eight…although all the real work falls to a small army of servants, including a Filipino nanny who hasn’t seen her own child for 20 years and confides to the camera that she considers herself to be the true mother of the Siegel kids. What Jackie Siegel is really good at is spending money. And she’s got so much that no matter how many consumer sprees she launches, she can’t burn through it. Now if she only had a modicum of taste. (more…)

Read Full Post »

“AI WEI WEI: NEVER SORRY”  My rating: B+  (Opening August 17 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

91 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The movies go through heroes like McDonald’s goes through cows. But “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” offers us a real-life hero unlike any we’ve ever seen.

It’s not just that Ai doesn’t look like your conventional leading man. He’s fat, with a scraggly beard in a constant state of evolution. He resembles a scholar depicted in an old Chinese screen…except that ancient Chinese scholars were rarely seen flipping the bird (literally, the obscene hand gesture) at the authority figures in their society.

Ai Wei Wei, the subject of Alison Klayman’s documentary, is an artist by profession. He was one of the designers of the Bird’s Nest, the spectacular arena that was the centerpiece of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics, and his art –usually in the form of huge installations using found materials — in recent years has been featured in solo shows in London, Munich and Sao Paolo.

But Ai’s true art may be found in his embrace of the truth and his disdain for hypocrisy.  He’s a social critic of the first order, a gadfly who devotes himself to poking China’s Communist leaders in the eye at every opportunity. (more…)

Read Full Post »

“NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS” My rating: B (Opening Aug. 17 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Neil Young looks like an old hobo. He’s not big on personal hygiene or sartorial statements. He rarely shaves and wears clothes that probably wouldn’t pass muster at any self-respecting thrift store.

But he’s a musical genius – a great songwriter, a superb instrumentalist, and possessor of one of the great bad voices in rock. By that I mean that like Bob Dylan, his singing isn’t good by technical standards, but it’s exactly what his songs require.

Jonathan Demme’s “Neil Young Journeys” is a concert documentary capturing Young’s solo performance at Toronto’s Massey Hall as part of his 2010 tour to promote his “Le Noise” album.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“UNDEFEATED” My rating: A (Opening May 25 at the Glewood at Red Bridge)

113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Already I can hear you groaning over the Internet.

“A sports movie? An inspirational sports movie? Doncha got something with car wrecks?”

Your loss.  “Undefeated” (not the similarly entitled turkey about Sarah Palin) isn’t just a terrific documentary. Simply put, it’s one of the year’s best movies, a real-life “The Blind Side” times 20.

The subject of this devastatingly emotional experience is a middle-aged suburban father with a big gut and jowls. Bill Courtney is the football coach for Memphis’ Manassass High School. Not that he’s an educator by training. He runs a lumber business and volunteers to coach an inner city team that hasn’t won a playoff game in the school’s 110-year-history.

In the course of “Undefeated” Courtney coaches his demoralized and underprivileged players to a winning season.  That would miracle enough.

But T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay’s film makes all too clear, Courtney’s most daunting task is to instill hope, sensitivity, discipline and dedication in young men who are circling the drain.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“CORPORATE FM”  My rating: B (Opening May 25 at the Screenland Crown Center)

73 minutes | No MPAA rating

I almost never listen to my car radio (when I do it’s an NPR station) and “Corporate FM” nicely explains why.

Made over seven years by KC filmmaker Kevin McKinney, this documentary takes in the big picture of corporate consolidation of the radio industry.

And while the film exposes no smoking gun (most of its revelations are familiar enough to people concerned with the issues), it’s an extremely effective summation of how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it.

The doc’s long gestation period actually proves beneficial, for McKinney is able to observe over the long haul the evolution of radio from a public service (that’s the FCC’s definition, not mine) to a corporate cash cow.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“HOT FLASH HAVOC” My rating: C  (Opening May 25 at the Screenland Crossroads)

87 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Hot Flash Havoc” is about an important health issue. But don’t mistake it for entertainment.

This doc from direcdtor Marc Bennett and writer Marnie Inskip delivers just about all the information you could want about “the change.” But for most of its running time it feels more like a public health lecture.

It starts out trying to soften us up with man-in-the-street interviews with woman and the men who love them.

One woman calls menopause “ one of the biggest tests a woman goes through to find out how positivie she is in life.”

Another notes that nobody likes the onset of menopause, but “if  you don’t reach it, you’ve really got troubles” (i.e. , you’re dead).

Opines another subject: “If this were happening to males, They’d fix it.”

“This” is theusual litany ofcomplaints: mood swings, hot flashes, memory loss, decreased sex drive.

The main thrust of “Hot Flash Havoc” is to undo the harm done by a deeply flawed study which a few years ago suggested that the hormone therapy used to treat the symptoms of menopause led to heart disease.

Through the testimony of a score of medical experts, the film argues that getting off hormones was precisely what should not have happened.

There’s valuable information here. But while director Bennett employs animation, bouncy music and fast-cut editing in an effort to rev up the proceedings, “Hot Flash Havoc” is very slow going.

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »