Butler's Cinema Scene

“GRAVITY” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Oct. 4)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The prospector in the waterless desert. The mountaineer in a blizzard. The shipwrecked sailor on a raft.

There have been plenty of movies about humans trying to survive in inhospitable situations, but few are quite as terrifying – or beautiful – as that depicted in “Gravity.”

As just about everyone knows by now, the latest film from the chameleonic Cuaron – a veteran of kiddie lit (“A Little Princess”), teen sex (“E Tu Mama Tambien”); a Harry Potter movie and a dystopian future (“Children of Men”) — is set in outer space and centers on two astronauts  (played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney)  who are marooned when their space shuttle is destroyed by debris from a Russian spy satellite.

“Gravity” isn’t the first stranded-in-space epic…Ron Howard gave us “Apollo 13” in 1995 and long before that there was the melodrama “Marooned” in 1969.

But it is without doubt the most realistic, so perfectly capturing the feel of life in orbit that on the drive home from the theater I couldn’t quite shake the sensation that I was part of a weightless environment.

The film begins audaciously with a single, uninterrupted 12-minute shot in which Cuaron’s camera seems to slowly float around the orbiting shuttle and the Hubbell telescope, which is undergoing a repair job.

The lady with the wrench is Ryan Stone (Bullock), a scientist on her first space flight. Ryan is installing new circuitry of her own design on the Hubbell, and pride of ownership is the only reason she’s doing the job herself.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“THE FAMILY” My rating: C+ (Opening wide on Sept. 13)

Luc Besson’s queasy comedy “The Family” is noteworthy primarily for casting Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer in roles that are a figurative continuation of characters they developed some years ago.

We meet the Blakes — Dad Fred (DeNiro), Mom Maggie (Pfeiffer) and their kids,  17-year-old  Belle (Dianna Agron, late of TV’s “Glee”) and 14-year-old Warren (John D’Leo) — after an all-night drive across France to their new home in a small burg in Normandy.

Actually, their name isn’t Blake.  It’s Manzoni. And it quickly becomes apparant that this is no ordinary family. 

Michelle Pfeiffer

Dad is a former Brooklyn wise guy who turned state’s evidence against his mob bosses.  Now the survival of  his brood is dependent on the Witness Protection Program and an exasperated, saddle-faced FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) with the double duties of keeping the “Blakes” safe from hired hit men and of protecting the rest of us from the family’s spectacularly criminal proclivities.

Robert DeNiro as a made man? That’s no stretch. The guy could play Fred Blake/Giovanni Manzoni in his sleep — though he thankfully doesn’t take the easy way out here. 

And Pfeiffer portrayed a Mafia wife in the 1988 hit “Married to the Mob.”  She’s got the sexy/dangerous attitude down cold.

So it’s kind of reassuring — in a weird way — to find them adopting personas with which we’re already comfortable. It’s like going to a rock concert and being treated to an evening of Nuimber One hits. (more…)

Read Full Post »

“ELYSIUM” My rating: C (Opening wide on Aug. 9)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

One classic definition of science fiction is a story that takes a contemporary social or scientific situation and extrapolates how it might play out in the future.

Neil Blomkamp’s “Elysium” should be great sci-fi. Instead it’s a great idea that quickly bogs down in the same sort of slam-bam chaos we’ve been enduring all summer.  (Hell, for as long as I can remember).

As such it’s a distinct step down from Bloomkamp’s debut feture, 2009’s “District Nine,” a savvy futuristic satire of Apartheid involving aliens instead of black people.

We all know about the 1 percent, right? Well, 150 years from now the wealthiest among us have given up on the dying planet Earth and relocated to Elysium, a big, sleek space station rotating in orbit.

There the lawns are all manicured, the foliage is lush, the people are rich and beautiful, and the technology so advanced that every home has a machine that diagnoses illnesses or physical damage and cures the patient in a matter of minutes.

Back on terra firma the vast mass of humanity lives in conditions that suggest a South American favela that has spread to cover the entire planet. Everyone dreams of going to Elysium; a few actually make it thanks to smugglers who make illegal shuttle runs.

Max (Matt Damon, head shaved, heavily tattooed) is an ex-con working in an L.A. factory making ‘droids. Thanks to his criminal past he’s always being hassled by the cops (actually robots) and spends a lot of time talking to his parole officer (a robotic mannequin so primitive it looks like one of those fortune tellers in a turn-of-the-last-century penny arcade).

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“PACIFIC  RIM” My rating:  C + (Opening wide on July 12)

131 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is absolutely no reason why a reasonably intelligent, over-30 lover of the dramatic arts needs to slap down $10 or so to watch “Pacific Rim.”

That said, if such an aforementioned individual does find himself in a theater watching this noisy (as in rock-concert loud) romp, he’ll be okay. Might even enjoy himself.

If you’ve seen the trailers you know that “Pacific Rim” is a lot like a Transformers movie mated to a Godzilla movie and injected with steroids – a description that sounds impossible (louder and busier than a Michael Bay movie?), but there you have it.

The pitch: Giant robotic figures battle giant saurian creatures.

But “Pacific Rim” was written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, the Spanish horror/sci-fi aficionado who has given us two flat-out masterpieces set in the Spanish Civil War  (“The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”)  and the devilishly enjoyable (thanks to Ron Perlman’s monumental perf in the title role)  “Hellboy.”

Del Toro is in summer blockbuster mode here, which means you won’t get a whole lot in the way of character development, complicated motivations or subtlety in just about any phase of this production.

But I gotta admit, his childlike enthusiasm is infectious.

Orson Welles once described a movie set as the greatest toy train a boy could ask for. Only for del Toro a movie is a 60-story mechanical man using a seagoing oil tanker as a baseball bat.

The story? Well, apparently big lizard-like aliens called Kaiju have been entering our world through a time/space rift at the bottom of the Pacific. These critters seriously ravaged the adjacent coastlines before being held at bay by the Jaegers, huge robots piloted by two humans who must meld their minds in something called the “drift” in order to operate these massive fighting machines.

(more…)

Read Full Post »