Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE DALLAS BUYERS CLUB”  My rating: B (Opening wide on Nov. 22 )

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The critical resurrection of Matthew McConaughey’s career forges ahead with “The Dallas Buyers Club,” which finds him dropping a fifth of his body weight to portray an HIV-infected cowboy/con man.

But McConaughey isn’t the only actor undergoing a big transformation here. Equally impressive is erstwhile studmuffin Jared Leto, who not only does the crash diet thing but reinvents himself as a transvestite hooker.

Talk about trolling for Oscars, fellas.

When we first meet Ron Woodruff (McConaughey) he’s doing a cowgirl in one of the bronco chutes at a rodeo. Director Jean-Marc Vallee (“The Young Victoria”) wastes no time in establishing Ron’s bona fides as a ladies’ man.

Early on we learn that the gaunt rodeo rider is also a hustler who’ll set up a betting pool – his horsey buddies wager on how long a fellow rider can stay atop a bull – and then try to flee with the money without paying off the winners.

Ron lives in a mobile home that has seen better days. He drinks. He does drugs. He stages orgies.

He’s contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t share his homophobic, racist, good ol’ boy Texas view of things.

Ron is about to get his comeuppance. Injured on the job (he’s an electrician), he’s taken to a hospital. When the doctors come to talk to him they’re wearing surgical masks. They inform him that he has tested positive for the HIV virus. (more…)

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Mohsen Ramezani

“THE COLOR OF PARADISE” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Middle Eastern Voices.

“The Color of Paradise” can reduce even the most jaded filmgoer to open-mouthed astonishment.

Iranian writer/director Majid Majidi has taken a tale that would have made Dickens proud and presented it in such a way that it seems both utterly realistic and achingly poetic.

Simultaneously a religious parable and a socially conscious drama, “The Color of Paradise” is unforgettable.

Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) is an 8-year-old boy who spends most of each year in a Tehran school for the blind. Now, at the end of term, he’s left twiddling his thumbs while all the other children are picked up by their parents.

Left alone in a park-like setting, Mohammad’s attention is focused on nearby chirping. A tiny bird has fallen from a tree and is being threatened by a hungry cat; on hands and knees Mohammad searches for the distressed creature, retrieves it and then risks his neck by climbing up the tree, feeling his way along the branches, and replacing the hatchling in its nest.

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There was before “Breathless,” and there was after “Breathless.”

Few movies have done so much to change film culture.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film screens at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, November 17,  at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St. It’s part of the ongoing Movies That Matter free film series.  I’ll be showing the film and giving a brief talk before and after the movie.

How big a game-changer can one movie be?

Pretty damn big.

More than any other movie, “Breathless” drew the world’s attention to the French New Wave, a movement of movies created by young critics-turned-directors. These filmmakers – among them Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and many others – were united not by style or subject matter but by their defiance of the status quo.

The New Wave was a rebellion against the complacency of the French film industry. Instead of aiming for polished, well-made productions, the New Wavers often worked in the streets with skeleton crews, exploring subject matter and attitudes at odds with the official cinema culture.

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“PERSEPOLIS” screens at 1:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 16 at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Middle Eastern Voices.

Animation has for so long been the domain of fairy-tale heroines and wise-guy bunnies that it’s a shock to discover that the form can tell human stories with the depth of great literature.

That’s what we have in “Persepolis,” the animated French-made feature based on Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels about her youth in revolutionary Iran.

There’s nothing remotely cute here, thematically or visually. Told in black-and-white line drawings occasionally relieved by splashes of color or subtle shading, this film by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud could have been shot as live action.

But animation adds another dimension; the movie’s minimalist style allows us to zero in on the emotions unfolding on the screen without distractions that might pull the eye away from what really matters. It’s a heightened reality.

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“THE PRIME MINISTERS: THE PIONEERS” My rating: B- (Opening Nov. 8 at the Screenland Crown Center)

116 minutes | No MPAA rating

I’m not exactly sure what to make of Richard Trank’s “The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers.”

It’s not precisely pro-Israel propaganda, though it sometimes feels like it.

The documentarty is based on the best-selling memoirs of Yehuda Avner, who served as an aide and speechwriter to five Israeli prime ministers. Yet it  feels curiously impersonal — even though the 80-something Avner is frequently on camera as a talking head.

On one level it’s a sweeping summation of 50 years of Middle Eastern history: war, terrorism, diplomacy. On  another it’s curiously myopic.

The film follows Avner from his boyhood in England to his new life in the infant state of Israel. He must have been an effective diplomatic and political operative, since he served in the administrations of Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Shimon Peres.

The film has been impressively made, featuring state-of-the-art production and a treasure trove of vintage newsreel footage and still photographs chronicling the early years of the Jewish state.  Sandra Bullock, Michael Douglas, Leonard Nimoy and Christoph Waltz are among the well-known actors who lend their voices to the effort.

There’s an immense amount of history here (most of it leading up to and through the Meir era…the years of Rabin, Begin and Peres will be dealt with in another documentary coming out next year).

Yet the film lacks a center. Ostensibly it should be Avnder himself, a witness to so much history. But he comes off as calm, polite, and a bit detatched…less  a dynamic doer than a fly on the wall who served and observed the great and powerful around him. He’s got some good stories — including one about visiting Harry Truman in Independence — but his modesty makes for an emotionally underwhelming expereince.

“The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers” might best be viewed as a sort of survey course in Israeli history, peppered with sometimes surprising insider anecdotes.

But while it chronicles Israel’s ongoing conflicts with its Islamic neighbors, the film sidesteps all mention of why  so much of the Arab world is bent on eradicating the Jewish nation. It’s not like the doc is overtly anti-Arab…its tone is more one of indifference. A person unschooled in the history of the region could come away from this movie without much of an understanding of what the conflict is all about.

| Robert W. Butler

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“INCENDIES”  screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9 at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Middle Eastern Voices.

Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated (for foreign language film) “Incendies” (French for “fires”) is about war and peace, about family and forgiveness.

It overflows with horror and emotional beauty, yet it delivers its potent payload with a minimum of sentimentality and filmic melodrama.

It’s the story of one life, but also about how the ripples from that life have spread to engulf many other lives.

Writer/director Villeneuve (whose first American film, “Prisoners” with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman, opened a few weeks back) has given us an intimate epic.

In modern-day Quebec twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) learn that their late mother, Nawal, a native of Lebanon who lived in Canada for more than two decades, has left behind a will packed with bombshells.

Through a notary the dead woman instructs Jeanne to find the twins’ father and deliver a letter to him. Simon is told to locate their older brother and hand over a similar epistle. (more…)

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