“MUSCLE SHOALS” My rating: B (Opening Nov. 1 at the Tivoli)

111 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Like “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” “AKA Doc Pomus” and “Tom Dowd & the Language of Music,” the new documentary “Muscle Shoals” leaves you stunned at the realization of the great music created by just one individual, record label or – in this case – town.

Muscle Shoals, Alabama, population 8,000, is a redneck burg of no particular distinction. Yet it became the birthplace of some of our greatest R&B and rock. Why should a rural town in one of the most racially-charged states have become a happy melting pot of black and white music-makers?

Greg Camalier’s film tries to answer that.  Maybe it has something to do with the landscape – Native Americans called the nearby Tennessee River “the river that sings.”  Opines U2’s Bono: “It’s like the songs came out of the mud.”

Whatever. Here’s what we can say for certain.

Jimmy Cliff

In the early ‘60s a local guy named Rick Hall created a recording studio in Muscle Shoals and hired a bunch of local white kids as a house band. As individual musicians they weren’t all that great – not at first, anyway — but together they had a synergy, a creativity that allowed them to take any performer, any song, and find just the right approach and arrangement. They became known as The Swampers.

Hall’s Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals got a big shot in the arm when a local nursing home worker named Percy Sledge recorded “When A Man Loves a Woman” there. Attracted by that huge hit, as well as tunes recorded in Muscle Shoals by Arthur Alexander, big-time record producer Jerry Wexler began bringing artists like Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to work with Hall and the Swampers. 

The combination of black artists and a white producer and studio band resulted in spectacular music like “Respect” and “Land of 1,000 Dances.”

(more…)

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“THE COUNSELOR” My rating: C (Opens wide on Oct. 25)

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Having apparently concluded that his work to date is unrealistically optimistic, Pulitzer-winning (for The Road) novelist Cormack McCarthy has at age 80 written his first original screenplay. 

The resulting movie – directed by Ridley Scott — seems to have been concieved for those who found “No Country for Old Men” implausibly upbeat.

“The Counselor” begins with a long opening scene in which a lawyer known only as Counselor (Michael Fassbender) and his paramour Laura (Penelope Cruz) make love in the bedroom of his uber-modern El Paso home. Enjoy it…it’s the only moment of tenderness in the whole two hours.

Next we see the Counselor in Europe buying a big diamond from a chatty dealer (Bruno Ganz). He’s going to propose to his gal.

So far, so normal.

But it slowly dawns on us (slowly because in his dialogue McCarthy has declared war on simple declarative sentences) that the Counselor is having money problems and in an attempt to turn things around has invested in a very shady deal. Drug smuggling.

In Mexico we see barrels of the stuff being placed inside the tank of a rust bucket septic service truck and covered with human waste – because what border guard wants to delve too deeply into such a repellant mess? (I’m not kidding…this movie must have employed a turd wrangler.)

The Counselor has a couple of partners in this nefarious venture. Westray (Brad Pitt) is a savvy facilitator in Stetson and cowboy-chic suit who conducts business in restaurants and talks matter-of-factly about all the things that can go wrong with this sort of enterprise. Think of his dialogue as foreshadowing.

Reiner (Javier Bardem, with a ‘do that looks like an exploding outhouse) runs local nightclubs and lives lavishly, but also needs to make a lot of money fast.  He’s living with the predatory Malkina (Cameron Diaz), who not only keeps two pet cheetahs but has had her body tattooed with cat-like spots. I suppose you could call her sexy, but in a very creepy way.

There’s also the Counselor’s client, a female drug kingpin (Rosie Perez) serving time in a Texas prison. She requests that our hero intervene on behalf of her son, who’s been arrested for speeding. That seemingly inconsequential act has grave repercussions.

Blink and you’ll miss cameos by John Leguizamo, Dean Norris (the late Hank of “Breaking Bad”), Natalie Dormer (Anne Bolyn in “The Tudors”), Goran Visnjic (“E.R.”) and Ruben Blades.

None of these individuals – save for Cruz’s deer-in-the-headlights innocent – has any redeeming qualities.  Notwithstanding his love for Laura, the Counselor is pretty much a cold fish, which makes him a less than compelling protagonist.

The moral of McCarthy’s tale is that once you get involved in the Dark Side there’s no turning back. The bad guys here – interchangeable drug cartel killers — are faceless and implacable. They just keep coming at you until there’s no escape. Talk — something the Counselor must be good at — has no power here.

“The Counselor” looks good – Scott always makes good-looking films – and takes full advantage of the ugly/beautiful Southwestern landscape. A couple of action scenes have been well staged.

But McCarthy’s super-literary dialogue is off putting. I think he’s aiming for a Mamet-esque tone, but he doesn’t have Mamet’s sense of humor. Or any sense of humor at all.

The film is frustrating because nobody here actually says what they mean. They all talk in code, in metaphor, and this tangential approach will leave some audience members wondering what the hell they just saw.

Anyway, “The Counselor” is so unrelentingly bleak that showers should be installed at theater exits.

| ROBERT W. BUTLER

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Heads up, horror fans!

Just in time for Halloween, the Kansas City Public Library is screening The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)  on Sunday, October 27, 2013, at 1:30 p.m. 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.

Just to put you in the mood, here are 10 little-known facts about the film, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films of all time…although it is also terrifically funny. Some, in fact, have called it the first great camp classic.

• The Frankenstein legend is one of the most popular movie subjects. To date more than 100 feature films have been released with “Frankenstein” in the title.
   
• The Bride of Frankenstein surprises many first-time viewers who are shocked to discover that it treats Boris Karloff’s “creature” with sympathy. This time around the monster learns to talk (Karloff resisted the idea, but later embraced it), and in many scenes is depicted as a Christ-like figure suffering at the hands of cruel mankind.
   
• Director James Whale (he made both Frankenstein in 1931 and the sequel four years later) was openly gay at a time when most creative individuals in Hollywood hid that fact. Many have speculated that The Bride of Frankenstein’s curious blend of horror and outlandish humor was the result of Whale indulging his camp sensibilities.
   
• Elsa Lanchester, who plays both author Mary Shelley (in the opening prologue) and the female “monster,” was the wife of actor Charles Laughton. She based her portrayal of the newly-animated Bride on the movements of birds.
   
• The Bride’s towering hairdo was inspired by an ancient bust of the Egyptian princess Nefertiti wearing a similarly-shaped headdress.
   
• Director Whale so wanted actor O.P. Heggie to play the blind hermit who takes in the Monster that he delayed shooting those scenes until the end of production, when Heggie would be finished with another film. Heggie never saw The Bride of Frankenstein…he died only a few months later.
   
• Colin Clive, the English actor who portrayed Victor Frankenstein in both Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, died only two years later of tuberculosis and chronic alcoholism. For 40 years his ashes sat unclaimed in the basement of a Los Angeles funeral parlor; in 1978 they were scattered at sea.
• Valerie Hobson, who portrayed Baroness Frankenstein (taking over the role originated by Mae Clarke), later played the adult Estella in David Lean’s 1946 Great Expectations. In 1954 she married future British Prime Minister John Profumo, whose career ended in scandal in 1963 after he lied to the House of Commons about his affair with call girl Christine Keeler.
   
• Boris Karloff on the Monster: “He was the best friend I ever had.”
   
• Though he is the actor most associated with Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff played the character in only three movies. Among the dozens of other actors who have assayed the role are Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, Christopher Lee, Freddie Jones, David Prowse, Bo Svenson, Michael Sarrazin, Clancy Brown, Chris Sarandon, Randy Quaid, Robert De Niro, Aaron Eckhart, and Benedict Cumberbatch.
   

| Robert W. Butler

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“PARKLAND”  My rating: B+ (Now showing at the Tivoli)

93 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Sometimes you think you’re over a traumatic experience, that you long ago consigned painful thoughts and emotion to the distant past. And then something comes along – something like the movie “Parkland” – to tear the scars open once again.

“Parkland” is about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Over the last 50 years – I was a high school sophomore when it happened — the subject has spawned many movies, many of them (like Oliver Stone’s “JFK”) weaving conspiratorial scenarios.

This film, though, delivers a gut punch not with outlandish claims but simply by meticulously adhering to the facts. There’s little obvious effort to overdramatize; nevertheless, “Parkland” moved me on a very deep and still-raw level.

Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s book Four Days in November, Peter Landesman‘s docudrama  gives the illusion of capturing the events of November 22 , 1963 in minute-by-minute fashion.

The title refers to Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, where emergency room personnel found themselves attempting to save the life of the President and then, almost exactly 48 hours later, were faced with doing the same for his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In recreating those unsettling two days, writer/director Landesman (this is his first film as director; he wrote the 2007 human trafficking drama “Trade”) cannily weaves original newsreel footage, TV and radio broadcasts, and new handheld footage to create a hauntingly seamless whole.

He’s assembled a cast of incredible depth and virtually no ego: Zac Efron as a young hospital resident who finds himself working on the President; Marcia Gay Harden as a tough-love-dispensing ER nurse; Ron Livingston, Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Welling, Mark Duplass and Gil Bellows as FBI and Secret Service agents; Paul Giamatti as Abraham Zapruder, the

dressmaker whose horrifying home movie captured the only images of the fatal bullet; and James Badge Dale as Oswald’s brother Robert and Jacki Weaver as Oswald’s mother, Marguerite.

This is powerful stuff, packed with moments of confusion, terror, and grief. Not to mention some insider stuff I wasn’t aware of.

For example, I didn’t know that the Secret Service agents and Dallas cops literally came to blows in the ER over the coroner’s demand that the President’s body not be removed until an autopsy had been performed.

I wasn’t aware of the race to get Zapruder’s film developed, since it contained essential evidence, or that the lab technician who took on the job warned that its 8mm format posed problems

that could result in the loss of the entire reel.

Or that Secret Service agents hurriedly tore out two rows of seats from Air Force One to make room for  JFK’s coffin: “We’re not carrying him down below like a piece of luggage!”

And perhaps nothing is quite so disturbing as Zapruder’s first look at his soon-to-be-notorious footage, crying out in anguish as the projected image of the shooting reflects off his eyeglasses.

For sheer lunacy on a Shakespearean scale, it’s hard to beat Marguerite Oswald, a mercenary madwoman certain that her assassin son was a secret agent of the United States being framed by his bosses.

“Parkland” runs for just 93 minutes …any longer and I don’t know if I could have taken it. But in recreating a time and place with astonishing fidelity, first-timer Landesman makes us understand what it was like to be on a turning point of history.

| Robert W. Butler

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