Butler's Cinema Scene

I’ve never been a big fan of horror movies. Too many cliches, too many worn-out tropes.

And at this late stage it’s almost impossible to come up with an idea so new, so shocking that it grabs audiences the way, say, “The Exorcist” did nearly 40 years ago. It seems like we’ve seen it all.

When we reach this stage of saturation, what’s needed is a movie that delivers the familiar in an entirely different way.  Which is where “Cabin in the Woods” comes in.

Written by geek god Joss Whedon and his colleague Drew Goddard (a producer on TV’s “Lost” and “Alias” and a screenwriter of “Cloverfield”) and directed by Goddard (it’s his first feature credit in that capacity), “Cabin…” cleverly turns the usual horror flick cliches inside out, much in the same way that Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead 2” did back in the day.

You’ve got a quintet of typical college students gearing up for a big weekend in the country.

The buff jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth of “Thor” fame) has a cousin who has recently purchased an old cabin deep in the woods. He recruits his squeeze Dana (Kristen Connolly), her virginal galpal Jules (Anna Hutchison), a hunky brain named Holden (Jesse Williams) and the wisecracking stoner Marty (a scene-stealing Fran Kranz) for two days of sylvan revels.

Their preparations and drive into the forest are observed by Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford), who are installed in a high-tech control center filled with TV monitors that allow them to eavesdrop on the partiers’ every move through literally thousands of hidden cameras and microphones.

Just what are Sitterson and Hadley up to? Our first guess is that they’re producing a reality TV show in which unsuspecting subjects are put into “horror” situations. In any case, these two button-pushers command a huge staff of helpers who bring their scenarios to life.

In this regard the film reminds of “Hunger Games” and “The Truman Show.”

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“FAREWELL, MY QUEEN” My rating: B+ (Now showing at the Glenwood Arts)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The fate of France’s King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, never seems to lose its appeal for filmmakers.

But writer/director Benoit Jacquot finds a new twist with “Farewell, My Queen,” in which the French Revolution and the fate of royalty is viewed through the eyes of the hired help. It’s like “Upstairs Downstairs – Gallic Division.”

Sidonie (Lea Seydoux, who was an assassin in the last “Mission Impossible” film and the shop owner who ends up with Owen Wilson in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”) is the Queen’s reader. Each morning she greets Her Majesty with a few passages from a favorite book … precisely which book is determined by the head lady in waiting (Noemie Lvovsky), who attempts to match the day’s reading to the Queen’s current temperament.

Living in Versailles in 1789, it turns out, is less glamour than drudgery. Sidonie and her fellow workers spend most of their time in dank, undecorated rooms with meager furniture and dirty plastered walls. They take their meals in a cellar that’s positively dungeon-like.

But Sidonie came here to serve her queen. And the moments she spends with Marie Antoinette in the Queen’s sumptuously appointed suites are her reason for living.

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“CELESTE & JESSE FOREVER” My rating: C (Opens Aug. 31 at the Glenwood Red Bridge, Town Center 20 and Studio 30 )

91 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Despite some laughs and the presence of the ever-amusing Andy Samberg, “Celeste & Jesse Forever” is not a comedy.

Rather, it is a sincere attempt to analyze the breakup of a marriage. It raises some interesting points.

Unfortunately, it delivers them in a repetitive and not-very-engrossing way.

We meet the titular characters (Rashida Jones, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Samberg) driving to meet friends for dinner. They appear to be a perfect couple, keyed in to each other’s emotions, sharing little private games.

It’s only when they sit down with their pals that we realize that Celeste and Jesse have been separated for several months in anticipation of a divorce. But they still feel like a couple. In fact Jesse now lives in the garage/studio behind Celeste’s house.

This setup creeps out their friends as unnatural. But for C and J it’s the ideal, civilized, non-acrimonious breakup, one that doesn’t force their acquaintances to side with one or the other partner.

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“COSMOPOLIS” My rating: C (Opening Aug. 31 at the Glenwood Arts)

108 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Because it stars “Twilight” hottie Robert Pattinson, some of his loyal tweener fans  and their moms may think about seeing his latest film, “Cosmopolis.”

Think again.

Our first glimpse of Rob-Pat as Eric Packer, a billionaire master of Wall Street, does remind a bit of his “Twilight” persona. Packer is pale, red-lipped and hides from the sun behind a dark pair of glasses. And you could describe him as a vampire, at least in the economic sense.

But beware, ladies. This film was directed by David Cronenberg, who has made a career of psychopathy (see “Crash,” “Dead Rigners,” etc.), and over its nearly two-hour running time Pattinson’s Packer has sex with several women, kills someone (for no apparent reason) and submits to the longest prostate examination in medical (and certainly movie) history.

Moreover, “Cosmopolis” is a dispiritingly leaden movie, one populated less with characters than with archtypes. People here speak in long, theatrical monologues. They might as well be wind-up toys.

It wears out its welcome long before the closing bell. (more…)

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“LAWLESS” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Aug. 29)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Reeking of period atmosphere and packed with faces that seem to have stepped out of the WPA  photographs of Dorothea Lange (or maybe the Skid Row portraiture of Weegee), the period crime drama “Lawless” certainly looks good.

Guy Pearce

But the latest from Australia’s John Hillcoat (who gave us the Down Under western “The Proposition” and the post-apocalyptic “The Road”) is a dramatically fuzzy venture, one that clumsily attempts to balance vintage bootlegger clichés and hard-core violence with moments of oddball humor.

The subject of the screenplay by Nick Cave (the eccentric Aussie rock star who also scripted “The Proposition”) are the backwoods Bondurants of Virginia, a real-life clan that in the early years of the Depression ran a major bootlegging operation  providing illegal liquor to speakeasies all over the East Coast.

Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy, last seen – barely —  beneath Bane’s mask in “The Dark Knight Rises”) heads the operation. A veteran of the Great War who has a reputation as unkillable, Forrest is socially uneasy loner who says little (he croaks like Billy Bob Thornton in “Slingblade”) and radiates an arresting blend of primitive strength and intimidation. Folks hereabouts know better than to cross him.

Helping out with the heavy lifting is brother Howard (Jason Clarke), a shaggy fellow a bit too in love with the family product to be wholly reliable.

Baby brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) is eager to get into the bootlegging game, but Forrest wants him to go slow, figuring Jack lacks the cut-throat inclinations the job demands.

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“TAKE THIS WALTZ” My rating: C+ (Opening Aug. 10 at the Tivoli)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Some nagging voice in the back of my head tells me I should have liked “Take This Waltz” a whole lot more.

But I cannot lie. I didn’t.

Going in, it sounded like a winner: Michelle Williams starring in the new film written and directed by Sarah Polley, whose Altzheimer’s drama “Away From Her” was one of the best movies of 2006.

But I found “Take This Waltz” pushing me away instead of pulling me in. In part this is because Polley has fashioned a romance of indecision, a brave move but not one filled with big emotional hooks.

Another problem may be that “Take This Waltz” is very much a woman’s picture. I don’t mean that in any sexist way…rather, it feels as if Polley has dedicated herself to capturing a woman’s view of life and romance on the screen with such singlemindedness that those of us with our plumbing on the outside may feel excluded.

Maybe women will view the film differently.

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“HOPE SPRINGS” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Aug. 8)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Nobody tells a joke in “Hope Springs.” Nor do they ever try to elicit a laugh from the audience.

And yet this latest film from director David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”) is devastatingly funny.

For this you can credit screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (making her feature debut after a TV career that includes scripts for “Game of Thrones,” “Everwood” and “Alias”), who writes about marriage with so many dead-on insights that at a recent screening the lady behind me kept muttering “Been there. Done that.”

Taylor’s screenplay generates laughter through character and situation, not by tossing out clever lines. And the results are pretty wonderful, a grown-up comedy about grown-up problems that will undoubtedly resonate far and wide.

Of course it helps to have Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones interpreting your material.

As Kay and Arnold, who after 30 years have settled into a rut of remote cohabitation,  Streep and Jones create what may very well end up being iconic personalities, movie characters that take on an importance beyond that of a mere film. Kay and Arnold, one suspects, may do for sixtysomethings what Juno did for smart-talking teens.

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“KLOWN” My rating: B-  (Opening August 3 at the Alamo Draughthouse)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Featuring a “Bad Santa” level of reprobate behavior and more embarrassing situations than “The Hangover” and “There’s Something About Mary” combined, “Klown” may be that rarest of cinematic beasts: a foreign film that appeals to mainstream tastes.

This Danish comedy from Mikkel Norgaard teams two infantile adult males with a 12-year-old introvert and plops them all down in a canoe trip. Whatever could go wrong does go wrong.

Frank (Frank Hvam) is a gangly, goofy middle-aged doofus who has just learned his girlfriend is pregnant. Perfectly aware of his irresponsible proclivities, she’s considering an abortion.

To prove his paternal potential, Frank agrees to look after his young nephew Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen) for an extended weekend. They’ll take a canoe trip with Frank’s friend Casper (Casper Christensen).

Bo is an uncommunicative phlegmatic lump obsessed with his penis size. Casper is an omnivorous horndog who sees the canoe trip as an opportunity to jump high school girls and to attend a convention of international hookers. No, seriously. (more…)

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“BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD”  My rating: B+

93 minutes  MPAA rating: PG-13

Name just about any important filmmaker, and they’ll have made a movie about children.

But I can recall no film – not even from an acknowledged master of cinema — that captures a child’s way of looking at the world as perfectly as “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Quvenzhane Wallis

In just about every aspect Benh Zeitlin’s feature reflects the thoughts, vision, and emotions of its six-year-old protagonist, from a camera that views everything from about three feet off the ground to its flights of intoxicated imagination to its simple narrative, which eschews the adult inclination to explain, elaborate, illuminate.

Our heroine is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), an astonishing beautiful tyke with a bushy Afro and a wardrobe that seems to consist mostly of underpants and big white rubber boots.

Actually the minimal clothing is perfectly appropriate given Hushpuppy’s environment. She lives in the Bathtub, a steamy community of swamp-dwellers along the Gulf Coast. The Bathtubbers are black and white and a Cajun blend of both. Most seem to have been here all their lives and share a laid-back lifestyle centering on beer and steamed crawfish pulled from the brackish waters. The work ethic isn’t big in the Bathtub.

Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry). Well, not actually with him. Hushpuppy has her own ramshackle mobile home raised on pilings. Wink sleeps, drinks and cooks in a shack across a junk-strewn meadow. (more…)

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I’m departing from my usual format of reviews and movie news to let everyone know that “Heart,” the four-issue comic book by our spectacularly talented daughter, Blair Butler, is now available in trade paperback.

For the benefit of the non-geeks out there, a trade paperback collects the entire run of a comic book in one volume.

Not only was “Heart” written by a former Kansas Citian, but it was illustrated by Kevin Mellon of Blue Springs. And the story takes place in and around our town.

“Heart” is the story of Oren Redmond, an Overland Park insurance company cubicle drone, who finds a reason to live in the world of mixed martial arts fighting. The book chronicles his rise in the ranks, as well as the many life lessons he learns, often the hard way.

For several years now Blair has been doing Mixed Martial Arts commentary for her cable TV channel, G4, and her love of and wealth of knowledge about the sport comes through loud and clear on every page.

This isn’t just a proud papa boasting. Check out the reviews:

“HEART may not change anyone’s feelings about MMA fights, but it will have readers reexamining their feelings about what drives some MMA fighters. Everyone knows someone like Oren — a friend who spends three nights a week playing shows with a band that probably won’t ever get signed, a relative who puts every hour of their day into a start-up company even when the economy’s broken, an activist struggling to change the way people think — or maybe they’re facing an uphill battle of their own. As anyone in contact with friends from high school on social media understands, not all of these kinds of struggles are worth watching unfold. In the case of Heart, however, fans are going to want to see Oren’s trials and tribulations through.”               — Comics Alliance

“Quite early on, it becomes clear that Oren has reached the glass ceiling, and his MMA prospects are pretty much over.  Blair Butler does an excellent job of getting into the mindset of a fighter in the aftermath of a knockout loss, showing how they might lose confidence in their chin, and how that could affect their whole style of fighting. (more…)

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