Butler's Cinema Scene

“BERNIE” My rating:  B (Opening wide on May 25)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

We so often see Jack Black going “big” in broad comic performances that it’s easy to forget that this is an actor capable of great subtlety.

Certainly it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job than he does in “Bernie,”  Richard Linklater’s based-on-fact study of a small-town eccentric now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison.

Bernie Tiede (Black) is a church-going, giving, glad-handing funeral director who comes to tiny  Carthage, Texas, in the late 1980s and quickly became one of the town’s most visible and beloved citizens.

The sort of guy who goes  the extra mile for his fellows, Bernie befriends local dowager and recent widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a rich witch so disagreeable that one local describes her as capable of “ripping you a two-bedroom, double-wide asshole.”

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“MARLEY”  My rating: B- (Opening May 17 at the Tivoli)

145 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Can it really have been more than 30 years since Bob Marley died of cancer at age 36?

Watching “Marley,” the exhaustive (2 hours and 25 minutes) and exhausting new documentary on the man and his music, one is stunned by how much Marley accomplished in a few years of recording…and by what more he might have given us had he lived.

Kevin Macdonald’s film benefits from what seems to have been total access to Marley’s family, friends, fellow musicians, recordings and concert footage. And it has been superbly photographed – no travelogue on Jamaica has ever captured that island with such rich colors and tactile detail.

As for Bob Marley himself, the film nails his charisma and his musical genius.

But regarding the man behind the icon…well, that’s a much iffier proposition.

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Patti Schemel

“HIT SO HARD” My rating: B- (Opening May 18 at the Screenland Crossroads)

minutes | No MPAA rating

By all rights, Patty Schemel should have died a long time ago.

It’s no coincidence that this documentary about her from director P. David Ebersole is subtitled: “The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel.”

Schemel, the drummer for the band Hole during its “Live Through This” era, had a monumental drug habit that had her flirting with death, living on the street and turning tricks to survive.

Somehow she came through it all with her humor and wry perspective on life intact.

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“DARK SHADOWS”  My rating: C (Opening wide on May 11)

113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

You can’t expect Johnny Depp to do everything.

He’s a very fine actor, wildly creative and capable of putting a singular spin on just about any character that comes his way, from Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter to the tragicomic Edward Scissorhand.

But he can’t take an indifferent piece of writing or a half-assed idea and, through sheer will power, transform it into gold. Surely we have at least learned that from three “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels.

(I’m talking here of esthetics. When it comes to actual gold – i.e., the generating of wealth – Depp’s mere presence in a film practically guarantees its financial success.)

Artistically, though, there’re only so many miracles that one man – even a very talented man — can pull off in the face of overwhelming mediocrity.

Lately, Depp has been wasting his great talents trying to give life to meritless films. The most recent of these is “Dark Shadows,” an updating of the late-‘60s horror-themed daytime soap opera.

The film’s trailer is promising. Here’s a white-skinned, black-haired Depp as Barnabus Collins, the series’ conflicted vampire hero, who after 200 years in a buried coffin is  having a hard time adapting to modern life (in this case the early 1970s). Like the aforementioned Mr. Scissorhand, he’s both cute and creepy.

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Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr…a modern Bonnie & Clyde?

“GOD BLESS AMERICA”  My rating: B- (Opening May 11 at the Screenland Crossroads)

100 minutes | Audience rating: R

“God Bless America” is less a movie than a primal scream of rage and frustration.

It’s basically a riff on the lovers-on-a-murder-spree genre (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” even “Thelma & Louise”), but one packed to the gills with biting social commentary courtesy of writer/director  Bobcat Goldthwait.

In case you didn’t know, Goldthwait, best known for his synapse-knotting stand-up comedy delivery, is a pretty decent filmmaker (“Shakes the Clown,” “World’s Greatest Dad”)

Here he takes all the things that infuriate him about America’s shallow, anti-intellectual, Kardashian-worshipping popular culture and unmercifully skewers them and their proponents.

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Greta Gerwig (far right) and do-gooder posse

“DAMSELS IN DISTRESS”  My rating: C-  (Opening May 5 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I have acquaintances who are big fans of Whit Stillman, who love his ultra-low-keyed comedies of modern manners (or perhaps it’s a lack of manners).

Sorry. I don’t get it.

I wasn’t that enthusiastic about Stillman’s best movie, his 1990 debut feature “Metropolitan.” But  I’m borderline hostile  when it comes to his fourth and latest film, the overly-mannered, criminally underpopulated “Damsels in Distress.”

Having heard about the setup for “Damsels…” I was actually looking forward to it. There’s some real potential here.

Set on the ivy-covered and vaguely run-down campus of Seven Oaks College, Stillman’s screenplay centers on a trio of terminally peppy and unabashedly preppy coeds. Their leader is the towering Violet (Greta Gerwig, memorable in “Greenberg”) who, like a Seven Sisters mutation of Jane Austen’s  Emma, has  devoted herself to improving the lives of her fellow students.

Whether or not they want their lives improved.

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Jason Patric

“KEYHOLE”  My rating: C (Opens May 4 at the Crown Center)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Keyhole” is the weirdest movie Guy Maddin has yet made…which is saying a lot.

In many regards it is vintage Maddin — shot in black and white on claustrophobic sets, marked by dynamic editing and a bizarre soundtrack, and acted by performers who do their best not to be naturalistic.

The problem is that “Keyhole” lacks what may be the most crucial element of Maddin’s style — his bizarre sense of humor. There are stabs at grim hilarity here, but they don’t take. Overall, this is a brooding, dark and largely joyless enterprise.

It’s set in a falling-down mansion in what is apparently the 1930s.  A group of gangsters and their molls armed with pistols and Tommyguns take refuge in the parlor. It’s night and outside a raging lightning storm competes with the flashing lights of police cars surrounding the house  to create a hallucinogenic atmosphere.

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Tom Hiddleston, Rachel Weisz in “The Deep Blue Sea”

“THE DEEP BLUE SEA” My rating: C (Opening April 27 at the Tivoli and Glenwood)

98 minutes| MPAA rating: R

Twenty years ago British filmmaker Terence Davies made two movies — “Distance Voice, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” — that were masterpieces of personal cinema. Low budget but beautifully conceived, the films hauntingly examined Davies’ own boyhood and youth in pre-WW2 Britain. They weren’t dramas, really (there was no big dramatic narrative), but they created an indelible portrait of a way of life, a working-class existence in which the simplest things might provide the most profound joy. Simple things like gathering with friends at the pub and over a pint singing popular songs.

In a sense Davies has been trying to remake those movies ever since. Certainly that seems to be the case with “The Deep Blue Sea,” his adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s 1950 play about a woman who has left her wealthy husband for a washed-up fighter pilot and finds that isn’t working out either. (more…)

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“IN THE FAMILY” My rating: A- (Opening May 20 at the Tivoli)

169 minutes | No MPAA rating

“In the Family” is a first feature so meticulously made, quietly heartfelt and carefully modulated that feels like a revelation, like the arrival of a talent that might really matter. An American Bresson, perhaps.

Except…except that writer/director/star Patrick Wang seems unable to turn it off. “In the Family” runs for nearly three freaking hours, and while audiences might tolerate that excess in a big-screen epic, it’s an intimidating thing in an intimate family drama. Unless you’re O’Neill, and even then it’s iffy.

Still, I saw the film a week ago and it has stuck with me. It establishes its own rhythms and viewpoint, it took up residence in my head. That doesn’t happen all that often.

What Wang gives us here is a story about a gay family, and yet I hesitate to call this a “gay” movie because its concerns — and Wang’s obvious artistry — are so universal.

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Alex…one of the victims of “Bully”

“BULLY”  My rating: B (Opening wide on April 13)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Bully” isn’t a particularly artful documentary, but there’s no question of its effectiveness.

Lee Hirsch’s film actually should be called “Bullied,” since it’s not about the perpetrators of classroom abuse but about the victims — the geeks, the gays, the goofy kids who go through life with a metaphorical target pinned to their backs.

Thus “Bully” doesn’t even address the “whys” of bullying. It’s all about the emotional and psychic pain it inflicts…and it more than proves its case.

Hirsch concentrates on five cases of bullying. In Sioux City, Iowa, he hides a microphone on young Alex to record the abuse piled on him every day on the bus ride to school. Hirsch — who served as his own cinematographer — also employs what seem to be hidden cameras to capture the slaps, punches and pushing (either that or the young bullies are actually showing off for the filmmaker).

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