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“ROCK THE KASBAH”: Exotic toss-off

October 22, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Kate Hudson, Bill Murray

Kate Hudson, Bill Murray

“ROCK THE KASBAH” My rating: C 

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Rock the Kasbah” is what the Brits call a “toss off.”

Director Barry Levinson’s latest is so lightweight that one comes away wondering if the whole project wasn’t just an excuse to hang out with some amusing people in an exotic location.

Richie Lanz (Bill Murray) is a former rock ‘n’ roll tour manager whose best years are long behind him. Now he runs scams on hopelessly untalented “singers” looking for their big break.

He lucks into a USO tour of Afghanistan using his Girl Friday (Zoe Deschenel) as the “star,” but the young lady is so appalled by Kabul’s chaos and violence that she bails, taking Richie’s passport and money with her.

Stranded in a strange world, Richie is adopted by a couple of stoner gun runners (Danny McBride, Scott Caan) who recruit him to make a delivery of ammo to a remote village.

There Richie discovers a great talent, a beautiful girl named Salima (Leem Lubany) who defies tradition and religious edict by retreating to a cave and singing her heart out. (All she knows are Cat Stevens tunes, but it’s a start.)

Richie comes up with a plan to get Salima on Afghanistan’s version of “American Idol.” Except that in doing so he will  be outraging half the nation — the male half — and putting both their lives in danger.

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“FREEHELD”: Following the social drama playbook

October 16, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Julianne Moore, Ellen Page

Julianne Moore, Ellen Page

 

“FREEHELD” My rating: B-

103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

A great tale trumps — just barely — mediocre delivery in “Freeheld,” a fictional version of the same story told in the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary of the same name.

Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) is a police detective in Ocean County, NJ. She’s a tough, creative and much-honored cop, admired by her peers and especially her womanizing (so we’re told) partner, Dane Wells (Michael Shannon).

Laurel is also a closeted lesbian, so worried that her career will stall if her sexual orientation becomes public that she has virtually no personal life.

Then she meets tomboyish Stacie Andree (Ellen Page).  Love blossoms, although the very out Stacie has a hard time dealing with Laurel’s secretive ways.

When Laurel is diagnosed with late stage cancer, she goes public with her sexuality by asking the Ocean County Board of Freeholders (basically the county commission, which runs the local police) to assign her pension benefits to her partner Stacie, who will at least be able to keep the house they have purchased and rennovated.

But all this takes place a decade ago, at a time when local pols weren’t about to set a precedent by giving a gay employee rights normally reserved for married heterosexuals.  So begins a long and painful legal and public relations process as Laurel becomes ever more frail.

 

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“STEVE JOBS”: Binary genius, binary fool

October 15, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Michael Fassbinder

Michael Fassbender

“STEVE JOBS” My rating: A- 

122 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Love him or hate him, Steve Job’s life was epic…so epic that any attempt to encompass it in a traditional movie biopic is doomed to failure. (Exhibit A: 2013’s lackluster “Jobs” with Ashton Kutcher as Apple’s genius in residence.)

Leave it to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network,” TV’s “West Wing”) to find a way to embrace the salient features of Jobs’ life and personality while inventing a near-perfect narrative structure.

“Steve Jobs” works on just about every level, with a near-brilliant central performance by Michael Fassbender as Jobs, a jaw-droppingly good supporting cast, and effortless direction by Danny Boyle.

But it’s the script — not just the snappy dialogue but the way the story is told — that makes the film a small classic of operatic intensity.

“Steve Jobs” is essentially three one-act plays, each unfolding in real time and centering on the debut of one of Jobs’ landmark products.

The first 40-minute segment takes place in 1984 with the unveiling of the Macintosh computer. The second unfolds in 1988 when Jobs, having been fired by Apple’s board of directors, debuts his renegade effort, the ill-fated NeXT work station. Finally there’s the presentation in 1998 of the original iMac…by this time Jobs has returned to Apple in triumph.

Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet

There’s an element of show-biz pizzaz and ticking-clock suspense at work here.  Jobs views each product debut as a sort of Broadway opening involving sound, video and his own central performance. And then there’s the not inconsequential fact that these various Apple products are often unfinished and still plagued by bugs.  When Jobs flips the switch will they perform or just sit there?

In a sense, the film is a sort of backstage drama. As with last year’s “Birdman,” the story is captured with a roving camera (the cinematography is by Alwin H.Kuchler) following Jobs as he stalks the theaters wings and subterranean passages, always in motion, always shouting orders and making demands.

Common to all three segments is a recurring cast of characters who grow older and evolve over more than a decade:

Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) is Apple’s head of marketing and apparently the only person on staff who can tell the domineering and arrogant Jobs when he’s full of shit. OK, she’s more politic than that, but basically she is Jiminy Cricket to Jobs’ Pinocchio.

Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) is the computer dweeb who cofounded Apple with Jobs, spearheaded the Apple II (for many years the only Apple product that made money) and over time was nudged out of the company (albeit with a huge golden parachute). Despite the betrayal and hurt, Woz still cares about his old partner.

“It’s not binary,” Wozniak cautions Jobs. “You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” Continue Reading »

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“MEET THE PATELS”: My big fat Indian bachelorhood

October 15, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Meet-The-Patels-e1437091362227“MEET THE PATELS” My rating: B

88 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

I was prepared to give “Meet the Patels” a chilly reception just on principle.

After all, here’s a release that looks suspiciously like a home movie…a home movie that meets everyone’s cliched expectations about the behavior of Americans of East Indian descent.

Okay, I was wrong.  I ended up thoroughly enjoying this goofy, warm, borderline heart-tugging documentary from the brother/sister team of Ravi and Geeta Patel.

And if it sometimes looks like a home movie…well, that’s part of its charm.

Our subject is co-director Ravi Patel, a modestly successful Hollywood actor who, as this documentary begins, is rapidly approaching the age of 30. Though born in the U.S.A., Ravi comes from a traditional Hindu family and the pressure is on for him to marry a nice Indian girl — preferably one also named Patel (it’s a clan thing) — and start producing grandkids.

The Woody Allen-ish Ravi reveals (sometimes in conversation with his unseen older sister Geeta, who’s manning the camera) that his dating history is sketchy at best. He’s rarely had success with American girls, though he did enjoy a two-year relationship which he kept a secret from his family lest they go bonkers because he was seeing a woman who wasn’t an Indian American. Eventually the romance collapsed (you can’t blame the girl…who wants to be a dirty secret?).

Now he agrees to allow his parents, Champa and Vasant, to do the whole matchmaking thing.  Ravi doesn’t want an arranged marriage –though he admits that his parents, who knew each other for all of a week before becoming engaged, are the happiest couple he knows.  Rather, he will submit to a complicated process meant to hook him up with an appropriate Hindu girl.  Both he and the women will have the right of refusal.

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“BRIDGE OF SPIES”: Cold War, warm heart

October 15, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

‘Bridge of Spies’ by DreamWorks Studios.

“BRIDGE OF SPIES” My rating: B+

142 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

 

Tom Hanks’ singular status as this century’s James Stewart pays off big time in “Bridge of Spies,” Steven Spielberg’s recreation of one of the Cold War’s lesser known stories.

As the real-life James Donovan, a New York insurance lawyer pulled into the world of espionage and international intrigue, Hanks is wry, moving, and astonishingly ethical. He practically oozes bedrock American decency.

Which was precisely what this movie needs.

The screenplay by the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman runs simultaneously on four tracks.

In the first Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested in NYC in 1957 by federal agents. As no lawyer wants to represent him, the Bar Association basically plays spin the bottle — and assigns the job to Donovan.

Jim Donovan believes that every accused person deserves the best defense possible. In fact, he alienates the judge, the feds, and the general public by standing up for his client’s rights and assuming that this is going to be a fair trial when everybody else wants just to go through the motions before sentencing Abel to death.

On a parallel track is the story of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a military flyboy recruited for a top-secret project and trained to spy on the U.S.S.R. from a one-man U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.  Alas, on his very first mission in 1960 he’s shot down, fails in an attempt to commit suicide, and falls into the hands of the Commies.

Then there’s the arrest in 1961 of Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American grad student studying economics who finds himself trapped on the wrong side of the newly constructed Berlin Wall and vanishes into the labyrinthine East German justice system.

All this comes to a head when Donovan, several years after Abel’s conviction, is dispatched to Berlin in an ex officio capacity to arrange a swap of the Soviet spy for Francis Gary Powers.  And if in the process he can somehow free Fred Pryor from a damp cell, so much the better.

The yarn is so big and dramatic that it seems improbable…yet it happened. (What’s more, a few years later Donovan was dispatched to Cuba to negotiate the release of anti-Communists captured in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.)

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“HE NAMED ME MALALA”: Uncanny calm

October 8, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

88 and Malala **

Ziauddin and Malala Yousafzai

“HE NAMED ME MALALA” My rating: B

87 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Even if “He Named Me Malala” were a mediocre example of the documentarian’s art it still would be devastating.

You couldn’t invent a story more inspiring than that of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl who openly fought the Taliban’s ban on education for women, was shot in the head by an assassin, miraculously recovered, and now is key to international efforts to provide schooling for young women in often hostile environments.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for ‘Superman’”) is clearly in awe of Malala, who possesses the uncannily calm, transcendent world view you’d expect from an 80-year-old guru or lama, but certainly not from an 18 year old.

Perhaps Guggenheim is too much in awe of his subject, for there seems to be little room here for any sort of critical perspective. I’m not asking Guggenheim to gnaw away at this remarkable  young woman’s reputation (you come away from the film humbled and inspired), but it would be nice to get a handle on how much (if any) of her activism is guided by her father, Ziauddin, an educator with big ideas.

For as the film’s title suggests, it’s as much the story of Ziauddin as of Malala.  One cannot speak of one without including the other — Malala describes them as “one soul in two different bodies.”

“He Named Me Malala” begins with an animated sequence depicting the 19th-century martyrdom of Malalai of Mailwand, the Pakistani version of Joan of Arc, who died leading native insurgents into battle against occupying British forces.

Malala narrates this story, and it clearly has personal meaning. After all, long before she became an international symbol for women’s rights her father named her after the historic Malalai.  It’s almost as if he knew she was destined for big things.

(Guggenheim returns again and again to painterly animated sequences to visually depict parts of Malala’s past for which there is no video footage.  These passages give the film a poetic quality, but also tend to prettify the brutal conditions faced by everyday folk in Taliban-controlled regions. I’m guessing that one of the film’s target audiences is teenage women and that the makers wanted to avoid the ghastly whenever possible.)

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“BIG STONE GAP”: Small town schmaltz

October 8, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Ashley Judd, Patrick Wilson

Ashley Judd, Patrick Wilson

“BIG STONE GAP” My rating: C

103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Much star power has been brought to bear on “Big Stone Gap,” writer/director Adriana Trigiani’s adaptation of her best-selling series of semiautobiographical books set in her childhood home of Big Stone Gap, W. Va.

So why isn’t this film any better?

Perhaps for fans of Trigiani (The Shoemaker’s Wife, the Viola series for young adults) the film will be a welcome opportunity to see on the big screen beloved characters from the printed page.

For this newbie the film was mildly (but only mildly) entertaining and mostly forgettable.

Set in the early 1970s (and actually shot in the real Big Stone Gap), the picture stars Ashley Judd as Ave Maria Mulligan, operator of the local drug store and at age 40 widely considered an old maid.

(One must regard as suspect any movie that promotes Ashley Judd as an old maid.)

Shortly after the film begins Ave’s mother — an Italian immigrant — dies, leaving behind a letter revealing that Ave is the love child of a romance back in the Old Country. Mom was pregnant upon arrival in the U.S.A. during WWII and wed the first man who showed an interest.

Anyone wanna bet that before this story plays out Ave’s mysterious biological father makes an appearance?

Meanwhile Ave has to deal with the hassles of directing the annual town pageant, an affair that comes off like a bargain-basement version of Branson’s “The Little Shepherd of the Hills.”

And there’s also a visit to the burg by U.S. Senate candidate John Warner and his movie star wife, Elizabeth Taylor.

Ave’s longtime beau is Theodore (John Benjamin Hickey), an aspiring and ego-driven thespian who has never consummated their relationship. Hmmmm. Theodore could have been the inspiration for “Waiting for Guffman.”

Meanwhile Ave is drawn to her childhood friend, the hunky coal miner Jack (Patrick Wilson), who has his hands full with a predatory divorcee (Jane Krakowski).

Other townspeople — all eccentric to one degree or another — are portrayed by Jenna Elfman, Whoopi Goldberg, Anthony LaPaglia, Jasmine Guy, and Judith Ivey.

This is the first feature from Trigiani, a veteran TV producer (“The Cosby Show,” “A Different World”), and while she may be intimate with the material she lacks the directing skill to bring it to life.

“Big Stone Gap” clunks along, making a stab at humor here and a grab at pathos there.  But despite the large and attractive cast, it never gets out of low gear.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE MARTIAN”: The loneliest man alive

October 1, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

martianMV5BMTUxODUzMDY0NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDE0MDE5NTE@._V1__SX1377_SY911_“THE MARTIAN” My rating: A

141 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

With “The Martian” director Ridley Scott and star Matt Damon deliver an almost perfect piece of popular filmmaking, an intimate sci-fi epic that is smart, spectacular and stirring.

This big screen adaptation (by screenwriter Drew Goddard) of Andy Weir’s best-seller about an astronaut stranded on Mars has just about everything — laughs, thrills, visual splendor and a rousing endorsement of the brotherhood of man.

It’s the least pretentious and most wholly enjoyable film of Scott’s extensive career (which includes  “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Thelma & Louise” and “Gladiator”) and pushes Damon’s acting talents to the max.

The premise melds elements of 1964’s “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” and “Apollo 13” (earthbound scientists and engineers invent ways to help their desperate colleague).

Matt Damon

Matt Damon

And nestled inside this riveting adventure is a sly commentary on bureaucracy.

Set in a near future in which the American space program is thriving (the film’s most patently fantastic assertion), “The Martian” opens on Mars, where a team led by Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) is wrapping up a month-long scientific mission. A fierce sandstorm catches the astronauts out in the open, and they barely make it to the Martian lander that will return them to the orbiting mother ship.

But one of them, botanist Mark Watney (Damon), is literally blown away by the raging wind. Believing him dead, Lewis has no choice but to take off without him before the storm makes liftoff impossible.

But Mark isn’t dead. He awakens to a beeping alarm in his helmet telling him he’s almost out of air, struggles out of the sand in which he is half buried and discovers that he’s been skewered by a shard of wind-blown metal.

He barely makes it into the now unoccupied housing module where he performs a bit of surgery on himself and takes stock of his situation. Continue Reading »

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“SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE”: Slow burn to sexy

October 1, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie

Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie

“SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE” My rating: B

101 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Writer/director Leslye Headland describes her new movie as ” ‘When Harry Met Sally’ with assholes.”

That’s accurate as far as it goes.  But I have to admit…I fell in love with these assholes.

The sorta familiar plot is about a guy and a girl — both of whose love lives are, well, challenged — who make a pact to remain platonic best friends.  They will be able to confide to each other the stuff they can tell no one else. But they will not get physical. That would screw up the chemistry.

Jake is a serial  womanizer.  No sooner does he establish a physical intimacy with a new woman than he starts looking for ways to cheat on her. Thing is, he’s so funny and charming that many of Jake’s wronged ladies let the infidelity slide.

Lainey, on the other hand, has been engaged in a long affair with a OB-GYN who uses her for quick, unsentimental sex before returning to his wife. Normally a pretty tough cookie, she’s hopelessly infatuated with this creep. Though she swears she’ll break it off, she keeps drifting back into his orbit.

Jake and Lainey are seriously flawed.  Thank heavens they are portrayed by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, who somehow manage to make their characters amusing, entertaining, vulnerable and, ultimately, very romantic.

In a prologue we see Jake and Lainey — college students — losing their virginity to one another. It’s a one night stand, no big deal, and both go their separate ways.

Twelve years later they run into each other at a meeting of sex addicts. (How’s that for a deliciously perverse twist on the old rom-com meet-cute scenario?)

He’s curious about his inability to maintain a monogamous relationship — though hardly committed to changing his ways. She’s dealing with her perennial sexual obsession with the good doctor (Adam Scott, who seems to be everywhere these days).

They agree to be each other’s emotional backboard, someone against whom they can bounce their innermost thoughts about sex and love. When they’re together, Jake and Lainey don’t have to pretend to be anything other than what they are.

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“FINDERS KEEPERS”: Fuckery and shenanigans

October 1, 2015 by butlerscinemascene

John Wood

John Wood

“FINDERS KEEPERS” My rating: B

82 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Finders Keepers” is a sort of hillbilly epic about an amputated human leg.

For starters.

In 2004 John Wood of Maiden NC lost his left leg — and his father, Tom — in the crash of their private plane.  Wood asked the hospital where he was treated to let him have his severed limb.  He hoped someday to be buried with it.

He expected to receive bones.  Instead Wood was given the whole leg, decaying flesh and all.

Initially Wood stored it in the freezer of the local Hardee’s (a friend worked there). After the manager threw a snit fit Wood soaked the limb in formaldehyde and hung it from a tree to dry.

But John had a drinking and drug problem. Before relocating to another state he moved his possessions into a storage facility. When he failed to pay the rent his belongings were sold at auction.

Enter Shannon Whisnant, a bombastic, barrel-bodied, bullfrog-voiced good ol’ boy who made a living buying junk cheap and selling it dear. Whisnant purchased and took home Wood’s small barbecue smoker. When he looked inside he discovered not the residue of old ribs but a human leg.

And there Whisnant saw a glorious future. This boondock Barnum would charge folks $3 ($1 for children) to view the limb. He printed up T shirts declaring him The Foot Man.

Meanwhile, between benders John Wood  argued that this was his flesh and bone, after all. He wanted nothing to do with what one observer of the feud describes as “fuckery and shenanigans.”

Shannon Wisnant

Shannon Wisnant

Their battle for possession of the leg would eventually be settled in the reality TV courtroom of Judge Greg Mathis.

At first glance Bryan Cranberry and Clay Tweel’s documentary appears to be a savage sendup of redneck ethos. But “Finders Keepers” takes individuals who at first glimpse seem stupid and silly and recognizes the tragedy in their lives.

For the more you dig into Wood and Whisnant’s back stories, the more complex things become.

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