Butler's Cinema Scene

“ENEMY”: To thine own self be true…

March 12, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Jake Gyllenhaal, meet Jake Gyllenhaal

“ENEMY” My rating: B (Opening March 21 at the Leawood )

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The old saw “He’s his own worst enemy” gets a new and disturbing twist in “Enemy,” a slowly-percolating thriller that finds Jake Gyllenhaal confronting his own doppelganger.

This is the second teaming up of actor Gyllenhaal and Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve. Last fall they had a modest mainstream hit with the kidnap drama “Prisoners.” “Enemy,” by contrast, is aimed squarely at the art house crowd.

Adapted by Javier Gullon from Jose Saramago’s novel , “Enemy” centers on Adam (Gyllenhaal), a Toronto history professor whose specialty is the methodology by which totalitarian states control their populations. Adam is a rather nondescript academic who only gets excited when delving into his favorite subject. At those times he seems borderline obsessed.

Adam seems to have little life off campus. He lives in a chilly, spartan apartment. He has a girlfriend, the cool blonde Mary (Melanie Laurent), but their relationship is less one of passion than of comfortable routine.

On the advice of a coworker, Adam rents a DVD of a period comedy, and is stunned to see himself as an extra, playing a bell hop in a 1920s hotel. A bit of research reveals the name of the actor, and suddenly Adam is consumed with finding out about his mystery double.

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HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “JESSE JAMES”

March 9, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Tyrone Power as Jesse, Jane Darwell as Ma James

“Jesse James” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

You don’t watch the Tyrone Power/Henry Fonda version of “Jesse James” for an accurate history lesson.

If you want something approaching realism in a depiction of the infamous James Gang, try 2007’s excellent “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” with Brad Pitt as the psychotic outlaw and Casey Affleck as the repellent little creep who shot him in the back.

Back in 1939, though, audiences were all about a romantic Jesse James, and this Henry King-directed Western delivered.

It’s highly selective in the story it tells. For example, it makes no mention of the James brothers’ background as ruthless Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. Rather, Jesse (Power) and Frank (Fonda) are presented as simple farm folk (albeit good with guns) who turn to violence when a brutish agent for the railroad attempts to seize their land – and kills their mother with a bomb.

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“STRANGER BY THE LAKE”:

March 6, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

“STRANGER BY THE LAKE” My rating: C+ (Opening March 7 at the Tivoli)

97 minutes | No MPAA rating

There are movies with gay characters, and then there are gay movies.

Writer/director Alain Guiraudie’s “Stranger By the Lake,” to its detriment, falls into the latter category.

Guiraudie is nothing if not ambitious. Here he has created an erotic thriller about a young man who falls for a hunky fellow whom he knows is a murderer. Alfred Hitchcock’s fingerprints are all over this tale of sexual obsession, and Guiraudie’s distinctive presentational style has its source in Antonioni’s 1966 headscratcher “Blow-Up.”

The film contains a great deal of casual male nudity — which is no big deal. But the enterprise is very nearly derailed by several hardcore sex scenes — the full stand-up-and-salute monty — which work against the eerie mood Guiraudie is trying so hard to create. At this point “Stranger By the Lake” stops being a thriller populated by gay characters and becomes a gay movie, one geared to satisfy the sexual voyeurism of the gay audience.

(I’m not picking on gay cinema. If the relationship depicted had been heterosexual it, too, would have trouble recovering from full-penetration porn moments.)

The entire movie unfolds during one summer week at a rural lake where gay men congregate. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a pleasant young guy out cruising for a bit of action. He makes the acquaintance of the oddball Henri (Patrick d’Assumcao), a fat, sad-sack straight guy who sits apart from everyone else like a contemplative Buddha. But Franck’s real interest is in Michel (Chrisophe Paou), a moustachioed Adonis who is dealing with a very clingy and jealous boyfriend.

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“JIMMY P.”: A Troubled Mind

March 6, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

“JIMMY P.”My rating: B (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

Mental health movies tend to run in well-established ruts.

The theraputic breakthrough. The hellish hospital. Indifferent doctors and sadistic aides/nurses.

“Jimmy P.” isn’t having any of that. This drama from French director Arnaud Desplechin (his last movie was 2008’s “A Christmas Tale,” a fondly remembered family drama with Catherine Daneuve as the head of a troubled but still tight family) is fiercely, stubbornly realistic. As well it should be, since Desplechin adapted it from a memoir by psychiatrist George Devereux, who worked for years at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka.

Jimmy Picard (Oscar winner Benicico del Toro) is a Blackfoot Indian from Montana, recently returned from World War II. While in France he suffered a severe head injury in a fall from a moving truck. Now he’s suffering from what today we’d call PTSD, which manifests itself in crippling headaches, blindness, and visual and auditory hallucinations.

The Veterans Administration sends him to Topeka, Kansas (it was shot in Michigan and Montana), where the doctors conclude there’s nothing wrong with him physically. Conventional psychiatric therapy seems the best option.

But Jimmy won’t talk. Though he can be perfectly lucid and even eloquent, something in his Native American background gets in the way of the probing that is part of therapy.

As a last resort, clinic head Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) calls an old friend, Romanian anthropologist and psychiatrist Devereux (Mathieu Almaric), who might be described as an Indian groupie. He’s fascinated with all things Native America and just spent two years living with a tribe in the Mojave Desert.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Benecio del Toro, Mathieu Almaric, Menninger's | Leave a Comment »

“ADULT WORLD”: That sucking sound

March 6, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Emma Roberts, John Cusack

“ADULT WORLD” My rating: D (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In the skin-crawling indie comedy “Adult World,” former tweener star Emma Roberts (TV’s “Nancy Drew”) dulls up the screen as a college coed whose lack of self awareness and sense of entitlement is so total as to be crippling.

Her Amy, a student at Syracuse University, has convinced herself that she’s a great poet. In fact, she is a ghastly poet (“…shattered wings catapult the vulva to vast oblivion…”), but nothing like a reality check gets in the way of her quest for literary greatness.

In short order she has dropped out of school and been kicked out of her parents’ home. She gets a job clerking at Adult World, a mom & pop adult book/video store owned by a mom and pop (Cloris Leachman and John Collum, who make an early appearance and then bail) and managed by the sweet/cute/ironic Alex (Evan Peters, Jesse Eisenberg now being too old for these parts.).

Given the setting, you might expect some “Clerks”-style satire of the whole porn thing, but we get only a few half-hearted stabs at the store’s loser clientele (“Do you have the anti-microbial anal beads?”). Outrageous? Hardly. It it all feels very 1980s made-for-television. (Still can’t figure out what earned the movie an R rating.)

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HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK”

March 2, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert

“Drums Along the Mohawk” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 8, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

Director John Ford had a terrific year in 1939.

One of his films from that year, Stagecoach, was instantly recognized as a classic and was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. Plus, it turned around the career of a middling cowboy actor named John Wayne, who thereafter was one of Hollywood’s greatest stars.

Another Ford effort from ’39, Young Mr. Lincoln (with Henry Fonda excelling as the future president), is recognized as one of the finest pieces of Americana ever captured on celluloid.

Given the stratospheric acclaim directed at those two landmarks, it’s not unusual that Ford’s third film from ’39, Drums Along the Mohawk, often gets overlooked.

Which is a real shame, since it’s a strong effort that dovetails seamlessly with Ford’s recurring theme of what it means to be an American.

In addition, it was Ford’s first Technicolor film, and right out of the gate he excelled at capturing brilliant, vibrant images. In fact, he dismissed color as ridiculously easy to work with when compared to black-and-white.

Based on Walter Edmunds’ bestselling novel (it’s still a great read), Drums centers on the Revolutionary War as it was fought on the frontier, with Yankee settlers battling Indian tribes. The Indians have been convinced by the British that as an independent nation, Americans would waste no time in sweeping westward and seizing tribal land, and that their best interests are to be found by siding with the redcoats.

That’s the story’s background. But the real meat of the yarn lies in the relationship of and Gil and Lana Martin, newlyweds carving a life out of the wilderness.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Drums Along the Mohawk", American Revolution, Claudette Colbert, henry fonda, John Ford | 1 Comment »

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “DODGE CITY”

February 23, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Olivia DeHavilland, Errol Flynn

“Dodge City” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 1, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film sereies Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

Depending upon how you choose to view it, “Dodge City” is either a quintessential Western or a shameless collection of cowboy cliches.

It’s got a cattle drive, a stampede, fetching dance hall girls (the main one is played by Ann Sheridan), a wicked gambler (Bruce Cabot) who runs the town like a private fiefdom, a temperance meeting, a running gun battle on a steam-driven train, and a world-class barroom brawl … all of it captured in glorious early Technicolor.

Most of all it features the cinematic three-way of director Michael Curtiz and stars Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland.

Flynn and DeHavilland had been successfully paired in “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (’36), and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (’38). They would go on to share the screen in a total of eight features, including “Dodge City” (’39) and “They Died with Their Boots On” (’41).

It was widely assumed that the actor and actress were an item. But that was all publicity. DeHavilland was a fairly genteel sort, while the Australian Flynn was a notorious womanizer and drinker whose career barely survived a 1942 trial for statutory rape. His memoir was entitled My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

Still, DeHavilland was not immune to her co-star’s bad-boy charisma. “He was a charming and magnetic man,” she wrote years later, “but so tormented. I had a crush on him, and later I found he did for me.”

In the films they made together Flynn and DeHavilland invariably were directed by Curtiz, an Austrian immigrant who just a couple of years later would achieve screen immortality by giving us Bogie and Bergman in “Casablanca.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ann Sheridan, Bruce Cabot, Dodge City, Errol Flynn, Michael Curtiz, Olivia DeHavilland | 2 Comments »

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “GULLIVER’s TRAVELS”

February 16, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

“Gulliver’s Travels” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film sereies Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

Nobody remembers who came in second.

Perhaps that explains why just about everyone but animation historians have forgotten Gulliver’s Travels. Released by the Fleischer Animation Studio in 1939, it was only the world’s second feature-length animated film.

The Fleischer brothers – Dave and Max – got their start in animation in the 1920s. From their New York studio they launched two fantastically popular series.

Max Fleischer and Betty Boop

Betty Boop was a prototypical flapper of the era, a big-headed beauty with a svelt body who was subversively aware of her sex symbol status.

Popeye, on the other hand, was a brawling, mumbling sailor who found superhuman strength in chugging canned spinach.

Both series were solid moneymakers.

But the financial and artistic success of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 convinced the brass at Paramount – which financed the Fleischers – that they needed their own feature animated film.

Prodded into action, the brothers announced that they would adapt Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It was Max Fleischer’s favorite book from boyhood.

What with its story of the shipwrecked Gulliver being held captive by a society of combative tiny people, there were all sorts of visual possibilities. (The novel’s second half finds Gulliver in a land of giants – but that part of the yarn was dropped.)

Continue Reading »

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“GLORIA”: The second time around

February 13, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Paulina Garcia in “Gloria”

“GLORIA” My rating: B (Opens Feb. 14 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

110 minutes |MPAA rating: R

Funny thing about growing older.

Our desires and curiosities can become muted. Having learned from our youthful mistakes, we’re now more cautious.

Some of us, anyway. There are others who in middle age (or even old age) resume the exploring they gave up long ago…or never experienced in the first place.

Gloria (Paulina Garcia), the title character of Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Lelio’s naturalistic drama, belongs in the second camp.

She’s got two grown kids who don’t get along, a failed marriage in her past, and a full-time job. Which leaves her evenings free to pursue … what?

Romance? Sex? Companionship? Perhaps just the satisfaction of knowing she’s still alive and kicking?

“Gloria” begins in a Santiago club where the over-50 crowd go dancing. Our heroine is no bombshell (she’s got a goofy pair of glasses and a retro ‘do), but she’s got a sly self confidence that is definitely intriguing. Especially to Roldofo (Sergio Hernandez), a retired naval officer several years her senior.

The film is a chronicle of Gloria and Rodolfo’s affair, complete with nude bedroom encounters (brace yourself for less-than-perfect bodies), and it takes us from giddy “this could be the start of something big” territory to hard-nosed lessons in disappointment.

Initially we’re swept off our feet along with Gloria. Rodolfo is charming, sauve, apparently sincere, and he’s something of a self-made man who operates a paintball field where weekend warriors stalk each other with big guns that shoot only pigment.

And the sex is terrific!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

“HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “Wuthering Heights”

February 9, 2014 by butlerscinemascene

Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier

“Wuthering Heights” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film sereies Hollywood’s Greatest Year, which features movies released in 1939.

Happy sets do not always result in happy movies.

Nor do miserable sets invariably produce cinematic dreck.

For proof of that one need look no further than the career of William Wyler, one of the most prolific and honored filmmakers ever.

Films made by Wyler (1902-1981) have won more awards – acting, writing, technical achievement — than those of any other director in Hollywood history. Moreover, Wyler himself was 12 times nominated for an Oscar for best director, winning three times. That’s a record that holds today.

But Wyler had a reputation for crankiness, imperiousness and, some would say, borderline sadism in his handling of actors.

He was a perfectionist who would drive his cast and crews crazy with reshoots, earning him the nickname “90-take Wyler.” While filming “Jezebel,” he had Henry Fonda do the same scene 40 times in a row. His only comment to the actor was “Again.”

When an exasperated Fonda asked what was wrong with the take they’d just completed, Wyler replied: “It stinks.” And kept on shooting.

In 1938 producer Samuel Goldwyn contracted with Wyler to direct an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Gothic classic, “Wuthering Heights.”

By this time Wyler – who was born in Alsace, a French-speaking district of Germany – had been shooting Hollywood features for a decade.

His earliest efforts were mostly Westerns (a French-speaking German shooting cowboy pictures … go figure) but he’d also done a good mix of comedy (“Her First Mate,” “The Good Fairy,” “The Gay Deception”) and drama (“Counselor at Law,” “These Three,” “Dodsworth,” “Dead End”).

Moreover, he’d gotten terrific performances from a wide range of actors: John Barrymore, Paul Lukas, Constance Cummings, Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall, Joel McCrea, Miriam Hopkins, John Huston, Frances Farmer, Humphrey Bogart, Sylvia Sidney.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Emily Bronte, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, William Wyler, Wuthering Heights | Leave a Comment »

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Butler's Cinema Scene

Movie criticism taking the long view

“ENEMY”: To thine own self be true…

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “JESSE JAMES”

“STRANGER BY THE LAKE”:

“JIMMY P.”: A Troubled Mind

“ADULT WORLD”: That sucking sound

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK”

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “DODGE CITY”

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “GULLIVER’s TRAVELS”

“GLORIA”: The second time around

“HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “Wuthering Heights”

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