Butler's Cinema Scene

Paul Muni (right) as Louis Pasteur

“THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 21, at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Muni the Magnificent.

The work of scientists generally doesn’t lend itself to dramatization.

In real life, earthshaking breakthroughs are fairly rare. Great cures and life-changing inventions are most often the result of painstaking trial and error over years or decades.

Not that Hollywood has ever let facts get in the way of a good story.

Take, for example, the opening sequence of “The Story of Louis Pasteur.”  In mid-19th century Paris, a physician prepares to go on a house call. He places his instruments in his black bag and, dropping one on the floor, picks it up, wipes it off on his pants leg, and puts it in with the rest.

The camera then pans to a dark alcove. A figure emerges holding a gun. Bang! Dead doctor.

What’s this bit of melodrama got to do with the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur?

Just this. The shooter is the husband of a woman who died at the hands of the doctor. Apparently the widower had read a pamphlet published by Pasteur which excoriates France’s physicians for their failure to sterilize their hands and instruments. And now the distressed husband is taking his revenge.

“The Story of Louis Pasteur” isn’t a full film biography, as it only covers about a decade in the great chemist’s life. For modern audiences it is less about one man than it is about the bad old days of head-in-the-sand medicine, when doctors didn’t think a wound was healing without a lot of pus and took pride in their filthy instruments.

The bulk of physicians, in fact, thought that Pasteur was either a madman or a con artist for his assertion that disease was caused by tiny creatures – germs – that could be seen only under the microscope.

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Chiwetel Ejiofor in “12 Years a Slave”

Steve McQueen’s ante-bellum drama “12 Years a Slave” made off with the big wins Sunday in voting by members of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle.

The movie won top honors for best picture, best actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), supporting actress (Lupita Nyong’o), supporting actor (Michael Fassbender) and for John Ridley’s screenplay adaptation.  McQueen tied for best director with “Gravity’s” Alfonos Cuaron.

Sandra Bullock was named best actress for her performance as an astronaut stranded in space in “Gravity.”

A second tie occurred in the animated featuring voting, with the honors split between “Frozen” and “Despicable Me 2.”

France’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was named best foreign language film.

Best original screenplay honors went to Spike Jonze for “Her,” in which an introvert played by Joaquinn Phoenix falls in love with the Siri-like operating system on his computer. “Her” also won the Vince Koehler Award for Best Fantasy, Science Fiction or Horror film.

“The Act of Killing,” in which former right-wing Indonesian death squad members were encouraged to re-enact their crimes for the camera, was named best documentary.

| Robert W. Butler

“OUT OF THE FURNACE” My rating: C (Opens wide on December 6)

116 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Certain movie genres are best not messed with.

Revenge melodramas and porn, for example. Get too artsy – try too hard to make them relevant and meaningful – and you deny the audience the crude thrills they’ve paid for.

“Out of the Furnace,” a crime drama from writer/director Scott Cooper  (“Crazy Heart,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”), tries to make up for its clichéd yet wildly improbable plotting by pretending to be a character study.

It has a few solid moments, but finally runs aground on the rocks of its own lofty (yet ill defined) ambitions.

Russell Baze (Christian Bale) lives in a Pennsylvania factory town and labors in the local steel mill (the “furnace” of the title). He’s hard-working, decent and in love with the beautiful Lena (Zoe Saldana). He  should be the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song.

His younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) is a National Guardsman who has gone through four tours of duty in Iraq (the year is 2008). After all that, normal domestic life seems utterly empty.  Rodney – a gambler usually in arrears with the loan sharks – has taken to participating in illegal bare-knuckle fights. He’s the sort who can take a savage beating for five minutes; then something clicks inside and he becomes a rabid monster.

The first half of “Out of the Furnace” is all about milieu and character. Russell tends to his dying dad and goes deer hunting with his uncle (Sam Shepard). He secretly pays off Rodney’s debts with the local small-town wise guy (Willem Dafoe).

He goes to prison for vehicular homicide when he crashes into another car after a night at the local bar. When he comes out, his girl Lena has taken up with a local cop (Forest Whitaker).

All this is very depressing. There are a couple of fine moments – particularly a tearful, rueful reunion between Russell and Lena during which she announces she’s pregnant by her new man – but the plot seems to have stalled in a swamp of blue-collar angst. Continue Reading »

“SCARFACE” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7, at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., as part of the film series Muni the Magnificent.

Actor Paul Muni (1895-1967) was a human chameleon obsessed with transforming himself for his roles. Throughout the 1930s and into the ‘40s he was considered America’s premier dramatic actor, landing six Oscar nominations and one win.

But along with his genius came some world-class eccentricities.

Muni was painfully shy and became completely unnerved when fans recognized him in public.

He did extensive research to prepare for his roles and once he’d settled on an interpretation no one – not his director, not his fellow actors – could get him to vary from it. He allowed his wife to be the final judge of his work… if she didn’t approve of a scene, it had to be reshot.

Between takes on the movie set he calmed himself by playing a violin. He was thrown into a panic if he saw someone wearing red clothing.

And Muni gave up a lucrative Warner Bros. contract while still in his acting prime.

Born in Austria, Muni came to America as a child. His parents were actors in the Yiddish Theatre and Muni made his stage debut at age 12 playing an 80-year-old man. A master of stage makeup, Muni was so transformed that theater goers didn’t realize he was just a child.

Yiddish was his first language. He didn’t act in English until he was nearly 30 years old.

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Bruce Dern, Will Forte

“NEBRASKA” My rating: A (Opening Nov. 27 at the Glenwood Arts)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Delightfully funny and surprisingly soulful, “Nebraska” is filmmaker Alexander Payne’s comic valentine to small-town America.

Fuelled by terrific perfs from veteran Bruce Dern and “SNL” alumn Will Forte as a father and son  on a raggedy road trip — and shot in black-and-white so gorgeous you wonder why Hollywood ever let it go – “Nebraska” skewers small minds while celebrating big hearts.

Having it both ways has long been Payne’s trademark (“Sideways,” “About Schmidt,” “The Descendants”), but this time he’s refined his approach to near perfection. “Nebraska” is more than a plot and a collection of performances – it’s a feeling, a state of mind.

It is pretty freakin’ sublime.

Woody Grant (Dern) is an unshaven old coot who may be drifting off into dementia. Repeatedly he’s been found walking the highway near his home in Billings, Montana;  his destination, he tells the cops, is Lincoln, Nebraska, where a fortune awaits him.

In the mail Woody has received one of those publishing sweepstakes prize packets informing him that he may have won $1 million. Now he’s determined to present the dog-eared letter in person and claim his prize.

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Judi Dench, Steve Coogan

“PHILOMENA” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Nov. 27)

98 minutes | MPAA Rating: PG-13

It may be a buddy/road movie, but “Philomena” is a buddy/road movie of a singularly high order.

For starters, it’s got Judi Dench in the title role, giving one of her best performances.

The excellence continues with the screenplay by co-star Steve Coogan (with Jeff Pope) that won the top writing award at the Venice Film Fest this year.

And it jells with the direction of Stephen Frears, who approaches potentially controversial and/or maudlin material with just the right deft touch.

Inspired by a non-fiction book by Martin Sixsmith, “Philomena” describes how Sixsmith (Coogan), a former BBC newsman fired from his high-profile government job, goes looking for a story with which to reignite his journalism career.

The perfect yarn falls into his lap when he’s hooked up with Philomena Lee (Dench) , a woman who 50 years earlier gave birth to an illegitimate son in one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic Church.

Against her wishes, Philomena’s son was given up for adoption by the nuns. Now she wants to track him down.

“Philomena” pulls off an high-wire balancing act. On the one hand it’s a comedy of class differences.  The rather snooty Sixsmith (nobody can match Coogan when it comes to playing aloof ass-hats) is intially bemused and a bit contemptuous of the working-class Philomena, a woman addicted to bad romance novels whose idea of a big night is sitting in a hotel room watching a Martin Lawrence/”Big Momma” movie.

Coogan and Dench clearly are having a ball playing such dissimilar traveling companions.

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Sophie Nelisse, Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush in “The Book Thief”

“THE BOOK THIEF”  My rating: B- (Opening wide on Nov. 22)

131 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is much to admire in the new film “The Book Thief.” But something’s missing.

Fans of the novel will tell you that quite a bit is missing, but they’re talking about plot points jettisoned on the way to the screen. I’m referring to the film’s curious emotional neutrality…this should be a Class A tear-wringer, but it failed to evoke in me even a whimper.

Still,   “The Book Thief” offers an interesting lesson on the difference between literature and movies.

Markus Zusak’s novel — categorized as lit for young people but drawing a far wider audience — is a variation on Anne of Green Gables set in Nazi Germany.

A young girl is adopted by a kindly man and his severe wife. She becomes so obsessed with reading that she risks much to “borrow” books from the local mayor’s private library. Thus the title.

She witnesses Nazi madness:  book burnings, torch-lit rallies, Hitler Youth songfests. The family harbors a fugitive Jew. Her new papa, though far too old for action, is conscripted into the army.

The most amazing thing about the novel, though, is its narrator: Death.  Yep, the Grim Reaper himself, who observes human life from a distance and comments – often sardonically – on his limited (though final) interactions with homo sapiens. Death is the novel’s most interesting character.

He’s hardly in the movie at all.

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Most of us saw Walt Disney’s Pinocchio when we were children.

It was exciting, funny, tuneful, and a bit scary.

In other words, great entertainment for the small fry.

But have you seen Pinocchio since becoming an adult?

It’s a whole other thing.

Pinocchio (1941) screens at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, December 1, 2013,  at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St., as part of the Movies That Matter film series. I’ll be showing the film and giving a brief talk before and after the movie. Admission is free.

After the huge success in 1937 of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney had planned for Bambi to be his next full-length animated film. But finding an appropriate animation style for that movie’s various forest creatures was proving a problem.

So when one of his animators gave Disney a copy of Carlo Collodi’s 1938 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, he jumped on the chance to make his next movie about the puppet who yearns to become a real boy.

But it wasn’t as easy a project as Disney had imagined. The Pinocchio of the book is selfish and mean. Nasty, in fact. And while his misbehavior was tolerable on the printed page, in a film it could be alienating.

So the Disney bunch went to work giving the puppet an overhaul. He was redesigned to look less like a severe marionette and more like a cute little boy (hinges were added to his knees and elbows). Pinocchio’s personality got an overhaul, too.  Now he’s an innocent newborn whose lapses are the result not of selfishness or meanness but of his wide-eyed naivete.

In the book Pinocchio squashes a cricket who tries to teach him right from wrong. For the movie the animators elevated the cricket to co-star status. Named Jiminy and voiced by recording sensation Cliff Edwards, this cricket provided a refreshing modern sensibility in the midst of a 19^th-century fairy tale. Jiminy offered comic relief.

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