Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE SPECTACULAR NOW” My rating: B+ (Opens Aug. 23 at the Cinemark Palace)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Movie teenagers bear about as much resemblance to real kids as movie cops do to real police work.

Which makes “The Spectacular Now” a wonderful aberration, a film that feels fresh and authentic and injects new life into a worn-out genre.

Director James Ponsoldt’s Sundance hit is a love story but it’s also an insightful personality study of two young people who find in each other something each desperately needs.

Sutter Keely (a terrific Miles Teller) is a popular guy at his high school, a funny, friendly senior whose self-effacing humor and deadpan wit suggest he’s far smarter than his terrible grades would indicate. (Imagine the love child of Vince Vaughn and a “Say Anything”-era John Cusack.) He’s popular with both his fellow students and his exasperated teachers.

Unfortunately, his charm masks the fact that he’s an alcoholic-in-training, getting blotto with alarming regularity.

Sutter has a steady squeeze (Brie Larson) who appreciates him for his warmth and fun-loving ways but recognizes that there’s no future with such an unmotivated slacker. With graduation looming (it looks like he won’t be getting a diploma), she tells Sutter that it’s over, though he’ll always be her favorite ex-boyfriend.

Then he’s thrown together with wallflower Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley), who on her morning paper delivery route finds Sutter sleeping off a bender on someone’s front lawn. Having misplaced his car, he asks for a ride.

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“JOBS” My rating: C+ (Opening wide on Aug. 16)

122 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“You’re good. Damn good,” a colleague tells young computer visionary Steve Jobs early in the new bio-pic “Jobs.”

“But you’re an asshole.”

Yup.

“Jobs” isn’t a bad movie. And if you’re looking for an affectionate recreation of the early days of the personal computer industry – when things we now take for granted (like a writing program with changeable fonts) were hailed as major breakthroughs – it’s geekily engaging.

But Joshua Michael Stern’s film is painted in broad strokes and rarely gets behind the mysterious and mercurial surface of its central character. The late Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs comes off as an arrogant, self-centered visionary who touched millions of lives through his products but alienated many of his nearest and dearest.

That the movie never really connects on an emotional level is not the fault of Ashton Kutcher, who gives a perfectly acceptable performance and who eerily recreates Jobs’ skinny, turtlenecked frame and loosey-goosey slouch walk. The problem is that Matt Whiteley’s screenplay never quite decides what it thinks of this polarizing figure.

“Jobs” begins in the mid-70s with our protagonist a barefoot dropout hanging around the Reed College campus, follows him through the creation and rise of Apple, through his being fired by the board of directors in 1985, and his eventual return to the failing company in 1996 to retake the reins and spearhead Apple’s resurgence,  one of the greatest turnarounds in business history.

Actually, the movie ends in the late ‘90s…there’s no mention of iconic products like the iPhone or the iPad or of the long fight with cancer that left Jobs dead in 2010 at age 56.

But, then, “Jobs” leaves out so much. It’s almost as if it were written with the assumption that we already know most of the important details of Jobs’ life and work.  The results feel superficial, unformed.

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James Cromwell, Genevieve Bujold

“STILL MINE” My rating: C+ (Opening Aug. 9 at the Rio)

102 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is much to admire in “Still Mine”: Fine acting, some gorgeous cinematography, lovely New Brunswick landscapes.

None of which can dispel the sensation that the movie is bitter medicine that we should swallow because it will be good for us.

“When I was young I looked at old people and thought if you live long enough, you probably have time enough to figure out dying,” says 80-something Irene Morrison (Genevieve Bujold). “But I’m no closer now to the great mystery than when I was 10.”

Craig (James Cromwell), her husband of some 60 years, shrugs. A crusty old farmer, he hasn’t time for meditations on mortality. He’s got stuff to do.

“Still Mine,” written and directed by Michael McGowan, is a Canadian geezer drama (based on a real incident) that chronicles Craig’s long legal wrestling match with the local authorities over his plan to build a new house on his farmland.

With his beloved Irene slipping into dementia and their century-old farmhouse now unsuitable for folks their age (the place is impossible to heat and the only bathroom is on the second floor), Craig decides to build a nice cozy new one-story home. He’ll do it himself, the way his father taught him.

And he sees no reason why he should have to file building permits, or draw up architectural specs, or buy lumber that has been officially inspected and stamped (after all, he mills his own boards from his own trees and knows that the quality exceeds anything he’d find at a building supply store).

“When did we become a country of bureaucrats?” Craig fumes.

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