Butler's Cinema Scene

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt

“HANNAH ARENDT” My rating: B+ (Opens on July 26 at the Tivoli)

113 minutes | No MPAA rating

Intellectual integrity hardly seems like the stuff of scintillating cinema…but then I wouldn’t have thought an 11th –century nun who composed chants for her cloistered sisters would be terribly interesting, either.

But the combination of writer/director director Margarethe von Trotta and star Barbara Sukowa can ignite even the most unlikely subject matter. We saw it a couple of years ago with the Medieval drama “Vision,” and lightning strikes again with their most recent collaboration, “Hannah Arendt.”

Arendt (1906-1975) was a political theorist and a Jew who fled Germany and its Nazi culture, immigrated to America and became an academic. In 1961 she was assigned by The New Yorker to cover the war crimes trial in Israel of Nazi SS bigwig Adolf Eichmann, who had overseen the logistics of deporting hundreds of thousands of European Jews to extermination camps.

Adolf Eichmann on trial

Arendt traveled to Jerusalem expecting to encounter a figure of monumental evil. The man she saw isolated in a glass booth (to prevent assassination attempts) she described as “a ghost who happens to have a cold.”

Eichmann viewed himself as a methodical worker who did his best to complete the job assigned him. Indeed, the prisoner was indignant at finding himself on trial…he believed that in following orders he was doing the right and moral thing.

To describe the defendant Arendt coined a phrase that has entered the modern lexicon: “The banality of evil.” She argued that war criminals are rarely psychopaths; most of them are just ordinary people trying to fit in or get ahead.

Upon publication Arendt’s report unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Some accused her of letting Eichmann – indeed all war criminals – off the hook. Others took particular umbrage at her assertion that the terrors of the Holocaust might have been limited had Jewish leaders in Europe not take a conciliatory approach to the Nazis.

Hate mail was only the beginning of the grief the 56-year-old Arendt endured.  Lifelong friends disowned her. She was accused of anti-Semitism. Her academic career was thrown into jeopardy. Israeli security goons showed up to “suggest” she never publish her reportage in book form.

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Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson

“DRINKING BUDDIES” My rating: C+ (Opening Sept. 13 at the Alamo Draft House)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Drinking Buddies” is not a romantic comedy, despite the presence of some usually-funny players and a setup that sounds like classic rom-com.

Instead, Joe Swanberg’s largely-improvised feature is a gentle, unforced study both of several  authentic-feeling characters and of a way of life.

Kate (Olivia Wilde) is the events planner at a Chicago craft brewery. Her best bud is one of the brewers, Luke (Jake Johnson).

Both are in romantic relationships with other people (she with a recording engineer played by Ron Livingston, he with a special ed teacher played by Anna Kendrick). But it’s all too obvious that Kate and Luke are cut from the same slacker cloth.  They banter on the job, share lunch, and hang after hours.

Their idea of a good time is going directly from the brewery to a bar to suck down pints, play pool and talk – although their repertoire of discussion subjects seems pretty limited. They may have intellectual inner lives, but they’re not indulging them in public.

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“MUSEUM HOURS”  My rating: B (Opens Sept.  6 at the Tivoli)

106 minutes | No MPAA rating

At first glance one might mistake  Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” for an art-school prank, a feature film fiendishly devised to torment those moviegoers with  short attention spans.

It’s certainly not a conventional drama. At times it feels more like a documentary. And the plot, what there is of one, can be summed up in a couple of sentences.

But give this gorgeously photographed picture and chance and you might just find yourself seduced.

The setting is Vienna, particularly the grand old Kunsthistorisches Museum, repository of one of the world’s great art collections. The 60something Johann (Bobby Sommer) works as a guard at the Kunsthistorisches. As a young man, he tells us, he managed struggling rock bands. Now he’s traded the noisy life for one of whispers and silence. Maybe that’s why the film has no musical score.

One day Johann offers assistance to a visitor who seems to be lost and confused.  This is Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), who has flown in from Montreal because of a family emergency. Anne is the only surviving relation of her cousin, who lies in a coma in a nearby hospital.  Apparently she’s expected to hang around Vienna until the cousin dies, then tie up the loose ends.  (She may even have to decide whether to pull the plug on life support, though that would be the topic of a different, more topical film).

Johann befriends Anne, serving as her translator in dealings with the doctors and escorting her around Vienna.

Aha, you say. A Golden Years love story.

Nope. Johann is gay. They’re just friends.

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“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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