Butler's Cinema Scene

“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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“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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