Butler's Cinema Scene

Nathan Lane, Julianne Moore

“THE ENGLISH TEACHER” My rating: C  (Opens May 24 at Standees in Prairie Village)

93  minutes | MPAA rating: R

There may be a decent comedy hiding somewhere inside “The English Teacher.”  Lord knows it’s got the right cast.

But the feature debut of TV veteran Craig Zisk (“Weeds,” “United States of Tara,” “Nip/Tuck,” “Parks and Recreation”) is a tepid thing.  It’s almost as if Zisk wasn’t sure whether he was making a comedy or something else entirely.

The setup sounds promising.  Fortysomething high school English teacher Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore) is a spinster whose attempts at finding a decent man have not been fruitful. So she throws herself into being the best teacher she can be — inspiring, available, encouraging.

Then she runs into one of her former students, Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano), back in his podunk Pennsylvania town after four years of university and two years of trying to break into Broadway as a playwright.

Linda is frustrated that her former star pupil hasn’t made it big. She asks to read his magnum opus — which appears to be a mannered, really dreadful allegorical psycho drama about children and parents that is part Maeterlinck’s “The Blue Bird,” part adolescent whinefest.  It ends with the murder and suicide of the two main characters.

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A couple of years back I heard that a combination restaurant/movie theater was planned for the venerable Prairie Village Shopping Center at 71st and Mission Road.  I wrote it off as another overreaching pipe dream that would burn out in no time.

Truth is, I’ve never warmed to the dinner-and-a-movie format featured at the Alamo Draft House downtown or at AMC’s Studio 30 in Olathe.  Eating in the dark while the wait staff provides unwanted distractions?  No thanks.

Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong about Standees, the Entertaining Eatery.

The new complex opening May 24 on the mall in the Village (in the space formerly occupied by the Macy’s home store and Einstein Brothers Bagels) looks to me like a total winner, a very classy (yet affordable) restaurant joined with three wonderfully intimate (but not at all cramped) movie auditoriums.

Standees is the first  effort by Dineplex International, a newly-formed company headed by Frank Rash, an exhibition veteran with nearly 25 years with AMC Entertainment.

Among the other principals in the operation are former AMC CEO Peter Brown and former AMC veep for Strategic Analysis Doug Stone.

Together these guys have decades of exhibition experience, and they’ve done an astounding job of sizing up their intended market.

For starters, they don’t regard Standees as a movie-and-a-meal operation

“It’s first and foremost a restaurant,” Rash explains. “It’s designed to do well just as a restaurant.  But all of us involved love movie exhibition, and this lets us keep our hands in.”

I’m yet to eat at Standees, but I like what I’ve heard from Chef Patrick McDonnell and what I saw at a recent walk-through.

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“THE GREAT GATSBY”  My rating: B- (Opens wide on May 10)

143 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Let’s admit at the outset that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is above all else a literary masterpiece, which is to say that its power derives from the transformation of the written word into mental images and emotional  reactions.

 In short, the magic is all in our heads.

Let’s also admit that every effort to film “Gatsby” has, to a greater or lesser extent, failed. 

The good news is that Baz Luhrmann’s new version fails less than most. In fact, there are moments when his “Gatsby” flirts with actually being good.

This could be a minority view. A recent advance screening of the film ended with at least one audience member – probably  a fellow critic — loudly booing Luhrmann’s efforts . Kansas City audiences are notorious polite; in 40 years of reviewing this was a first.

There were moments in this film, particularly in the early going, where I was tempted to boo, too…or at least roll my eyes and brace myself for the worst.

But despite some missteps and overstatement, Luhrman’s “Gatsby” accomplishes  something no other film version has come close to. It makes the mysterious Jay Gatsby a recognizable human being — not just a symbol of American upward mobility and can-do determination,  but a flesh-and-blood figure of real yearning and pain and hope.

This happens for two reasons. First, after a breathless, bounce-off-the-walls opening hour, Luhrmann slows things down, lets his story breathe, and lets the feelings of Fitzgerald’s story to come through.

Second, this “Gatsy” works because Leonardo DiCaprio is so good in the title role.

The key is vulnerability. DiCaprio zeroes in on Gatsby’s childlike aspects. Here’s a character who has achieved incredible wealth and worldliness (apparently through criminal enterprise) but who remains a love-struck adolescent when it comes to the woman who got away.  DiCaprio’s Gatsby is simultaneously naïve and foolish and weirdly heroic.

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“NO PLACE ON EARTH” My rating: B- (Opens May 3 at the Glenwood Arts)

83 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

 There’s a hell of a story at the heart of “No Place On Earth.”  But I do wish it had been better told.

The facts are pretty amazing.  During World War II several Ukrainian Jewish families took shelter from the Nazis in an immense gypsum cave system. After more than a year underground 38 men, women and children emerged to find that the Germans had retreated in the face of the Red Army.

While the men would periodically venture out in search of food and fuel, the women and children remained hidden, thus setting a world record for days spent underground. One girl – now an octogenarian – had forgotten what sunlight was like.

Janet Tobias’ documentary allows these now-elderly individuals to tell their own stories…and that’s both good and bad. 

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