Butler's Cinema Scene

“KILLING THEM SOFTLY”  My rating: B

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Killing Them Softly” has the grimmest world view of any film since Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.”

The difference is that despite destroying the Earth in the last scene, the pessimistic Von Trier found tremendous beauty on this spinning rock.

“Killing Them Softly,” on the other hand, is a jaundiced wallow in greed and corruption, a gritty and deliberately ugly tale of crime and consequences that evokes grim laughter but leaves behind the bitter taste of bile.

Based on a novel by prosecutor-turned-writer George V. Higgins (whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle became a brilliant crime film in 1973), this effort from Aussie auteur Andrew Dominik is so brutal as  to be shocking even to jaded contemporary sensibilities. Yet you can’t call it exploitative or cheap.

Our hero (the word is used advisedly) is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a mob enforcer  dispatched to post-Katrina New Orleans to clean up a mess.

Three oily (literally…they seem to sweat 10W-40) criminals (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Vincent Curatola) have robbed an illegal poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta).  A few years earlier Markie arranged the robbery of his own game, a bit of outside-the-box thinking that earned begrudging admiration from his fellow lowlifes.

Of course, you can only pull off that sort of thing once, and that’s what the three mooks behind  this new crime are counting on. In the wake of yet another robbery everyone will assume Markie is going for a perfecta. The presumption of guilt will fall on him, allowing a clean getaway for the true perps.

Except that the lethally laid-back Cogan isn’t falling for that. He knows that Markie is too smart to pull the same stunt again. Problem is, everybody else is thick as a brick.  All the gamblers in town assumes Markie is the bad guy, and to keep peace in the valley Markie – even if he’s innocent – must be made an example. Continue Reading »

Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander

“A ROYAL AFFAIR” My rating: C+ (Now at the Tivoli and the Rio)

137 minutes | MPAA rating: R

 It’s got no shortage of plush costumes and castles, not to mention an egalitarian sensibility that resonates with modern  audiences.

But I found Nikolaj Arcel’s “A Royal Affair” (Denmark’s submission to this year’s Oscar competition for foreign language film) dry and morose and not much fun.

Historically, at least, it seems to be pretty accurate.

In the mid 1700s an English princess (Alicia Vikander) is wedded to Denmark’s King Christian VII.  It is not a happy marriage for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, England seems positively liberal compared to repressive Denmark. Upon arriving in her new home, young Queen Caroline finds that much of her personal library has been seized for espousing the heretical ideas of the Enlightenment.

But that’s just a minor blip compared to the challenges posed by her husband. King Christian (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) is flat out nuts. He drinks and whores to excess, is indifferent to his royal duties. The best education available has left him no better prepared to rule than a besotted frat boy at some Midwestern college.

Continue Reading »

“LIFE OF PI”  My rating:  A (Opens wide on Nov. 21)

127 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

If ever there was a novel that defied the journey to film, it is Yan Martel’s 2001  “Life of Pi.”

The narrative presents a daunting logistical nightmare for any filmmaker. Most of the story involves a shipwrecked teenager who spends months at sea sharing a lifeboat with a huge Bengal tiger. It’s the sort of setup that demands the utmost of film technology.

And, in the book’s final pages, Martel introduces the possibility that our young hero is an unreliable narrator, that he has invented this epic yarn to cover a much more tawdry, shameful and shocking reality.

How do you make that work on the screen? I thought it couldn’t be done.

I was  wrong.

Ang Lee’s film version of “Life of Pi” is so good on so many levels that it’s unsettling.

Not only does Lee capture the vast arc of this unconventional survival tale, but he renders it in the best 3-D I’ve ever witnessed (the only thing that comes close is “Avatar”). Moreover, the entire film is a visual tour de force, a panorama of such hallucinogenic beauty that words cannot do it justice.

For mind-blowing visuals it is rivaled only by the acid-trippy “star gate” sequence at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This film has that sort of impact. Continue Reading »