Butler's Cinema Scene

“HOPE SPRINGS” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Aug. 8)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Nobody tells a joke in “Hope Springs.” Nor do they ever try to elicit a laugh from the audience.

And yet this latest film from director David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”) is devastatingly funny.

For this you can credit screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (making her feature debut after a TV career that includes scripts for “Game of Thrones,” “Everwood” and “Alias”), who writes about marriage with so many dead-on insights that at a recent screening the lady behind me kept muttering “Been there. Done that.”

Taylor’s screenplay generates laughter through character and situation, not by tossing out clever lines. And the results are pretty wonderful, a grown-up comedy about grown-up problems that will undoubtedly resonate far and wide.

Of course it helps to have Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones interpreting your material.

As Kay and Arnold, who after 30 years have settled into a rut of remote cohabitation,  Streep and Jones create what may very well end up being iconic personalities, movie characters that take on an importance beyond that of a mere film. Kay and Arnold, one suspects, may do for sixtysomethings what Juno did for smart-talking teens.

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“KLOWN” My rating: B-  (Opening August 3 at the Alamo Draughthouse)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Featuring a “Bad Santa” level of reprobate behavior and more embarrassing situations than “The Hangover” and “There’s Something About Mary” combined, “Klown” may be that rarest of cinematic beasts: a foreign film that appeals to mainstream tastes.

This Danish comedy from Mikkel Norgaard teams two infantile adult males with a 12-year-old introvert and plops them all down in a canoe trip. Whatever could go wrong does go wrong.

Frank (Frank Hvam) is a gangly, goofy middle-aged doofus who has just learned his girlfriend is pregnant. Perfectly aware of his irresponsible proclivities, she’s considering an abortion.

To prove his paternal potential, Frank agrees to look after his young nephew Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen) for an extended weekend. They’ll take a canoe trip with Frank’s friend Casper (Casper Christensen).

Bo is an uncommunicative phlegmatic lump obsessed with his penis size. Casper is an omnivorous horndog who sees the canoe trip as an opportunity to jump high school girls and to attend a convention of international hookers. No, seriously. Continue Reading »

“BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD”  My rating: B+

93 minutes  MPAA rating: PG-13

Name just about any important filmmaker, and they’ll have made a movie about children.

But I can recall no film – not even from an acknowledged master of cinema — that captures a child’s way of looking at the world as perfectly as “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Quvenzhane Wallis

In just about every aspect Benh Zeitlin’s feature reflects the thoughts, vision, and emotions of its six-year-old protagonist, from a camera that views everything from about three feet off the ground to its flights of intoxicated imagination to its simple narrative, which eschews the adult inclination to explain, elaborate, illuminate.

Our heroine is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), an astonishing beautiful tyke with a bushy Afro and a wardrobe that seems to consist mostly of underpants and big white rubber boots.

Actually the minimal clothing is perfectly appropriate given Hushpuppy’s environment. She lives in the Bathtub, a steamy community of swamp-dwellers along the Gulf Coast. The Bathtubbers are black and white and a Cajun blend of both. Most seem to have been here all their lives and share a laid-back lifestyle centering on beer and steamed crawfish pulled from the brackish waters. The work ethic isn’t big in the Bathtub.

Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry). Well, not actually with him. Hushpuppy has her own ramshackle mobile home raised on pilings. Wink sleeps, drinks and cooks in a shack across a junk-strewn meadow. Continue Reading »

I’m departing from my usual format of reviews and movie news to let everyone know that “Heart,” the four-issue comic book by our spectacularly talented daughter, Blair Butler, is now available in trade paperback.

For the benefit of the non-geeks out there, a trade paperback collects the entire run of a comic book in one volume.

Not only was “Heart” written by a former Kansas Citian, but it was illustrated by Kevin Mellon of Blue Springs. And the story takes place in and around our town.

“Heart” is the story of Oren Redmond, an Overland Park insurance company cubicle drone, who finds a reason to live in the world of mixed martial arts fighting. The book chronicles his rise in the ranks, as well as the many life lessons he learns, often the hard way.

For several years now Blair has been doing Mixed Martial Arts commentary for her cable TV channel, G4, and her love of and wealth of knowledge about the sport comes through loud and clear on every page.

This isn’t just a proud papa boasting. Check out the reviews:

“HEART may not change anyone’s feelings about MMA fights, but it will have readers reexamining their feelings about what drives some MMA fighters. Everyone knows someone like Oren — a friend who spends three nights a week playing shows with a band that probably won’t ever get signed, a relative who puts every hour of their day into a start-up company even when the economy’s broken, an activist struggling to change the way people think — or maybe they’re facing an uphill battle of their own. As anyone in contact with friends from high school on social media understands, not all of these kinds of struggles are worth watching unfold. In the case of Heart, however, fans are going to want to see Oren’s trials and tribulations through.”               — Comics Alliance

“Quite early on, it becomes clear that Oren has reached the glass ceiling, and his MMA prospects are pretty much over.  Blair Butler does an excellent job of getting into the mindset of a fighter in the aftermath of a knockout loss, showing how they might lose confidence in their chin, and how that could affect their whole style of fighting. Continue Reading »

There isn’t a whole lot of middle ground when it comes to Larry Fine, Moe Howard and Curly Howard.

Either you think the Three Stooges are hilarious (meaning you’re probably a regular guy) or you think they’re utterly stupid (meaning you’re a woman…or one of those guys).

So…half of you could not care less about the release of the massive 20-disc “The Three Stooges Ultimate Collection.” But for the other half it’s a sort of comedy Second Coming.

(A confession: I’m one of those guys. The Stooge magic never worked on me – or at least it hasn’t since the fifth grade.)

Well, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, you’ve got to give props to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for putting together 60-plus freakin’ hours (and three decades) of nonstop Nyuk Nyuk, eye poking, head-thumping and face slapping.

What you’ve got here are 190 shorts (or, more accurately, a handful of basic slapstick routines recycled through 190 scenarios so similar it’s impossible to tell them apart), two feature films from the late ‘50s (“Have Rocket, Will Travel” and “Rockin’ in the Rockies”) and, of particular interest to hard-core Stooge fans, three discs of rare and unreleased content centering on various solo short subjects by the boys. Continue Reading »