Butler's Cinema Scene

“BERNIE” My rating:  B (Opening wide on May 25)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

We so often see Jack Black going “big” in broad comic performances that it’s easy to forget that this is an actor capable of great subtlety.

Certainly it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job than he does in “Bernie,”  Richard Linklater’s based-on-fact study of a small-town eccentric now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison.

Bernie Tiede (Black) is a church-going, giving, glad-handing funeral director who comes to tiny  Carthage, Texas, in the late 1980s and quickly became one of the town’s most visible and beloved citizens.

The sort of guy who goes  the extra mile for his fellows, Bernie befriends local dowager and recent widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a rich witch so disagreeable that one local describes her as capable of “ripping you a two-bedroom, double-wide asshole.”

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“MARLEY”  My rating: B- (Opening May 17 at the Tivoli)

145 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Can it really have been more than 30 years since Bob Marley died of cancer at age 36?

Watching “Marley,” the exhaustive (2 hours and 25 minutes) and exhausting new documentary on the man and his music, one is stunned by how much Marley accomplished in a few years of recording…and by what more he might have given us had he lived.

Kevin Macdonald’s film benefits from what seems to have been total access to Marley’s family, friends, fellow musicians, recordings and concert footage. And it has been superbly photographed – no travelogue on Jamaica has ever captured that island with such rich colors and tactile detail.

As for Bob Marley himself, the film nails his charisma and his musical genius.

But regarding the man behind the icon…well, that’s a much iffier proposition.

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Patti Schemel

“HIT SO HARD” My rating: B- (Opening May 18 at the Screenland Crossroads)

minutes | No MPAA rating

By all rights, Patty Schemel should have died a long time ago.

It’s no coincidence that this documentary about her from director P. David Ebersole is subtitled: “The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel.”

Schemel, the drummer for the band Hole during its “Live Through This” era, had a monumental drug habit that had her flirting with death, living on the street and turning tricks to survive.

Somehow she came through it all with her humor and wry perspective on life intact.

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“DARK SHADOWS”  My rating: C (Opening wide on May 11)

113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

You can’t expect Johnny Depp to do everything.

He’s a very fine actor, wildly creative and capable of putting a singular spin on just about any character that comes his way, from Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter to the tragicomic Edward Scissorhand.

But he can’t take an indifferent piece of writing or a half-assed idea and, through sheer will power, transform it into gold. Surely we have at least learned that from three “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels.

(I’m talking here of esthetics. When it comes to actual gold – i.e., the generating of wealth – Depp’s mere presence in a film practically guarantees its financial success.)

Artistically, though, there’re only so many miracles that one man – even a very talented man — can pull off in the face of overwhelming mediocrity.

Lately, Depp has been wasting his great talents trying to give life to meritless films. The most recent of these is “Dark Shadows,” an updating of the late-‘60s horror-themed daytime soap opera.

The film’s trailer is promising. Here’s a white-skinned, black-haired Depp as Barnabus Collins, the series’ conflicted vampire hero, who after 200 years in a buried coffin is  having a hard time adapting to modern life (in this case the early 1970s). Like the aforementioned Mr. Scissorhand, he’s both cute and creepy.

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Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr…a modern Bonnie & Clyde?

“GOD BLESS AMERICA”  My rating: B- (Opening May 11 at the Screenland Crossroads)

100 minutes | Audience rating: R

“God Bless America” is less a movie than a primal scream of rage and frustration.

It’s basically a riff on the lovers-on-a-murder-spree genre (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” even “Thelma & Louise”), but one packed to the gills with biting social commentary courtesy of writer/director  Bobcat Goldthwait.

In case you didn’t know, Goldthwait, best known for his synapse-knotting stand-up comedy delivery, is a pretty decent filmmaker (“Shakes the Clown,” “World’s Greatest Dad”)

Here he takes all the things that infuriate him about America’s shallow, anti-intellectual, Kardashian-worshipping popular culture and unmercifully skewers them and their proponents.

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Greta Gerwig (far right) and do-gooder posse

“DAMSELS IN DISTRESS”  My rating: C-  (Opening May 5 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I have acquaintances who are big fans of Whit Stillman, who love his ultra-low-keyed comedies of modern manners (or perhaps it’s a lack of manners).

Sorry. I don’t get it.

I wasn’t that enthusiastic about Stillman’s best movie, his 1990 debut feature “Metropolitan.” But  I’m borderline hostile  when it comes to his fourth and latest film, the overly-mannered, criminally underpopulated “Damsels in Distress.”

Having heard about the setup for “Damsels…” I was actually looking forward to it. There’s some real potential here.

Set on the ivy-covered and vaguely run-down campus of Seven Oaks College, Stillman’s screenplay centers on a trio of terminally peppy and unabashedly preppy coeds. Their leader is the towering Violet (Greta Gerwig, memorable in “Greenberg”) who, like a Seven Sisters mutation of Jane Austen’s  Emma, has  devoted herself to improving the lives of her fellow students.

Whether or not they want their lives improved.

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