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“WANDERLUST”:

February 24, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

Rudd * Aniston * Theroux“WANDERLUST” My rating: C+ (Opening wide on February 24)

98 minutes | MPAA rating: R 

Ever since his genius comic riffing in “I Love You, Man,” KC native Paul Rudd has been Hollywood’s go-to guy for off-the-cuff hilarity.

He’s at it again in “Wanderlust,” a dork-among-the-hippies comedy, and he’s the reason to check it out.

Rudd plays George, who with his wife Linda (Jennifer Aniston) is trying to make ends meet in the tough world of Manhattan. As the film begins they are completing the purchase of a condo – actually a closet-sized studio – and dreaming of life as property owners.

But George loses his job and Linda’s plan to sell her documentary film (about penguins with testicular cancer) to HBO collapses. Soon they’re on the road to Atlanta to crash with George’s boorish brother, a porta-potty king.

Looking for a bed and breakfast, they stumble into Elysium, a old-style commune in the Georgia woods that’s absolutely overflowing with pot-puffing, Frisbee-tossing, granola-munching, downward-dogging, instrument-strumming, walk-around-stark-naked bunch of latter-day hippies.

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OSCAR NOMINATED Documentary Shorts

February 17, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

Four of this year’s five documentary shorts nominated for the Academy Award open Friday (Feb. 17) a the Tivoli Theatre.

And a more powerful handful of short films you’d have a hard time finding.

(The fifth nominated film, “God is Bigger Than Elvis,” about Elvis Presley co-star Dolores Hart and her decision to become a Benedictine nun, is not being made available for commercial presentation as part of the Oscar shorts package.)

Some of these titles are hard to watch. All are important.

James Armstrong...the Barber of Birmingham

“THE BARBER OF BIRMINGHAM: FOOT SOLDIER OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT” My rating: B+

18 minutes

Robin Fryday and Gail Dolgin’s film centers on 85-year-old James Armstrong, a barber in Birmingham, Alabama, who marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and now watches the election of America’s first black president.

He’s a lovely old fellow. His barber shop’s walls are covered with old news clippings about the Civil Rights movement and a sign advises patrons: “If you don’t vote, don’t talk politics in here.”

Armstrong is a churchgoer who says with pride that “I’ve been in jail six times…in this city.” He drives a car literally held together with duct tape.

“Barber of Birgmingham” cuts between archival footage from the ‘60s, interviews with veteran marchers (now in their 80s), and shots of political activity as the 2008 presidential election heats up.

The film isn’t particularly well organized — Fryday and Dolgin seem content to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks — but still it contains moments of breathtaking power.

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“PINA”: Elegy and Appreciation

February 10, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

“PINA”  My rating: B+ (Opening Feb. 10 at the Town Center 20 and Studio 30)

103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

When famed German choreographer Pina Bausch died in 2009, she was collaborating with filmmaker Wim Wenders on a documentary about her art and career.

Wenders went ahead with the project, a collection of some of Bausch’s most famous pieces, performed by her company of long standing and filmed in 3-D.

Thus the movie becomes a sort of elegy for and appreciation of Bausch.

I knew of Bausch but had never seen any of her work. After “Pina,” though, I’m a fan.

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2012 OSCAR NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORTS

February 10, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

This collection of Oscar-Nominated Live-Action shorts opens Feb. 10 at the Tivoli

Ciaran Hinds, Kerry Condon

“THE SHORE” My rating: A-

29 minutes

Warm, funny and a bit heartbreaking, “The Shore” is about the return of a sixtysomething Joe (Ciaran Hinds) to the  seaside village in Northern Ireland he fled during the troubles in the 1970s.

Accompanying him is his American-born daughter (Kerry Condon), whose search for answers for why her father has stayed away all these years becomes our journey as well. It all has something to do with the girl (Maggie Cronin) and the best friend (Conleth Hill) Joe left behind.

Writer/director Terry George has a nifty gift for mixing the melancholy with the boistrously hilarious.  Hill’s character is one of a trio of locals who illegally supplement their government welfare checks by collecting shellfish when the tide is out and selling them to vendors. There’s a priceless scene of them spotting Joe from afar and, assuming he’s a government man come to bust them, trying to make a break for it. Alas, they’re all too fat and middle-aged to get far.

A hugely appealing film about returning to your roots and making amends. Continue Reading »

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2012 OSCAR NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORTS

February 10, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

" A Morning Stroll"

This program of Oscar-nominated shorts opens Feb. 10 at the Tivoli

“A MORNING STROLL”  My rating: B

7 minutes

This short from the UK is a triptych, with each “panel” set in a different time and rendered in a different artistic style. The subject matter, though, remains more or less the same.

In a segment set in 1959, stick figures in a black-and-white urban environment respond to a chicken that clucks down a sidewalk on its morning walk.

In the present, a young hip-hop lad encounters the same chicken in a brightly colored environment…but he’s too wrapped up in his  handheld zombie video game to pay much attention to anything else.

And 50 years in the future, the same chicken is out taking his morning stroll…although there apparently has been a zombie apocalypse, for the street is littered with wrecked cars and our perambulating fowl must avoid a voracious example of the undead. This segment employs very realistic computer animation.

I can’t deduce any important meaning in “A Morning Stroll,” but it’s divertingly goofy. Continue Reading »

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“SAFE HOUSE”: “Bourne” meets “Training Day”…sort of

February 10, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

“SAFE HOUSE”  My rating: C+ (Opening wide Feb. 10)

115 minutes | MPAA rating:R

“Safe House” is of interest mostly for the films it borrows from, mainly the “Bourne” series and “Training Day.”

Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds

Like the former, it’s a spy movie about one guy’s attempts to survive while exposing a conspiracy within the CIA. Like the latter, it offers Denzel Washington in award-winning charmy/scary mode.

Washington plays Tobin Frost, a legendary American agent who went rogue a decade ago and has spent the last few years selling the secrets of the world’s big espionage agencies to the highest bidder. An international fugitive, Frost is viewed almost as superhuman – smarter, creepier and more deadly than just about anyone else.

Fleeing a small army of well-armed assassins, Frost takes refuge in an American consulate in Capetown, South Africa. He figures he’ll be safer in custody than on the street.

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“WOMAN IN BLACK”; “THE INNKEEPERS”: Something wicked this way comes

February 3, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

“THE WOMAN IN BLACK” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Feb. 3)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“THE INNKEEPERS” My rating: C+ (Opening at the Screenland Crossroads on Feb. 3)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The problem with most ghost movies is that they fall apart in the clutch.

Oh, there are a few, like Robert Wise’s “The Haunting,” that set the hook early and never let you shake it off.

But most movies in the genre end up delivering a few goosebumps and then run aground on the rocks of their own illogical premises.

Two new spookfests have opened simultaneously in Kansas City, one your traditional Victorian haunter, the other a vaguely hip modern interpretation. Oddly enough, in both cases the wandering spirit making life miserable for the living is a wronged woman.

Perhaps the makers of ghost stories have a misogynistic streak. Discuss among yourselves.

Daniel Radcliffe...chasing ghosts

The more elaborate of the two productions is “The Woman in Black” starring Daniel Radcliffe (that’s right, Harry Potter) as a widowed lawyer. The time is the turn of the last century (noisy automobiles are beginning to show up even in remote English towns) and our hero, Arthur Kipps, has journeyed to a small coastal burg to settle the estate of a wealthy old woman whose large and largely rundown home sits on an island cut off from the mainland with each high tide.

Arthur is a sad, morose fellow perpetually in mourning for the wife who died in childbirth and left him with a young son back in London. He has his hands full with the locals, who refuse to rent him a room at the local inn, decline to take him out to the island estate, and even try to block roads to prevent access.

The local gentry (Ciaran Hinds), a rationalist with a mad wife (Oscar nominee Janet McTeer) and contempt for the peasants’ superstitions, befriends the young stranger and facilitates his entry to the mouldering mansion.

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“A DANGEROUS METHOD”: A therapist’s progress

January 27, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

“A DANGEROUS METHOD” My rating: B- (Opening on Jan. 20)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

There’s no overt violence in “A Dangerous Method.” The characters wear top hats or long pastel dresses and talk in a highly civilized manner while sipping coffee and puffing stogies.

But for all the gentility of its Merchant-Ivory trappings, the latest from filmmaker David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”) is right at home with his longstanding preoccupation with “abnormal” psychology.

More than just a case history, “A Dangerous Method” is about psychology with a capital P. It goes right to the source.

Michael Fassbender (who also stars in the just-opened “Shame”) staras as psychiatric giant Carl Jung. It’s the turn of the last century in picturesque Zurich, where Jung works at a mental hospital, attempting to cure his patients through psychotherapy instead of the often violent methods that in the past made such clinics a living hell.

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“ALBERT NOBBS”: The measure of a man

January 27, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

Glenn Close as Albert Nobbs

“ALBERT NOBBS”  My rating: B (Opens Jan. 27)

113 minutes | MPAA rating: R

There’s so much interesting stuff going on in “Albert Nobbs” that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First, of course, there are the Oscar-nominated performances by Glenn Close (best actress) and Janet McTeer (supporting actress). What makes it doubly intriguing is that both play women disguised as men.

Then there’s the true but semi-fantastical premise of the screenplay by Close and John Banville, which springs from the fact that in Victorian Ireland (and elsewhere around the world during various epochs), certain women to simply survive or to realize their ambitions have opted to go through life as males, never letting society know of their secret.

And finally there’s the man behind the camera, Rodrigo Garcia, who has given us two wonderful and criminally underappreciated masterpieces of independent cinema (“Nine Lives,” “Mother and Child”) and produced (and, frequently, directed) the HBO  series “In Treatment” about a psychotherapist and his patients.

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“EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE”: Precious, but…

January 20, 2012 by butlerscinemascene

“EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE”  My rating: B (Opening Jan. 20)

129 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I was prepared to be irritated by “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” And I was.

This is a movie about a too-cute kid (he may or may not be autistic) who after losing his father in the 9/11 attack goes on a borough-to-borough scavenger hunt throughout NYC, attempting to solve the final conundrum left by his puzzle-posing papa.

This yarn has an off-the-charts potential for preciousness.

And yet by the end, Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of Jonanthan Safran Foer’s novel had me by the throat and the tear ducts.

This puts your humble critic in an uncomfortable position. My left brain is telling me, “Aren’t you ashamed?” My right brain is saying, “Yeah, but it feels so good.”

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