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A modest proposal…

July 14, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

…to open the Emmy logjam

Bryan Cranston won’t pick up a fourth Emmy this year for “Breaking Bad,”  but only because he wasn’t eligible. The show was on hiatus this season.

Hey, I like Cranston. Great performance in a great role.

But I hate the whole Emmy dynasty thing where a performer wins year after year.

I especially hate it because unlike films, where an actor plays a totally different character with each new project, TV actors find themselves winning Emmys for characters they may have created years earlier.

Granted, characters on TV can grow and change over time, but most of the hard work was done that first season.

Here’s my proposal:  Once an actor wins an Emmy for playing a particular character, he/she cannot be nominated for that same character for, say, three years.

It will open up the process, it will put fresh faces and characters into the running, it will spread around the honors and prevent the whole awards thing from becoming an excercise in deja vu.

Thank you for your consideration.

| Robert W. Butler

Posted in Reveries | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

“HARRY POTTER AND THE DEADLY HALLOWS: PART 2” : Last piece of the puzzle

July 14, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

“HARRY POTTER AND THE  DEADLY HALLOWS: PART 2” My rating: B (Opening wide at 11:55 p.m. July 14)

130 minutes | PG-13

Imagine that you’ve been in a coma for the last 15 years and missed the whole Harry Potter thing.

You’ve no knowledge of the real-life rags-to-riches story of creator J.K. Rowling. Of the long lines of readers awaiting midnight sales of the latest installment. Of the worldwide mania. Of the rise in childhood literacy. The theme park.

Imagine that the slate has been wiped clean. You’re a total Harry virgin.

Under those circumstances, if you were taken to a theater and shown one of the “Harry Potter” movies, what would you make of it?

Be honest, now. Continue Reading »

Posted in Popcorn movies | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

“PHASE 7”: Quarantined in Rio

July 13, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Jazmin Stuart and Daniel Hendler in “Phase 7”

“PHASE 7” My rating: C 

98 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Urbanites imprisoned in their own apartments are nothing new (see “Quarantine” and plenty of zombie movies), but the low-budget Argentine effort “Phase 7” tries to spice the genre up with droll humor.

Actually, “spice” is the wrong word to use here, since Nicolas Goldbart’s film is so laid back and casual that you can practically see it evaporating off the screen.

Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his wife Pipi (Jazmin Stuart) are city dwellers expecting their first baby. We encounter them in a supermarket where they seem not to notice that other shoppers are running around madly and grabbing items off the shelves as if the end of the world had just been announced. Continue Reading »

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NEWSPAPER DAYS: First assignment

July 11, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

The Kansas City Star, 18th and Grand, KCMO

On a sunny June day in 1969 I climbed the steps of the Kansas City Star building, passed the bronze relief portrait of founder William Rockhill Nelson that still watches over the front door, and began my career as a newspaperman.

Actually it was only a summer internship, but those three months at The Star provided a crash course in practical journalism, allowed me to show what I could do and paved the way for a full-time gig when I graduated from college a year later.

Up in the second floor newsroom I reported to Don T. Jones, the daytime assignment editor of The Times, then The Star’s morning edition (the two papers merged many years ago).

Don T., as he was universally known, is best described as a chain-smoking bantam rooster. Continue Reading »

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“BEGINNERS” : Getting started

July 8, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Ewan McGregor, Melanie Laurant and friend

“BEGINNERS” My rating: B  (Opens July 8 at the Glenwood Arts and Tivoli)

105 minutes | MPAA rating:  R

We inherit more from our parents than DNA. Without realizing exactly how or why, we inherit a way of looking at life.

“Beginners” is about a man looking back on his parents’ marriage and finally coming to terms with the often uncomfortable emotional baggage they bequeathed him.

That may sound like a heavy slog. Happily, much of “Beginners” is a hoot — bizarrely funny, sweet, sexy and quite moving.

If with his second feature the film’s writer/director — modern-day Renaissance man Mike Mills — can’t always keep all those balls perfectly suspended in the air, he comes close enough to make this film a must-see event.

Continue Reading »

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“HORRIBLE BOSSES” : Workin’ for the man

July 8, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis and Jason Bateman in "Horrible Bosses"

“HORRIBLE BOSSES”  My rating: C+ 

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It may not be a comedy for the ages, but “Horrible Bosses” certainly resonates in the here and now.

The premise of this extremely rude effort from director Seth Gordon finds three buddies trapped in jobs with miserable bosses and, given the current dearth of employment opportunities, unable to escape.

Their answer: Murder. They agree to knock off each other’s bosses.

That’s a bit extreme, but then so is everything about this movie, which takes Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day and basically casts them as modern versions of the Three Stooges, nice dopes who mess up everything they touch and then react in a childlike frenzy of shoving, slapping and punching. Continue Reading »

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“SUBMARINE” : Youth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

July 6, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Craig Roberts in "Submarine"

“SUBMARINE” My rating: C+  (Now at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

JD Salinger never allowed a movie to be made of his classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, and I now think I know why.

It’s because his adolescent protagonist Holden Caulfield — so funny, entertaining and idiosyncratic on the written page — would be borderline intolerable in the flesh-and-blood world of film.

I base this on my reaction to “Submarine,” an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s novel about a Welsh teenager in the ‘80s. Dunthorne’s Oliver Tate is self-absorbed, judgmental and maddening in all the ways a young person can be, but while he’s fun to encounter on the written page, in the darkness of the movie house he’s an infuriating and irritating wad of mopey misery.

As played by young Craig Roberts, Oliver isn’t much fun to be around, despite the cinema tricks thrown at him by director Richard Ayoade.

For example, early on our furtively angry hero imagines what it would be like if he were to die. He envisions — and we witness — TV news reports of the mass outpouring of grief, of candle-bearing classmates, of spontaneous shrines to his memory that spring up on street corners, of platitudinous eulogies.  Continue Reading »

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Book Review: Sleight of hand

July 6, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

“THE MAGICIAN AND THE CARDSHARP”  (Owl Books)

Karl Johnson’s breezy nonfiction read — just out in paperback — offers a multitude of attractions.

For anyone who’s ever been fascinated by magic, it’s a detailed look into the world of professional illusionists and sleight-of-hand artists.

For card players it’s replete with possibilities for cheating.

For general readers it’s a real-life detective story.

And for residents of this neck of the woods — Kansas City and environs — it’s a yarn set in our own back yard.

Johnson’s principlal subject is Dai Vernon, a Canadian who became New  York high society’s premiere performer of close-up magic, established himself as the dean of North American magicians, and who spent the last 30 years of his life (he died in 1992 at age 98) as the in-house attraction of Los Angeles’ famed Magic Castle, training young magicians and putting on amazing shows for a delighted public.

Continue Reading »

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DVD review: Brilliant film, maddening coverup

July 5, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale in "Of Gods and Men"

“OF GODS AND MEN” (Now available)

Terrific movie.
Infuriating DVD packaging.

“Of Gods and Men” is one of the year’s finest films. This French release, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year, centers on the monks of the Tibehirine Monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains, who in 1996 were abducted by Islamic revolutionaries then waging war against the government.

Several months later the monks’ severed heads were returned to the monastery for burial.

Happily, this isn’t a film about dying. Rather, Xavier Beauvois has made a movie about living. Continue Reading »

Posted in Art house fare, New on DVD | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

NEWSPAPER DAYS: The flying Underwood

July 4, 2011 by butlerscinemascene

Jim Fisher never looked to me like a newspaperman.

He looked like a Kansas rancher.

While most career journalists are prone to corpulence (too many donuts, too much time sitting at a keyboard), Jim was as lean as the Marlborough Man…with whom he shared a love of tobacco.

From the day I first met Jim in the city room of the Kansas City Star until my last sighting of him more than a decade ago, his looks hardly ever changed.

He always had a four-day growth of chin stubble (I never understood this…at some point wouldn’t it either turn into an actual beard or be cut back to baby-bottom smoothness?). His hair was trimmed close…not quite Marine D.I. close, but getting there.

His wardrobe never varied: Well-worn blue jeans, a wrinkled shirt Continue Reading »

Posted in Reveries, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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