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“ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW”: Lenny and George

May 19, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

David Dastmalchian, Karen Gillan

“ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW” My rating: B

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

Filmed mostly in Kansas City, Collin Schiffli’s “All Creatures Here Below” reminds of a 21st-century retooling of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Its background is not the Great Depression but rather the hardscrabble world of the contemporary underclass. In lieu of the childlike giant Lenny it offers a young woman of similar simplicity, though her mental/emotional fragility is born less of genetics than a ghastly past.

And like Steinbeck’s novel,  David Dastmalchian’s screenplay is rooted in a fatalism that offers only brief flickers of stubborn — and elusive — hope.

The good news is that the piece has been so well acted by its two leads that it keeps us involved long after our logical sides tell us it’s time to bail.

Gensan (Dastmalchian) and Ruby (Karen Gillan) are a young couple living hand to mouth in Los Angeles.

In the film’s first few minutes he is laid off from his job making pizzas (corporate is trimming the work force) and she is let go from her gig on the cleaning crew of a megachurch…apparently Ruby can’t keep from hanging around the nursery, which she has been told is off limits to her. (In Mice… Lenny has a thing for rabbits; Ruby obsesses about babies.)

Desperate for cash, Gensan wagers his severance paycheck on an illegal cockfight. He loses big but in the ensuing chaos of a police raid manages to make off with a stolen car and a wad of cash from the betting table. He gets word to Ruby to meet him away from their apartment; they have to get out of Dodge.

She shows up as directed, only she has with her the infant daughter of their neighbor. Ruby has found the child unattended and decided that she’d be the better mother.

Now the frantic — and let’s face it, not very bright — Gensan must navigate a drive across half the country with the maddeningly illogical Ruby and a crying baby who needs diapers, a child car seat, and nourishment (Ruby is so clueless she attempts to breast feed; even Gensan knows you have to be pregnant before that works).

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“WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY”: Woman’s world

May 17, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler

“WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY” My rating: B-

84 minutes | MPAA rating

“Wild Nights with Emily” is such an awesome idea that I wish I liked the film more than I do.

When Emily Dickinson died in 1886 in Amherst, Mass., she left behind nearly 2,000 unpublished poems which would lead future generations to regard her as America’s greatest poet.

For most of the ensuing 130 odd years Dickinson has had the reputation of a recluse, a woman incapable of interacting with others. But if that’s the case, if her personal life were so limited, if she never enjoyed human intimacy, how did she come by the ideas and emotions so brilliantly expressed in her writing?

Seizing on recent research into and discoveries about Dickinson, writer/director Madeleine Olnek has given us a film that presents Emily Dickinson not so much as a recluse as a dedicated artist who, by the by, had a lifelong sexual relationship with the woman who would become her sister-in-law. We’re talking some good old-fashioned lust.

Moreover, Olnek presents her yarn as a comedy in which Dickinson’s vastly superior intellect and talents go head-to-head with the doofuses who run the male-dominated literary world of the 1800s. These bozos are so gobsmacked by her poetry that  all they can do is complain that it doesn’t rhyme.

Olnek’s screenplay time jumps from Dickinson’s mature years and her affair with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler) back to her adolescence when the two first fell in love (the girls are played as teens by Dana Melanie and Sasha Frolova).

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“BOOKSMART”: All night long

May 16, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever

“BOOKSMART” My rating: B 

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Booksmart” is being described as a female-centric version of “Superbad.” Well it is…but it’s more.

For her feature directorial debut actress Olivia Wilde (with the assistance of four screenwriters) has given us one of those teen-age all-nighter comedies, with all the raunch, substance sampling, and sexual awakening the genre implies.

The difference, of course, is that instead of giving us horny adolescent boys we follow a couple of graduating senior girls who have spent their entire high school careers toeing the line and are now ready to party down.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein, whose brother Jonah Hill starred in ‘”Superbad”) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) have done everything right.  Great grades, lots of activities, student government, the whole deal.  And it has all paid off with Molly’s admission to Yale and Amy’s plan for a gap year of charity work in Africa.

Initially the two feel superior to their party-hearty classmates who will undoubtedly be heading for military service or the local junior college. But when Molly and Amy learn that many of those slackers have themselves landed in great college situations, they question everything.

I mean, why do everything right if it doesn’t give you leg up on the animals? Realizing they have pretty much wasted their youth on the quest for scholastic greatness, the best buds decide to hit their classmates’ rowdy night-before-graduation bacchanal.

They are, of course, ill prepared to party down. They never really got to know their fellow students in any depth, and their efforts to blend in are hopelessly klutzy.

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“TRIAL BY FIRE”: The view from Death Row

May 16, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Jack O’Connell, Laura Dern

“TRIAL BY FIRE” My rating: B

127 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Familiarity breeds contempt. But given the right circumstances, it can breed compassion and understanding as well.

Edward Zwick’s “Trial by Fire” is a fact-based film inspired by the story of Todd Willingham, who was convicted of setting a fire that killed his three young daughters and executed by the state.

As protagonists go, Willingham is at first a hard man to care about. But by the time this gut-wrencher has come to its conclusion that proposition will be turned inside out.

The film opens in 1991 with Willingham (Jack O’Connell) crawling from his burning house in small-town Texas. He grabs a  jack from the trunk of his car and uses it to break the window of his daughters’ bedroom.  For his efforts he is very nearly incinerated by an erupting fireball.

Wellingham is arrested on the drive back from his childrens’ funeral.  The experts say the fire was deliberately started. Which makes this a case of murder.

And, frankly, the portrait of Willingham that emerges only cements his guilt.  For he is one unlikeable individual, a sort of white trash poster boy who beat and cheated on his wife Stacy (“The Deuce’s” Emily Meade), who drank and brawled and was known to have lied to the cops in the past.

His court-appointed attorney mounts not even a half-hearted defense, and in short order he’s on Death Row.

Geoffrey Fletcher’s screenplay (based on David Grann’s New Yorker article) dispenses with the nuts and bolts of the case in the first half hour.  The bulk of the film depicts how while awaiting execution Willingham finds his better self.

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“DOGMAN”: Killer chihuahua

May 15, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Marcello Fonte

“DOGMAN” My rating: C+

110 minutes |  No MPAA rating

In the opening scene of “Dogman,” the dog groomer Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is attempting to shampoo and dry a fierce pit bull.

Keeping just out of range of the chained beast’s chomping fangs, Marcello calms the monster with baby talk. (“Hey, Cutie-Pie. Hey, Sweetie.”)

Turns out he’s a lot better with animals than his fellow humans. It figures…little Marcello looks like nothing so much as a sad-eyed chihuahua.  And he’s got the timid personality to match.

“Dogman” comes to us from director Matteo Garrone, who had an international hit with 2008’s “Gommorah,” set in Southern Italy’s criminal underworld. This latest film is also about crime, albeit the unorganized kind.

Marcello, who is divorced and devoted to his young daughter, is an inoffensive sort. Which may explain why he is so routinely exploited by Simone (Edoardo Pesce), a hulking thief, coke addict and hair-trigger brute.  Simone is always pulling his little buddy into some sort of criminal enterprise, and Marcello is too weak  to refuse.

They reside in a seaside slum that may once have been a modern housing project but which how has succumbed to rust and mold. To one degree or another the men in the neighborhood subscribe the the traditional form of toxic masculinity; poor Marcello desperately wants their recognition and approval. Continue Reading »

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“CHARLIE SAYS”: Helter Skelter

May 9, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Matt Smith as Charles Manson

“CHARLIE SAYS” My rating: B-

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The murderous Charles Manson family has been the subject of countless films, TV shows and documentaries. “Charlie Says” approaches the yarn from the point of view of one of his “girls.”

Written by Guinevere Turner and directed by Mary Harron (the same team who brought us “American Psycho” nearly 20 years ago), the film is less about Manson (portrayed here by “Dr. Who” veteran Matt Smith) than about Leslie “Lulu” Van Houten, a runaway teen who wandered into Charlie’s harem at the Spahn Ranch (a Western movie set just outside L.A.) and ended up a convicted killer on Death Row.

Lulu is portrayed by Hannah Murray, a Brit actress best known on these shores as Samwell Tarley’s wife Gilly on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Her role on GOT doesn’t begin to suggest the depth of her work here, in which her character evolves from moon-faced innocent to blood spattered loony who repeatedly stabbed one of the family’s victims.

In the “present” (about 1973) we find Lulu, Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon) and Susan”Sadie” Atkins (Marianne Rendon) occupying separate cells in a California prison.  The state has recently outlawed executions,  but the three women are considered too dangerous to join the rest of the prison population, and so can look forward to living their lives alone own Death Row, able to call to one another but only rarely actually seeing  their comrades’ faces.

Enter a grad student (Merritt Wever) who convinces the prison administration to allow her to hold classes for the three.  During these sessions — ostensibly about women’s studies and other topics — the inmates talk about their lives with Charles Manson.  These scenes unfold in flashbacks.

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“RED JOAN”: Fellow traveler

May 9, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Judi Dench

“RED JOAN” My rating: B

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

History is rarely kind to traitors. But even a Benedict Arnold has his reasons.

“Red Joan” is a heavily fictionalized version of the real-life story of the late Melita Norwood, who in the post-war years passed on Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

Written by Lindsay Shapero and directed by Trevor Nunn (yes, the world-famous stager of such massive theatrical hits as “Cats” and “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”), the film stars Dame Judi Dench as Joan Stanley, a seemingly innocuous grandmother who one day finds counterintelligence agents on her doorstep.

Interrogators present the old lady (she acts befuddled, but isn’t) with proof that a half century earlier she betrayed her country to the Russkies. The bulk of the film consists of flashbacks to Joan’s early years. In these scenes she is portrayed by Sophie Cookson, an actress who at first seems bland but ends up delivering a slow-boil performance that gets under your skin.

Naivete is young Joan’s biggest handicap.  She’s studying engineering and doing well in a mostly-male environment, but she’s also a bit backward socially. Which makes her an ideal target for a glamorous classmate, Sonya (Tereza Skrbova), a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, who cannily sucks Joan into her world of anti-authority partying.

Sonya introduces Joan to her cousin Leo (Tom Hughes), an outspoken lefty who becomes the girl’s first lover. She is at first amused by his rabble-rousing oratory, but his favorable view of the Soviet Union begins to rub off on her.

Later, when Joan becomes part of the team developing an atomic bomb, Leo will wheedle and coax until Joan begins surreptitiously photographing top secret documents and passing them on to a Soviet agent.

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“THE BRINK”: “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?”

May 7, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Steve Bannon

“THE BRINK” My rating: B (Now at the Screenland Tapcade)

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most liberals, it’s safe to say, would rather endure three hours of oral surgery than spend 90 minutes with Steve Bannon,  alt-right Sith lord and mastermind behind the Trump presidential campaign.

They ignore Bannon at their own peril.

For “The Brink” filmmaker Alison Klayman (“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”) spent nearly a year following the post-White House Bannon, eavesdropping as he continues his quest for economic nationalism. Bannon has expanded his ambitions beyond the U.S., becoming a force in the right-wing politics of several nations where he advocates the return of “old-school Christian democracy rooted in the European tradition.”

It’s worrisome.

“The Brink,” a title obviously chosen for its ominous implications, falls well short of the hatchet job liberals might desire.  For one thing, Bannon can be charmingly self-deprecating. He laughs at the scruffy, overweight image he often presents (“a gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk”) and is a quick-witted and compelling speaker (providing, of course, you appreciate his message).

Despite his reputation, Bannon is never caught doing or saying anything overtly racist.  He claims that economic nationalism binds all Americans together, and that it trumps all issues of race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. He blames America’s industrial elites for abandoning all civic conscience and chasing money by shipping jobs abroad. On that last point he sounds not unlike the Democratic Party’s neo-lefties.

He says  there was no glamor in working for the White House, claiming to have hated every moment of his tenure. Churches have a positive energy, he claims, while a Jersey strip club has another kind of energy.  “The West Wing has bad karma…because you’re doing evil stuff. I thought I was doing the Lord’s work.”

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“SUNSET”: Infinitely pretty things

May 3, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Juli Jakab

“SUNSET” My rating: B 

142 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes, who burst upon the world scene a couple of years back with the harrowing concentration camp drama “Son of Saul,” steps even further back in time with his sophomore effort, “Sunset.”

Shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) returns to Budapest, where she was orphaned at the age of two.  Her goal is to get a job at the famous hat store founded by her late parents and which still bears her family  name..

Her return to the city of her birth sets off a series of puzzling and threatening events. Brill (Vlad Ivanov), the courtly current owner of Leiter’s, gives her a job making hats and seems  benevolent if businesslike. But Irisz starts getting odd vibes about the other young women working there, some of whom have disappeared with little trace.

A scary man appears in Irisz’s bedroom to threaten her; she learns that she has an older brother of whom she has been unaware, a notorious criminal leading a deadly anarchist gang.  In fact, this mystery sibling already has staged an assassination attempt on Brill.

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“ASK DR. Ruth”: Hard times, good sex

May 2, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Ruth Westheimer…despite her gesture here, she maintains size doesn’t matter

“ASK DR. RUTH” My rating: B

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s easy enough to view Ruth Westheimer as a punchline.

Over nearly  40 years she has become a sort of self-caricature, employing a chatty-grandma persona and a thick German accent to dispense sex advice which coming from anyone else would turn your ears a flaming red. (“I’m not tall and blonde and gorgeous,”  acknowledges the 4-foot-7-inch dynamo.)

The great value of “Ask Dr. Ruth,” Ryan White’s insightful and informative doc, lies not so much in rehashing her public career as in exploring the personal history that has molded the now-90-year-old “happy Munchkin of sex.”

Born to doting Jewish parents in Frankfurt, Germany, Ruth (that’s her middle name…she was born Karola Ruth Siegel) was only 10 when she was sent to neutral Switzerland where she and other Jewish children were housed (and made to work) in an orphanage. Initially she exchanged weekly letters with her parents; after a few months the letters stopped coming.

White (perhaps best known for “The Keepers,” a Netflix documentary miniseries about the decades-old murder of a  young nun) relates key moments from Ruth’s childhood through somber animated sequences and, of course, the memories of Dr. Ruth.

After the war she moved to a kibbutz in Palestine where she served as a sniper (“Thank God I never had to shoot anybody”), nearly lost both legs in a bomb blast and married an Israeli freedom fighter. She followed him to Paris where he studied medicine; when he dropped out and returned home, the newly-divorced Ruth stayed on to study at the Sorbonne.

Husband No. 2 was an impossibly handsome Frenchman who took her to the United States. That marriage ended, she says, because she realized there wasn’t much intellect behind the good looks.

On a ski trip to northern New York she met engineer Manfred Westheimer, the love of her life. They moved into a New York apartment (she still lives there), had two children and enjoyed a long and apparently blissful marriage until his death in 1997.

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