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“MARY MAGDALENE”: The 13th disciple

April 19, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, Rooney Mara as Mary Magdalene

“MARY MAGDALENE” My rating: B

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Less iconoclastic than earnest, “Mary Magdalene” is an art-film Bible movie that more resembles Pasolini’s pared-down “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” than your typical Hollywood sword-and-sandal epic.

It is, in fact, far better than one would expect upon learning that the title character is played by Rooney Mara and that Jesus Christ is portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix.

The screenplay (by Helen Edmunson and Philippa Goslett)) and direction (by Garth Davis of “Lion” fame)  observes Jesus’ ministry through the experiences of Mary Magdalene, who is depicted not as a prostitute (that whole scenario was the invention of a sixth-century pope) but as an ahead-of-her-time woman  as important to the Christian faith as any of the male disciples.

Early on we find Mary serving as a midwife to the women of her village. She’s no shrinking violet; she rejects the attempts of her father (Tcheky Karyo) to find her a husband and outrages the menfolk by praying in the synagogue whenever she feels the need. At one point her family attempts an exorcism to rid her of proto-feminist demons.

So when Jesus and his disciples pass through, Mary is ready to drop everything and follow. Jesus so trusts Mary that  he sends her and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) on a mission to spread the Gospel to Sumeria.

A lot of the usual trappings and incidents of a typical Jesus movie are ignored in this rendition.  There’s no Sermon on the Mount or miracle of the bread and fishes, no trial before Pontius Pilate or the Sanhedrin, no Herod. We experience only what Mary experiences.

This makes for a less flashy, more intimate retelling of the Gospels. “Mary Magdalene” is about relationships. One of the more interesting characters is Tahar Rahim’s Judas, played not as a skulking villain but as an baby-faced enthusiast who betrays Jesus not for money but to force him to show his true powers.

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“THE CHAPERONE”: Jazz Age junket

April 18, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Haley Lu Richardson, Elizabeth McGovern

“THE CHAPERONE” My rating: C+

103 minutes | No MPAA rating

A pall of old-fashioned made-for-TV mediocrity hangs over much of “The Chaperone,” a Masterpiece Theatre production based on a highly-regarded novel by Lawrence resident Laura Moriarty, adapted by Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey,” “Gosford Park”) and featuring a more-than-solid cast.

Blame veteran TV director Michael Engler and a stingy budget for fumbling the ball here.

At first glance one might assume that this is the story of the young Louise Brooks, who in the 1920s went from Wichita to a starring role with a top New York dance troupe and then on to international stardom as the ultimate flapper and sex symbol of silent film.

Not really.  Brooks (played here by Haley Lu Richardson) certainly has a role in this yarn, but its real focus is a middle-aged Kansas  housewife and mother  (Elizabeth McGovern) who agrees to chaperone the young hellion during her Big Apple sojourn. In  the process the older woman finds her own world exploding and expanding.

Norma (McGovern) first lays eyes on 15-year-old Louise at a Wichita dance recital where she is mightily impressed by girl’s flamboyant Isadora Duncan-ish flouncing. Norma is a stolid Midwestern matron, stuck in a sexless marriage (that’ll be explained later) to a lawyer (Campbell Scott); they have twin college-bound sons.

When she learns that Louise has won a coveted spot with the famous Denishawn modern dance company in NYC, and that the girl’s parents are looking for an appropriate chaperone to accompany their daughter to the big city, she volunteers. Heck, she needs some adventure.

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“PETERLOO”: Eloquent pageantry

April 18, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

“PETERLOO” My rating: C

154 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo” is less a film drama than it is an illustrated history lesson.

That’s a problem.

Leigh, who always has had a thing for life’s underdogs, here turns his attention to a notorious bit of British history. The 1819 massacre at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, found His Majesty’s sword-waving cavalry riding into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators protesting for political reform.

The violence doesn’t rear its ugly head until late in this 2-hour, 33-minute effort.  Most of Leigh’s screenplay is devoted to eavesdropping on  a dozen or so characters who represent various attitudes and political viewpoints in the months before the bloody incident.

Thus we follow a shellshocked trumpeter from the Battle of Waterloo (David Moorst) who returns home to Manchester to find jobs are scare and respect for a former soldier nonexistent. We sit in on long, talky meetings in which various agitators rail against miserable working conditions, low pay, and  a political/economic system designed to grind the country’s have-nots into the ground while enriching the altready-haves.

(Karl Marx was only a year old at the time, but he undoubtedly grew up aware of the the Manchester massacre.)

We witness a mother and wife haggling over the price of a few eggs with which to feed her family. We observe men slaving in a steam-driven textile factory where one misstep can mean a crushed limb. And  journalists debating how to convey to the common reader what the government’s suspension of habeas corpus means to the individual.

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“STORM BOY”: Coastal conscience

April 12, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Finn Little and friend

“STORM BOY” My rating : C+

98 minutes | MPAA ratingL

Some children’s films — “The Black Stallion,” say, or “Fly Away Home” — are too good for children.  They entertain the small fry, sure, but they appeal to adults on an even deeper, more resonant level.

And then there are films like “The Storm Boy,” an Australian effort that should keeps the youngsters diverted but which felt too contrived and deliberately constructed to keep this mature viewer enthralled.

This is the second film adaptation of Australian novelist Colin Thiele’s 1963 best seller about a boy and his pet pelican, and for modern audiences screenwriter/star Jai Courtney has provided a rather unwieldy framing story that finds the child hero of the original now an older man looking back on his past as he faces a big decision.

In the present retired businessman Mike Kingley (Geoffrey Rush) is called back for a family powwow about what to do with a strip of beach that was Mike’s boyhood home. The real estate is now hugely valuable and  Mike’s son-in-law, the current head of the business, has plans that, well, aren’t particularly environmentally friendly.

Mike must wrestle with his conscience over how he’ll vote in a board-of-directors showdown; part of that process is relating to his sullen granddaughter (Morgana Davies) — who doesn’t share the rest of her family’s rape-the-earth attitude — the story of how he grew up on that scenic bit of coastline.

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“WOMAN AT WAR”: Eco-whimsy

April 6, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir

“WOMAN AT WAR” My rating: B

101 minutes | No MPAA rating

A middle-aged choir director maintains a double life as an eco-terrorist in “Woman at War,” an Icelandic film that despite its heavyweight themes maintains a surprisingly airy tone.

At 49 Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) lives what appears to be an unremarkable life in Reykjavik.  On her weekends, though, she loads up a backpack and heads deep into the country’s rugged, treeless interior where she wreaks havoc on the electrical grid.

Halla’s motives and how she came by them are never fully explained in the screenplay by director Benedikt Erlingsson and Olafur Emilsson.

Apparently she opposes an Icelandic/Chinese consortium dedicated to beefing up heavy industry, which Hanna believes will destroy the environment. She employs technology as basic as a bow and arrow and as sophisticated as military-grade explosives to bring down high-tension transmission towers, cutting off the juice to a large foundry she regards as a particularly odious polluter.

She’s a one-woman wrecking crew and the authorities employ everything from satellites to heat sensors, drones and flying squads of military commandos in an effort to put an end to Hanna’s activities.  She is surprisingly good at avoiding detection, though it’s pretty clear her days are numbered.

Now a yarn like this could be played for polemic drama, but director Erlingsson instead opts for whimsy.

There is, for instance, the musical score, performed by six musicians (pianist/accordianist, drummer, tuba player, and three women singers) not just on the soundtrack but in the film itself.  Thus as Hanna treks across a volcanic landscape she passes the musicians, who have set up their instruments in the wide open spaces. Occasionally the players — invisible to everyone save the audience — will react (wordlessly) to the scenes being played out in front of them.

Then there’s a semi-comic subplot about a bicycle-riding South American tourist (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) who is always at the wrong place at the wrong time and is arrested repeatedly on suspicion of being the terrorist. Worst vacation ever.

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“THE WIND”: Little house of horror on the prairie

April 4, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Caitlin Gerard

“THE WIND” My rating: C+ (Opens April 5 at the Screenland Tapcade)

86 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“The Wind” is plenty ambitious.  It’s part Western, part horror flick, part feminist parable.

Thing is, it doesn’t fully work on any of those levels.

When we first see our heroine, Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) she is covered head to foot in blood and holding a dead baby. Talk about making an entrance.

We later learn that the blood is that of her best friend and the only other woman living within a day’s walk of the struggling ranch run by Lizzy and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman).  Apparently the woman, who was pregnant, developed a killer case of cabin fever and blew out her brains with Lizzy’s shotgun.  Out of desperation Lizzy then cut open her friend in an effort  to save the child.  No luck.

Needless to say, Lizzie is rocked by this desperate act.  But things will get worse. Director Emma Tammi and screen writer Teresa Sutherland (adapting Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 novel) will see to that.

Set in the mid-1800s somewhere out West, “The Wind” examines how isolation and wide open spaces work on a woman’s mind.  Like Henry James The Turn of the Screw, we can never be sure if the horrors Lizzy must cope with — a pack of ravenous wolves, noises in the night, an eviscerated goat, the certainty that some hideous creature is lurking just outside her door — are real or the products of her tortured psyche.

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“SKATE KITCHEN”: Rolling along

April 4, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Rachelle Vinberg

“SKATE KITCHEN” My rating: B

106 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Some of us are  lucky enough to experience one adolescent summer of near  total freedom.  No job, no school, no responsibilities.

Just hanging out with your friends and trying — without too much angst — to figure out who you are.

That’s the situation offered in “Skate Kitchen,” Crystal Moselle’s docudrama-ish  study of female teen skateboarders whiling away the hot months on the streets of NYC.

The film is practically unplotted, drifting from one episode to another, this encounter to the next, without a whole lot of rhyme or reason. But as an immersive experience, one that puts you into the sneakers of its young protagonists, the film has few equals. It feels utterly, totally alive.

Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) is not looking forward to a summer cooped up in the Queens apartment she shares with her hospital worker single mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez). The pair are almost always at odds over Camille’s love of skateboarding, which Mom views as dangerous; Camille has come up with all sorts of ingenious ploys to cover up how she’s actually spending her days.

Left to her own devices, Camille goes exploring, taking the train across the East River (clutching her skateboard the whole time) and probing the byways of Manhattan. She soon finds skateboard parks where others her age are doing their acrobatic stunts; little by little she is accepted by a group of girls who are as unfettered by convention as she is.

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“THE MUSTANG”: Animals

March 28, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

“THE MUSTANG”  My rating: B+ 

96 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A violent, alienated man and an equally angry horse form an unexpected bond in “The Mustang,” an understated effort that often plays like documentary but carries the emotional weight of a classic drama.

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s film opens with a roundup of wild mustangs in a vast Western landscape. The animals are herded by  helicopters into stock pens. From there they are loaded onto trucks.

Cut to a Nevada prison where Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) has just joined the general population after  months in solitary confinement.  We never learn what he did to merit that treatment; all he’ll say is that he’s not good with people.

The prison psychologist (Connie Britton) struggles to get a word out of the sullen, withdrawn inmate. She’s trying to find a prison job or activity that will interest him. Finally she settles on the horse-training program, which takes recently captured wild mustangs and turns them into well-behaved riding horses that can be sold at auction.

Not that Roman overnight becomes a cowboy.  His main job involves shoveling shit. But he’s intrigued by the violent horse that occupies a metal shed on the prison grounds. The animal inside spends all day banging on the walls and shrieking its defiance. It’s a kindred spirit.

The old hand who runs the program (Bruce Dern) believes the horse is too mean to be domesticated, but gives Roman — who has absolutely no background with these animals — a chance to train the beast. If it doesn’t kill him first.

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“THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT”: Race against (and for) time

March 28, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard

“THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT” My rating: C+ 
110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“The Hummingbird Project” could be described as a race-against-time movie.

Two cousins risk everything to build a high-speed internet “highway” between Kansas and the East Coast, all to shave a few microseconds off the time required to send the latest stock market updates halfway across the continent.

Why bother? Because a microsecond head start on the competition — the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings just once — could mean millions in profits.

Kim Nguyen’s drama is acceptable if unremarkable in most respects. It  features a vintage Jesse Eisenberg performance (i.e., arrogant nerd) and an atypical one from Salma Hayek (here toning down the sexuality to play a Wall Street shark).

Where “Hummingbird…” really shines, though, is in the work of Alexander Skarsgard, an actor who mostly has been seen as a hunky type (a charismatic vampire in “True Blood,” a predatory stepdad in “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” an abusive husband in “Big Little Lies,” a muscled tree swinger in “The Legend of Tarzan”).

Here Skarsgard plays an antisocial dweeb, a bald, soft-bellied algorithm cruncher more comfortable with his computer screen than other human beings. It’s such a startling transformation that initially he’s unrecognizable. It’s a classic case of an actor getting lost in his role.

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“US”: We have met the enemy…and they are us

March 21, 2019 by butlerscinemascene

Lupita Nyong’o

“US” My rating: B+

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Humor and horror are strange bedfellows. Usually one negates the other.

But in “Us,” writer/director Jordan Peele’s followup to the spectacular “Get Out,” finds just the right balance between the goofy and the ghastly. The result is a horror movie quite unlike anything we’ve seen, one that mixes a family survival tale with supernatural elements and wraps it all up in a mind-boggling apocalypse.

All while leaving you chuckling.

The story begins in the mid-80’s when little Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders away from her parents at a beachside amusement park in Santa Cruz. She finds her way to a creepy mirrored funhouse where she encounters her own doppleganger…a little girl who looks exactly like her.

Jump to the present, where the adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is vacationing with her family — husband Gabe (Winston Duke), teen Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and little Jason (Evan Alex) — at her late grandmother’s semi-remote house in the forest outside Santa Cruz.

After the creepiness of the prologue Peele plunges into a family comedy.  Dad is a big friendly doofus, the sort of guy who is always humiliating his adolescent daughter, who rarely looks up from her smart phone. Little Jason is a weird kid who goes through life wearing what looks like a snarling gorilla mask.

As for mother Adelaide…well, she does the usual mom stuff. But being so close to the scene of her childhood trauma — after which she didn’t speak for months — has her cringing.  A trip to the beach finds her suppressing hysteria despite the presence of old friends Kitty and Josh (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker) and their twin teen daughters.

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