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“THE YOUNG KARL MARX”: Moviegoers of the world, unite!

March 14, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Vicky Krieps, August Diehl, Stefan Konarske

“THE YOUNG KARL MARX” My rating: C+

118 minutes | No MPAA rating

Few things are as noncinematic as a bunch of intellectuals arguing economic theory — which puts the makers of “The Young Karl Marx” on the defensive from the get-go.

Their solution is a sort of mutation on “Shakespeare in Love” in which Marx and his cohort Friedrich Engels rail at the status quo while outrunning the police and creditors, finding time to vigorously roger their ladyfolk. Along the way they establish the international Communist movement and get to work writing Capital.

Raoul Peck’s film (his last outing was the excellent James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”) begins in the early 1840s with unfortunate peasants being routed by cudgel-waving horsemen for having the effrontery to pick  up fallen tree limbs for firewood on a private estate.

Then we cut to young Marx (August Diehl) arguing with the writers and editors of their recently-banned newspaper; he criticizes his colleagues both for intellectual laziness and for a lack of resolve in opposing the establishment. (The film finds  Marx often insufferably arrogant…but he’s arrogant because he’s right.)

The scene ends with the entire newspaper staff hauled off to prison.

Meanwhile in Manchester England Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) is appalled at the inhuman conditions imposed by his father on workers at the family’s textile mill. When the proles protest by damaging a loom, Engels Pere fumes that “Machines are expensive…not like labor.”  His son leaves in disgust.

“The Young Karl Marx” is about how these two giants of economic reasoning got together, discovering their shared styles and common interests.  We also meet Marx’s wife Jenny (Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day Lewis’ love interest in “Phantom Thread”), a member of the French aristocracy who gave it all up for love and the workers of the world.  Then there’s Engel’s squeeze Mary (Hannah Steele), an Irish factory lass who takes no guff from anyone.

There are, of course, endless discussions of Marxist theory.  Some of these get heated when the talk turns to the boys’  sincere belief in  violent revolution.

“The Young Karl Marx” is about as well acted as it can be…it’s just that it plays more like a history lesson than a viable drama.  Good production values, though…even if most of what we see are gloomy garrets, dirty factory floors and dimly-lit taverns.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE CURED”: The persistence of memory

March 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Sam Keeley

“THE CURED” My rating: C+

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The new Holy Grail — at least as far as the makers of horror films are concerned — is a fresh take on zombies.

In recent years titles like “Maggie,” “Life After Beth,” “The Girl with All the Gifts” and “Warm Bodies” have sought with varying degrees of success to refresh the whole undead flesheater bit.

“The Cured” offers some intriguing ideas, but can’t sustain the drama when things fall back into the same-old same-old.

At the heart of David Freyne’s Ireland-lensed effort is the idea that zombies can be cured.  Whether or not that’s a good thing is basically what the movie’s about.

Months before the beginning of the film a bug called the Maze Virus swept Europe, turning everyday folks into snarling cannibals.  A vaccine has been developed that brings the infected back to their normal state…with the downside that they can recall all the ghastly things they did while under the virus’ influence.

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“A FANTASTIC WOMAN”: Not acting…being.

March 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Daniela Vega

“A FANTASTIC WOMAN” My rating: A- 

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

What Daniela Vega delivers in the Oscar-winning (for foreign language film) “A Fantastic Woman” is less a case of acting than of being.

As a trans woman portraying a trans woman in a film scripted for her by director Sebastian Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza, the Chilean actress so blurs the line between fiction and fact that the picture unfolds in a rarified realm of  ultra-realism (this despite a few moments of deliberate magic realism).

In a tale bursting with emotion and meaning,  Vega doesn’t have to push her performance. Simply by being here and reacting honestly to the screenplay’s situations she delivers a devastating, deeply moving message.

Marina (Vega) is a waitress with a part-time gig singing in a Santiago night spot. As the film begins she and her older lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), are preparing to celebrate with a bit of foreign travel.

But it’s not to be.  In the middle of the night Orlando has a stroke and falls down a flight of stairs.  Marina rushes him to a hospital, but it’s too late.

Most of “A Fantastic Woman” unfolds in the week leading up to Orlando’s funeral, when Marina must deal not only with her own grief but with the indignities heaped upon her by an uncaring system and Orlando’s disapproving family.

 

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“BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY”

March 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

“BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY”  My rating: B 

88 minutes | No MPAA rating

The tragedy of Hollywood icon Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) is that of a brilliant intellect trapped in a gorgeous body.  “People never got past her face,” laments one of her children.

That’s the premise, anyway, of “Bombshell,” a documentary biography by first-time director Alexandra Dean that explores Lamarr’s dual careers:  She was a big star but a crappy actress who became the inspiration for Disney’s Snow White and D.C. Comics’ Cat Woman; behind the scenes she was an inventor whose pioneering work led to today’s cellular age.

Along the way she became an enigma, a woman of so many different aspects, according to her son, “that even I couldn’t understand her.”

Even as a child the former Hedy Kiesler went her own way.  Her  parents treated her to the intellectual and artistic riches of their native Vienna. But she was no young deb…at age 16 she was posing for nude photographs;  at 19 she starred in the film “Ecstasy,” shocking and titillating moviegoers with a naked swimming scene and what appeared to be an on-screen orgasm.  (Hitler banned the film, not for the sex but because the actress was Jewish).

Young Hedy quickly married one of Austria’s richest men, a fascist-friendly and extremely jealous munitions magnate, then fled in a maid’s uniform to London where she was discovered by Louis B. Mayer, the American movie producer who was signing up talent eager to escape the Nazis.

Renamed Hedy Lamarr, she proved fantastically popular with American moviegoers, not for her limited range but for her gob-smacking gorgeousness.

She appears to have been indifferent to the whole business of acting — it was just a way to earn a living — reserving her real passion for tinkering (as a child she dismantled and reassembled a wind-up music box).  With the advent of World War II she decided to do something for the Allied cause.

Teaming up with composer George Antheil, she developed a method for steering a torpedo via radio waves.  To avoid jamming by the Germans, she and Anthill came up with “frequency hopping,” a system in which the torpedo and its remote operators were synced to an ever-changing series of radio frequencies.

Lamarr received a patent for the system, which she urged the military to consider.  But the Navy wasn’t impressed…though there is considerable evidence that years later, after the patent had expired, the Pentagon exploited it. Eventually frequency shifting became an essential element in the creation of cellphones, GPS, wifi and military satellites.

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“THE PARTY”: Sizzling snark

March 8, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz

“THE PARTY” My rating: B

71 minutes | MPAA rating: R

With a running of time just over an hour, Sally Potter’s “The Party” plays like a classic one-act play, filled with slamming door exits, fiercely funny wordplay and wonderfully brittle, self-delusional characters.

Potter,  the British creator of films like “Orlando” and “The Tango Lesson,” specializes in gender issues and anti-establishment politics.  “The Party” embraces all that while remaining bitterly hilarious.

In the film’s first shot a frantic looking woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) yanks open her front door, stares momentarily at the visitor on her stoop (the camera takes the vantage point of the guest) and points a pistol at us.

We then flash back 70 minutes.  That same woman, Janet, is busily futzing around the kitchen, preparing to entertain some old friends. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) sits in the living room, wine glass in hand, deejaying old blues and experimental jazz LPs. He has the look of a  shell-shocked combat vet.

One by one the visitors arrive and we gradually learn what the celebration is about.  After years of struggle as a party faithful, Janet has been named head of the country’s Ministry of Health. She is constantly interrupted by congratulatory phone calls, including several heavy-breathing text messages from an unidentified lover.

The deliciously catty April (Patricia Clarkson) is allegedly Janet’s best bud. As an American she takes a withering outsider’s view of Brit politics…but then she’s withering on just about every subject. Asked to evaluate if Janet’s new job has transformed her in any way, April observes that her friend now is “slightly ministerial in a post-modernist, post-feminist sort of way.”

She’s even harder on her boyfriend, a blissed-out, New Age-y German life coach named Gottfried (Bruno Ganz) who so adores her that he puts up with a constant stream of abuse. April announces that she intends to dump Gottfried that very night: “Tickle an aroma therapist and you find a fascist.”

 

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“THE INSULT”: Fighting words

March 1, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Rita Hayek, Adel Karam

“THE INSULT” My rating: B-

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Private words generate national repercussions in Ziad Doueiri’s “The Insult,” the Lebanese film nominated for the foreign language Oscar.

When we first see Tony (Adel Karam) he looks like nothing so much as a caricature of a Rust Belt Trump voter…baseball cap, goatee, plaid shirt over a sleeveless wifebeater. He’s attending a rally of Lebanon’s far right Christian Party, listening to a speaker harangue the Palestinian refugees who have been an uncomfortable part of that country’s social fabric for decades.

Meanwhile Yasser (Kamel El Basha), one of those Palestinians, is foreman of a construction crew working across the street from the apartment Tony shares with his pregnant wife Shirine  (Rita Hayek).

A dispute erupts  over a gutter that sends dirty water draining off Tony’s balcony onto the heads of the workmen. Yasser fixes a pipe to eliminate the problem; the improvements are torn out by Tony, furious that a Palestinian has been messing with his home.

At the urging of his boss, Yasser shows up at Tony’s car repair shop to apologize. Instead he’s told: “I wish Ariel Sharon had wiped you all out.”

An enraged Yasser punches Tony, breaking a couple of ribs.  Days later Tony aggravates the injury, piercing a lung and ending up in the hospital. Shirine goes into premature labor.

The mechanic decides to sue Yasser for damages.

Doueiri’s screenplay (written with Joelle Touma) is basically in two parts.  The film’s first half lays out the political and social tension creeping through all levels of Lebanese society.  Tony’s Christian Party members are rankled at a setup that allows Palestinians to live in refugee camps where the law can’t touch them. Meanwhile Yasser refers to himself and other refugees as “the niggers of the Arab world.”

In these early passages “The Insult” does a good job of describing the complex cultural and religious animosities that linger a quarter-century after the end of Lebanon’s devastating civil war. Particular effective are brief glimpses in the background of army tanks and the occasional stroller with an automatic weapon, reminders that civil unrest is a constant threat.

The film never makes the case of one man over the other; both Yasser and Tony have moments when they see, if only for a moment, the other guy’s point of view.  They regret the ugly turn things have taken and are tempted to call the whole thing off.

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“NOSTALGIA”: Points in heaven

March 1, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Jon Hamm

“NOSTALGIA” My rating: C-

114 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Nostalgia” is a points-in-heaven movie.

Basically it’s a little art film (well, it wants to be art, anyway) that has attracted an astounding cast of recognizable actors (Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Beth Grant, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, James le Gros, Nick Offerman, John Ortiz, Amber Tamblyn) who are working for little or no pay to be part of a noncommercial effort that they hope will have something to say.

Call it movie star penance. These actors are trying to rack up some points in heaven.

Let’s hope they do, because “Nostalgia” isn’t going to make a ding in either the box office or critical circles.

Written and directed by Mark Pellington (“Arlington Road,” “The Mothman Prophecies,” “The Last Word”), “Nostalgia” offers an interesting premise.  It’s about how humans connect with objects and how giving up or losing those possessions can result in both trauma and a positive re-examination of one’s life.

Plotted less as one contiguous story than as a series of interconnected shorts, the film begins with an insurance investigator (Ortiz) checking out the home of an old man (Dern) who is preparing to sell  everything to finance his last years.

Exactly what the insurance guy does is a bit vague. He says he’s there to see if there are items in the house worth bringing in an appraiser…but on whose behalf we don’t know.  Maybe an evaluation of home’s contents has been requested by the old man’s granddaughter and heir (Tamblyn).

Anyway, the insurance guy’s real job — narratively speaking — is to be a sounding board for other characters. (If “Nostalgia” were given to metaphysical musings, you might view the character as a sympathetic angel.)

His next “customer” is a widow (Burstyn) whose home has just burned to the ground.  She’s lost everything except her late husband’s most cherished possession, a baseball signed by Ted Williams.  Eventually the old lady will travel to Las Vegas and a sports memorabilia shop where the copacetic owner (Hamm) buys the baseball for mucho dinero.

Then we follow the sports memorabilia guy to his home town, where he joins his sister (Keener) in clearing out their late parents’ home. This reunion is marred by a family tragedy. Continue Reading »

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“ANNIHILATION”: Coming to get us

February 22, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Natalie Portman

“ANNIHILATION” My rating: B- (Opens wide on Feb. 23)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Given the runaway artistic and commercial success of his 2014 debut, “Ex Machina,” it’s hard not to see Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” as a case of sophomore slump.

“Ex Machina” was an almost flawless blend of performance, tension and social inquiry (Garland’s subject was artificial intelligence) that transcended the usual sci-fi parameters.

By comparison “Annihilation,” based on Jeff VanderMeer’s bestseller, feels less original and more conventional.

Plus, it has the built-in issue of being based on the first book of a trilogy — which no doubt is why at the end of nearly two hours the yarn seems unfinished.

And yet “Annihilation” has real strengths, including a mostly-woman cast dealing with a pressure cooker situation, a couple of fine action sequences and enough creeping tension to generate mucho spinal tingles.

Biologist  Lena (Natalie Portman) is in mourning. A year earlier her soldier husband Kane left for one of his black ops missions and hasn’t been heard from since. The authorities aren’t cooperative.

And then, miraculously, Kane appears in their home. He’s an emotional blank, with no memories of where he’s been.

Oscar Isaac

Before long the couple are snatched by commandos in black and taken to a top secret military base outside “the shimmer,” an area along the Carolina coast subject to bizarre anomalies.

As psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) explains, a few years earlier a meteor (or something) struck the area creating a “bubble” that is slowly expanding.  Numerous military teams, drones, even trained animals have been sent beyond the shimmer, but so far only Kane has returned.  And now he’s in a coma and on life support.

(How the authorities have kept the shimmer a secret for several years is one of those mysteries possible only in movieland.) Continue Reading »

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“ARE WE NOT CATS”: We are Devo

February 22, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Chelsea Lopez, Michael Patrick Nicholson

“ARE WE NOT CATS” My rating: C+

78 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Are We Not Cats” is a slacker love story.

Or maybe it’s a horror yarn centering on the human equivalent of a cat’s hairball.

The answer is up to the individual. Some viewers will be weirdly moved by writer/director Xander Robin’s short (only 78 minutes) debut feature. Others will be totally grossed out and repelled.

The film’s first half hour centers on Eli (Michael Patrick Nicholson),  a hapless twentysomething adrift in the scuzziest corners of New York City.

In short order Eli is rejected by his girl, loses his job as a trash hauler and is abandoned by his parents, who unceremoniously decamp to Arizona. He’s reduced to sleeping in the ramshackle delivery truck which is his sole means of making money.

Even if we hadn’t seen Eli’s world imploding around him, we’d know he was in the grip of a big-time existential dilemma. His unkempt hair, untended chin bristles and haunted eyes announce a dude in crisis. Told he looks tired, Eli can only shrug: “This is what I look like.”

Desperate for cash, he takes a job driving a massive truck motor to a customer upstate. Along the way he gives a ride to Kyle (Michael Godere), who takes him to a sort of underground nightclub for rural punks and introduces him to his girl, Anya (Chelsea Lopez), a naifish beauty with black lipstick and a wig concealing her bald pate.

Cancer patient?  No. Anya suffers from trichotillomania and trichophagia — she is compelled to pull out her own hair and eat it.

Nonetheless, she and Eli drift into a semi-romantic relationship…at least until the massive hairball in Anya’s intestinal tract creates a health crisis that requires improvised surgery.

The film’s title references not only the line chanted by the animal men in the classic horror movie “The Island of Lost Souls” (“Are we not men?”) but to Anya’s unhappy hairball.

In a sense this is two movies. The first is a sort of deadpan ashcan comedy as Eli drifts through a world of crumbling buildings and rusting, abandoned heavy machinery.

Then the oddball romance kicks in, only to be twisted inside out by one of the most gruesome scenes in recent movie memory.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE LODGERS”: Bump in the night

February 22, 2018 by butlerscinemascene

Charlotte Vega, Bill Milner

“THE LODGERS” My rating: C+

92 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Atmosphere trumps just about everything else in the Irish-lensed “The Lodgers,” a ghost story as ephemeral as “The Turn of the Screw.”

Brian O’Malley’s yarn unfolds in the early 1920s on a decaying Irish estate.  Twins Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) live alone, the last of their once-wealthy family.

They’re going slowly mad, living by arcane rules (for instance, they must be in bed by midnight) that make no sense.  Edward is further down the head-case highway than his sister and acts as the enforcer of these edicts; Rachel is quietly defiant and looking for a way out of her situation.

As is so often the case in these stories, the real conflict arrives with an outsider. Sean (Eugene Simon) has returned from the Great War with a wooden leg and the scorn of the local louts, who consider him a traitor for fighting side by side with the hated Brits.  But Sean spots Rachel on one of her rare trips to town and, well, he gets interested.

David Turpin’s screenplay is bigger on weird moments than well-developed characters, and the deep generational secrets that keep the twins in virtual bondage are predictable if improbable (incest, anyone?).

But coherent storytelling takes a back seat to director O’Malley’s visual flourishes: a stagnant pond that erupts in disturbing visions, a trap door in the floor that oozes viscous liquid, a blue/gray palette that cloaks everything in twilight dimness.

Don’t expect “The Lodgers” to provide any kind of  coherent statement. But its dank/dark visuals are compelling in their own right.

| Robert W. Butler

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