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“NOVITIATE”: Brides of Christ

November 23, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Margaret Qually

“NOVITIATE” My rating: B 

123 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The movies rarely treat religion with anything like respect or even intelligent understanding.  Which makes “Novitiate” a welcome anomaly.

Writer/director Margaret Betts’ film — made with a predominantly female cast and crew — is a serious attempt to examine a religious vocation through the eyes of one young woman.

Cathleen (Margaret Qually…she played the daughter in HBO’s “The Leftovers”) is raised by her hard-case mother in the American South during the 1950s.  Mom Nora (Juliette Nicholson) is a drinkin’, smoking’ modern woman with a tart tongue and a disdain for much of Eisenhower-era society.

But she’s devoted to her daughter and one Sunday takes Cathleen to the local Catholic church. Though irreligious herself, Nora wants her child to be able to make up her own mind. Almost against her better judgment, she accepts a free scholarship for Cathleen at the local parochial school.

The girl takes to Catholicism like other teens glom onto Rod McKuen’s poetry.  As graduation nears she announces that she wants to become a nun. Mom is horrified, but what are you gonna do?

And so Cathleen becomes a postulant at a cloistered community run by the hard-ass Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo), who hasn’t left the premises in 40 years.

Revered Mother — the spiritual version of a Marine drill instructor — makes no bones about her intentions to weed out the unworthy.  Her methods are often brusque and borderline cruel, and part of the wonder of Leo’s performance is that the character’s ogreish behavior is, if not likable, then at least understandable. It’s a long-tested system to which she adheres. Continue Reading »

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“THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI”: In your face

November 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Frances McDormand

“THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI” My rating: A- 

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Frances McDormand gives what may be her greatest performance in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

But then the film scores a trifecta of sorts by also containing best-ever perfs of both Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell.

Add to that the fact that the latest from Irish auteur Martin McDonough (“In Bruges”) is the funniest movie ever about grief, and you’ve got a serious — and seriously hilarious — moviegoing experience.

Not a perfect one, though.  Granted, the first hour of “Three Billboards” is just about flawless. In the latter going McDonough abandons the brilliant character study he’s been presenting and tries to woo us with iffy melodrama.  Still…

The title refers to three billboards on the road near the Ozarks home of Mildred (McDormand).  Almost a year earlier Mildred’s teenage daughter Angela was raped, murdered and her body set afire.  The local cops have hit a dead end and the angry, acid-tongued Mildred decides to jump start the investigation through shaming.

She calls at the local advertising firm and soon those three billboards read like a grim set of Burma Shave signs: “Raped While Dying.” “And Still No Arrests.”  “How Come, Chief Willoughby?”

This is a full frontal assault on the local police led by Chief Willoughby (Harrelson).  By all accounts Willoughby is a decent guy who has exhausted all leads. DNA collected at the crime scene doesn’t match anyone in the data base, and Willoughby rejects Mildred’s demand that the authorities collect samples from every boy and man in the county.

Willoughby reveals that he’s dying of cancer, apparently in the mistaken belief that this will soften Mildred’s wrath and she’ll take down the billboards. She’ll have none of it: “They wouldn’t be so effective after you croak, right?”

Woody Harrelson

Mildred may be the toughest, most uncompromising and prickly character of McDormand’s uncompromising and prickly career. You may not like her (she commits an unconscionable and, frankly, ludicrous act of arson against her perceived enemies), but you can’t take your eyes off her as plows through the town’s irate citizenry like a vengeful bulldozer. (One may look at the actress’s excellent work in HBO’s “Olive Kitteridge” as a sort of test run for this film.)

Her attitude even comes through in her choice of clothing. Nothing feminine about Mildred’s garb…she wears a blue jumpsuit and a Rambo-style headscarf, looking like Rosie the Riveter with a “can-fuck-you-up” attitude. (In one of the film’s slyer jokes, Mildred operates the Southern Charm Gift Shop — which thanks to her attitude is utterly devoid of  charm.)

Mildred’s contempt for the cops has its basis in more than just personal grief.  Deputy Dixon (Rockwell) is both astoundingly stupid and overtly racist and Mildred has no problem in calling him on his proclivities: “How’s it all going in the nigger-torturing business, Dixon?”

Dixon’s answer is that nowadays it’s “the person-of-color-torturing business.” (One of the iffier aspects of McDonough’s screenplay is that an honorable man like Willoughby employs a vicious asshat like Dixon; we’re led to believe that the Chief feels sorry for this moron and actually sees some potential in him. This strains credulity, but sets up later questionable developments in the Dixon subplot.) Continue Reading »

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“THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS”: Humbugger helper

November 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens

“THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS” My rating: C

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

When it is evoking the spirit of Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” cannot help but worm its way  into a viewer’s heart and mucus centers.

Seriously, for any halfway literate English-speaking person even the mention of Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts sets off mental and emotional detonations. Not only is A Christmas Carol one of the most artful stories ever written, it is credited by historians with triggering Victorian England’s wholehearted embrace of the Yuletide season. (Before the book’s publication, apparently, Christmas was no big deal.)

Adapted from John Stanford’s nonfiction book by Susan Coyne and directed by Bharat Nalluri (a veteran of Brit TV), “The Man Who  Invented Christmas” purports to relate how Charles Dickens came to write the story. Basically it’s Masterpiece Lite.

We first meet the great author (Dan Stevens, minus the facial hair of the older, more familiar  Dickens) in 1842 when he is going through a rough patch.  His last three books have tanked, his household is going through expensive civic improvements, his kids are running amok and the Missus (Morfydd Clark) announces that there’s another on the way.

Then there’s the arrival of Dickens’ father John (Jonathan Pryce), an entertaining/exasperating  bon vivant perennially in debt and congenitally incapable of earning his own living.

Desperate to offer his publishers a new book, Dickens proposes a Christmas story.  The editors are dubious, but Dickens says if necessary he’ll self-finance the volume. All he needs now are characters and a story.

Continue Reading »

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“COCO”: Night of the lively dead

November 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“COCO” My rating: B

109 minutes | MPAA rating:PG

As they did with 2015’s “Inside Out,” the animation geniuses at Pixar are again pushing the narrative envelope. With “Coco” they deliver a tale so dense with visual and thematic elements that by comparison most live-action films seem simplistic.

Taking as it starting point the traditions and mythology of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration, the film emerges as an epic family drama that resolves with a deeply satisfying emotional coda.

But as was the case with “Inside Out,” the film’s ambitions are so grandiose that it sometimes comes off as overwritten and unnecessarily complicated. Too many  digressions threaten to derail the yarn.

In a brilliant opening sequence that harkens back to the photo album introduction to Pixar’s “Up,” a family’s history is told in papel picado, the colorful hand-cut Mexican tissue flags.

Our narrator, young  Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), relates how his great-great-great grandmother was abandoned by her musician husband, leaving her to raise her daughter Coco alone. (Coco is still alive, an ancient creature lost in silent dementia and cared for by her extended family.)  Nevertheless she established a family-run shoemaking enterprise which endures to this day.  She also banned music from her household.

This poses a real problem for Miguel, who loves music, plays it in secret, and worships the memory of Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt), a legendary guitar-strumming troubadour from the 1930s who starred in a series of perennially popular black-and-white movies.

In fact, Miguel comes to believe that Ernesto de la Cruz — who died years earlier in an on-stage accident — is his great-great-great grandfather, about whom no one in the family will reveal anything.

All this coincides with the Day of the Dead celebration, where photos of deceased family members are displayed in a household shrine. On this one night of the year the dear departed are invited to cross over from the land of the dead to hover around their living descendants in a sprawling cemetery lit by thousands of candles and featuring tables of food to be shared by the living and, symbolically anyway, the ghostly visitors. Continue Reading »

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“LADY BIRD”: Mother and child reunion

November 17, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Saoirse Ronan

“LADY BIRD” My rating: B+ 

93 minutes | MPAA rating: R

That Saoirse Ronan gives an Oscar-worthy performance in “Lady Bird” is expected. She is, after all, perhaps the greatest actress of her young generation. (Exhibit One: “Brooklyn.”)

What’s really surprising about this funny/furious coming-of-age yarn is the voice behind the camera.  “Lady Bird” is the first feature soley written and directed by Greta Gerwig, the actress known as indie filmdom’s go-to gal for slightly ditzy heroines (“Greenberg,” “Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”).

Gerwig gives us not only a first-rate dramedy about a young woman’s growth from cranky teen to independent woman, but also the most incendiary mother/daughter movie relationship since “Terms of Endearment.”

Combining savage wordplay, satiric insights into adolescent life and a genuine sense of family dynamics, “Lady Bird” is simultaneously familiar and fiercely original.

Christine (Saoirse Ronan) is a high school senior (the year is 2002) and  pissed off about nearly everything. Her general dissatisfaction may be behind her decision to change her name to Lady Bird…or to at least demand that her parents, friends and teachers call her  that. A new name may lead to a new life, right?

In the film’s first scene Lady Bird and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) are reduced to tears while driving down the highway listening to a book tape of The Grapes of Wrath.  It’s a rare moment when mom and daughter are on the same page; seconds later Lady Bird’s temper flares and she impulsively bails from the moving car. (She will spend much of the movie with a cast on one hand.)

The source of the argument is college.  The two are returning from a scouting trip to regional universities, but Lady Bird has her heart set on something back east, a place with “real culture, like New York…or Connecticut.” Marion, a glum financial harpie, warns that there isn’t any money for an Ivy League education.  A small state college the next town over will have to do.

This is the film’s central conflict: a smart, ambitious and somewhat spoiled adolescent versus her penny-pinching, essentially joyless parent.  (Lady Bird’s dad, played by Tracy Letts, is a laid-back  noncombatant who offers moral support to both mother and daughter but not much else, having been downsized from his tech job.)

Continue Reading »

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“MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS”: Slow train to nowhere

November 9, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot

“MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS” My rating: C  

114 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The year’s strongest cast wrestles inertia to a standstill in “Murder on the Orient Express,” the latest addition to the pantheon of unnecessary remakes.

We already have Sidney Lumet’s perfectly delightful 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s great  railway mystery. But as with Shakespeare, Dame Agatha’s yarns are worthy of retelling for each new generation.  Problem is, this retelling is stillborn.

It’s always difficult to know exactly why a movie goes wrong, but in this case it may very well lie with the decision to have Kenneth Branagh both direct and star as eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

The character dominates virtually every scene, which means the acting weight alone was exhausting. To then also ride herd on a huge cast of heavy hitting thespians was too much to ask of anyone.

As it now stands, Branagh disappoints in both capacities. His features masked by absurd facial hair as obviously fake as the computer-generated backgrounds, he makes a mess of Poirot, who goes from crowd-teasing cutup to moody depressive without much in between. Lines that should evoke a laugh barely generate a tentative smile.

As for the directing end of things…well, what can you say when you have this much talent on hand and still end up with a dull yarn weighted down by blah characterizations?

Set aboard a snowbound luxury train on the Istanbul-Paris run, Michael Green’s screenplay clings to the basics of Christie’s tale (the “who” in the “whodunnit” makes for a one of the better revelations in all detective fiction) while dabbling with some of the particulars, largely in an effort to make the project more attractive to today’s mass audience.

Thus the screenplay finds time for one karate fight, a chase down a railroad trestle and a shooting — none of which are to be found in the novel or the earlier film.

While a few of the characters have undergone some tweaking (a physician aboard the train is now a Negro played by Leslie Odom Jr., providing the opportunity to dabble in some racial issues), most cling to Christie’s parameters. Continue Reading »

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“MY FRIEND DAHMER”: Nature and nurture

November 9, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Ross Lynch (center) as future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

“MY FRIEND DAHMER”  My rating: B

107 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Right off the bat, the title “My Friend Dahmer” puts potential audiences on edge.

After all, Jeffrey Dahmer was one of our more notorious serial killers of the last 50 years. Between 1978 and 1991 he murdered 17 men and boys, often preserving their bones and feasting on their flesh. He was beaten to death in prison in 1994.

The obvious question: What’s the take of writer/director Marc Meyers’ film?  Is it a blood-soaked bit of gross-out exploitation? A black comedy?

In truth “My Friend Dahmer” is a smart, insightful and disturbing study of the killer’s high school years.  Based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, Dahmer’s classmate and one of the few who paid the dead-eyed loner any attention, it’s both creepy and sad.

From almost the first frame of this film we understand that Jeff, played by Disney discovery Ross Lynch (“Austin & Ally,” “Teen Beach Movie”), has issues. In a shack in the woods behind his family’s semi-rural Ohio home he keeps jars in which dead  animals are slowly dissolving in acid solution. He always keeps a black plastic garbage bag in his pocket, lest he stumble across an intriguing bit of road kill.

“I like bones,” he explains. “It interests me — what’s inside.”

Gawky and outwardly unemotional, Jeff is a target for school bullies. Not that things are much better at home.

Mom (Anne Heche) is a former mental patient who lives life in just two speeds: fetal and combative. Her depression and raw emotions prove unbearable to her decent but  ineffectual husband (Dallas Roberts). At least Jeff’s father, himself the victim of a solitary  childhood, recognizes his oldest son’s plight and urges the kid to try to fit in.

Jeff’s plan to win his classmates’ attention is typically bizarre and tone-deaf.  He begins staging fake epileptic fits in the school hallways. His arm-flapping, screeching antics draw the attention of John Backderf (Alex Wolff) and a small coterie of social outsiders who adopt Jeff as their mascot.

“I think with you as our fearless leader we can really disrupt this school,” John tells Jeff.

“Let’s do a Dahmer,”  becomes their rebellious battle cry before each new example of perverse performance art. Continue Reading »

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“MAYHEM”: Let ‘er rip

November 9, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Steven Yeun

“MAYHEM”  My rating: C+ (Opens Nov. 10 at the Screenland Tapcade)

86 minutes | No MPAA rating

Joe Lynch’s “Mayhem” more than lives up to its name.

This giddy celebration of pointless violence finds Steven Yeun, late of cable’s “The Walking Dead,” playing attorney Derek Cho,  an employee of a take-no-prisoners law firm that represents the worst in contemporary American culture and capitalism.

Framed by a fellow attorney for a major screwup on a big case, a defeated Derek is cleaning out his office when police surround the firm’s high-rise  and inform those inside that a particularly malevolent virus has been detected on the premises.

Known as ID-7, this nasty bug causes the infected to lose all the inhibitions that normally keep us from sexually assaulting and or mercilessly beating our fellow men.

An anti-virus has been released into the building’s air conditioning, but it will take eight hours to kick in. Until then the place is under strict quarantine.

Continue Reading »

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“MANSFIELD 66/67”: Queen of tacky

November 3, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Jayne Mansfield (right) with pulchritudinous competitor Sophia Loren.

“MANSFIELD 66/67” My rating: C+ (Opens N ov. 3 at the Screenland Tapcade)

84 minutes | No MPAA rating

Given the aura of cheesy tackiness that still hangs over her life and career, perhaps it’s appropriate that the new documentary about sex bomb Jayne Mansfield is itself a triumph of cheesy tackiness.

P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes’s films opens with the declaration that it is a “true story based on rumor and hearsay.”  Well, it certainly isn’t your History Channel approach to documentary biography.

For one thing, no cooperation was offered by any member of the Mansfield family (the most prominent being her actor daughter, “Law & Order’s” Mariska Hargitay).

The film clips, photos and other archival elements were taken from public sources. Mostly the filmmakers relied on talking-head interviews with Mansfield admirers (John Waters, Mary Waronov), fellow show-biz types (Mamie Van Doren), a slew of feminist and pop culture scholars, and Kenneth Anger, the great chronicler of Tinseltown tawdriness who put Mansfield’s picture on the cover of his great expose Hollywood Babylon.

The doc is also peppered with animated segments and “production numbers” in which a chorus of college-age performers in blonde wigs do garishly-lit  go-go routines or engage in artless “interpretive” dances.

It says something about the filmmakers’ intentions that the first thing they address is Mansfield’s 1967 death in a horrific car accident and the long-standing rumor that she was beheaded in the crash.  The man who embalmed the movie star says her scalp was torn off but that her noggin remained attached to that voluptuous body.

Continue Reading »

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“BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL”: Chop sockey

November 2, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Takuya Kimura

“BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL” My rating: C+ (Opens Nov. 3 at the Screenland Tapcade)

140 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Beautifully mounted and crammed with enough head-spinning violence to lure moviegoers not already familiar with its manga origins, “Blade of the Immortal” is a samurai epic with edge.

Not only does Takashi Miike’s film (incredibly, his 61st feature in 13 years) mix the expected swordplay with a sort of mutated vampire tale, but its look blends feudal Japan with a punk sensibility — bizarre weapons, hairdos, tattoos and costuming (primitive sunglasses).

Not to  mention dialogue you’ll never hear in an Akira Kurosawa film: “Blow it out your ass!”

That said, it’s still a samurai movie, a genre we’ve see so many times that it takes something really special to grab the attention of jaded viewers.  “Blood of the Immortal” comes closer than most.

The premise finds a rogue samurai teaming up with a pre-pubescent girl (it’s like “Leon” with lots of sharp objects).

Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a wanted man after unwittingly engaging in a conspiracy against the current shogun. In the film’s opening scene he singlehandedly dispatches about a hundred soldiers who have been sent to kill him.

His face slashed, a hand severed and an eye gouged out, he’s dying when a mysterious crone appears to weave a magic spell. She inserts into his wounds “blood worms” which ensure immortality. Manji quickly heals, his hand reattaches, and like one of Bram Stoker’s undead he’s left to wander the earth in solitude, doomed to outlive anyone he cares about.

Fifty years later the never-aging Manji runs afoul of a renegade band of samurai — the Itto-ryu — who are bent on imposing their particular brand of martial arts on all of Japan.  Under their charismatic leader, Anotsu (Sota Fukushi), they are destroying the dojos of all competing fighting schools. Continue Reading »

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