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“LOST IN PARIS”: Amelie’s Canadian cousin

September 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Dominique Abel, Emmanuelle Riva, Fiona Gordon…atop the Eiffel Tower

“LOST IN PARIS” My rating: B+ 

83 minutes | No MPAA rating

Imagine “Amelie” made by Buster Keaton.

That’ll provide an idea of the disarming blend of charm and goofiness on display in “Lost in Paris.”

Made by the husband-and-wife team of Dominque Abel and Fiona Gordon (he’s from Belgium, she’s Australian), this wacky but thoroughly satisfying comedy is part vaudeville routine, part silent movie, and all pretty wonderful.

Fiona (Gordon) is a Canadian librarian who looks like a cartoon character. Her face is long, her neck even longer. She’s like a red-headed Olive Oyl who peers at the world through glasses so big they dwarf her face.

Early in “Lost in Paris” Fiona receives a message from her beloved Aunt Marta, who years earlier fled snowy Canada for the life of a dancer in Paris. Now, reports Marta (the late, great Emmanuelle Riva), the social workers want to relocate her from her apartment to a retirement home.  They say she’s losing it.

To rescue her auntie Fiona must get entirely out of her comfort zone, flying to France and negotiating the city  beneath a gigantic red backpack topped with a Canadian flag. She just misses Marta, who in an effort to keep her freedom has taken to living on the street.

Worse, Fiona is separated from her backpack, losing her money, passport, clothing and cell phone. Suddenly she’s homeless as well.

 

 

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“STRONGER”: The ballad of Lt. Dan

September 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Jake Gyllenhaal

“STRONGER” My rating: A- 

116 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Stronger” is the story of Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. The subject matter alone is enough to give potential moviegoers pause.

Is this going to be a weepy? A jingoistic flag-waver? Is it gonna be, oh God, inspirational?

There are plenty of arguments for steering clear of “Stronger.”  Ignore them.

For in adapting Bauman’s memoir writer John Pollen and director David Gordon Green have given us what may be the year’s most potent drama, a masterful blend of personal narrative and social observation.

It’s a film about despair, resilience, family and romance.  Yes, it’s deeply emotional, but less in a crassly manipulative Hollywood way than in the sense that it nails so many truths about the human condition.

You’ll cry.  In fact, anyone who can sit through “Stronger” without tearing up at least three times had best stop wasting their money on movie tickets and start saving for a bass boat.

But it’s a cleansing cry, not an exploitative one.

In the film’s first 10 minutes we’re introduced to Jeff (Jake Gyllenhaal, quite possibly Oscar bound), a “chicken roaster at Costco” and a classic example of blue-collar Boston. He’s a drinker and a sports idiot, traits he shares with his boisterous, brawling, low-credit-score uncles and cousins. He’s kind of unreliable, which is why his girl Erin (“Orphan Black’s” Tatiana Maslany) has broken up with him yet again.

Jeff decides he can win back Erin by passing on  a Sox game to cheer her on as she runs the Boston Marathon. He’s at the finish line holding a hand-made congratulatory sign when the bomb goes off.

Almost immediately director Green demonstrates how to ease into an uncomfortable issue with grace and taste.  We don’t see the immediate bloody results of the blast.  But we’re with Erin in a bar when the TV news shows a photo of the seriously wounded Jeff being carried away by a man in a cowboy hat. (We won’t actually see a re-enactment of the event until flashbacks in the movie’s third act.)

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“TROPHY”: Dominion

September 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

South African rhino breeder John Hume

“TROPHY” My rating:  B

108 minutes | No MPAA rating

Big game hunting — a incendiary topic known to break up marriages and ruin Thanksgiving dinners — gets remarkably  non-judgmental treatment in “Trophy,”the new documentary by Saul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau.

By turns maddening, melancholy and thoughtful, “Trophy” will defy the expectations of those who instinctively damn big game hunting as a bloodthirsty vestige of our primitive reptilian brains.

But it doesn’t exactly give hunters a clean bill of health, either. In the film’s last scene an American who has spent many thousands of dollars and years of planning to bag an African lion weeps over the body of the animal he has just killed — not out of regret but, presumably, because his dream has been fulfilled and there’s no beast of comparable magnificence on his hit list.

Big game hunting and the worldwide industry that supports it is a monstrously large topic, and  “Trophy” is a sprawling and often unfocused affair. It often seems the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how to tell their story — or exactly what the story is — and ended up throwing lots of stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

This seemingly unstructured approach — no narration, and only a few graphics displaying the current populations and death rates among endangered species — forces audiences to remain alert and to put their prejudices more or less on hold. For whatever you think about the film’s subject, one discovers there’s always more to learn.

(Of course, there are always the tremendous visuals…the film is often as beautiful as one of those National Geographic specials.)

“Trophy” begins with Texas sheep breeder Phillip Glass accompanying his young son on the kid’s first deer kill. Appreciate it or not, this is a rite of passage experienced by hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The film then cuts to South Africa where hunters takes down a rhino with a tranquilizer dart, then saw off the animal’s precious horn. What looks like a barbarous act is anything but. By removing the horn they are ensuring that the rhino — one of a thousand maintained by real estate millioinaire John Hume on his sprawling breeding farm — will be of no value to poachers, who would happily kill the creature in order to sell its “magic” horn on the thriving Asian black market. (Because of its alleged medicinal properties, a rhino horn can go for $250,000.)

“Trophy” takes us to the world’s largest big-game convention in Las Vegas, where American hunters get motivated to tackle the Big Five (that’s when a hunter has bagged an elephant, a lion, a leopard, a rhino and a buffalo).

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“ZOOLOGY”: Allegorical tail

September 21, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Natalia Pavelkova

“ZOOLOGY”  My rating: B- 

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

By turns funny, grotesque and touching, “Zoology” is a modern-day fable about a woman whose life is transformed by, well, an unexpected growth spurt.

Natasha (a terrific Natalya Pavelkova) is a paper pusher at a local zoo in a Russian city so emotionally stifling that everything, from the leaden sea and sky to the graffiti-marred concrete walls, is the same blueish gray.

Natasha is gray, too.  She’s in her fifties but looks much older; her unkempt hair is turning white, and she wears drab, shapeless, colorless clothing.

The other women in the zoo’s administrative offices make fun of her (once a mean girl, apparently, always a mean girl) and play nasty tricks.  The one good thing about Natasha’s job is that it gives her a chance to commune with the animals; on the sly she slips sausages to the big cats and throws bread crumbs to the ducks.

Early on in Ivan I. Tveerdovsky’s film Natasha seeks medical help for lower back pain. It’s only when she’s on the X-ray table that her terrible secret is revealed.

She has grown a tail, a fleshy, hairless thing that hangs down behind her knees.

This appendage has a mind of its own, twitching and throbbing.  In the bath it surfaces through the suds like a submarine’s periscope. (All the “tail” effects appear to be practical, no computer animation. They’re utterly convincing.)

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“MOTHER!”: WTF?

September 15, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem

“MOTHER!” My rating: C 

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Darren Aronofsky is a master filmmaker whose grasp of movie technology and cinema’s esthetic possibilities has few equals.

But  you’ve got to wonder about his choice of subject matter.

There are moments of pure genius on display in “mother!”,  along with a sustained depiction of madness to equal anything ever seen on the screen.

But they are in the service of an eschatological puzzle that will leave most audience members scratching their heads.  The movie is clever to a fault, but at the risk of emotionally alienating all but the most die-hard theological geeks.

You know we’re in the world of heavy-duty (if not pretentious) metaphor when all the characters are denied names and identified in the credits as Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Younger Brother, etc.

Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in a remote, formerly splendid country home with her husband, the considerably older Him (Javier Bardem). Him is a novelist with a bad case of writer’s block; he can’t make the ideas flow and it’s making him pathetic and cranky.

Mother, meanwhile, busies herself with restoring the old mansion, a job she has taken on singlehandedly.

Michelle Pfeiffer, Ed Harris

Their isolated lives are interrupted by Man (Ed Harris), who claims to be a physician doing research nearby. He’s been misinformed that Mother and Him are running a b&b.  When Him learns that Man is a big fan of his writing, he invites the visitor to move into a guest room.

Mother isn’t thrilled, and is even more upset when Man’s wife, Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer), shows up as well.  They are the guests from hell:  smoking, drinking, acting like they own the joint and making out like horny teens. This part of “mother!”, at least, is wickedly funny.

Woman is a nosy meddler who wants to know the nature of her hosts’ sex lives and presses Mother for an explanation of their childless state.

Mother pleads with her husband to evict the interlopers, but his ego is desperate for their fawning praise. Moreover, Man appears to be dying of lung cancer. What kind of person would toss him out?

The first half of the film climaxes with a murder.

In its wake Him finds inspiration, writes a new novel and impregnates Mother.

All seems copacetic until the night thousands of Him’s fans descend upon the house and begin a riot, holding orgiastic ceremonies, stripping the house for souvenirs and, eventually, turning their attention to the infant  Mother delivers in the midst of these cabalistic reveries. (Shades of “Rosemary’s Baby”!) Continue Reading »

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“VICEROY’S HOUSE”: Last days of British rule

September 14, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Armstrong

“VICEROY’S HOUSE” My rating: B 

106 minutes | No MPAA rating

Gurinder Chadha’s “Viceroy’s House” is more history lesson than viable drama. But it’s compelling history, told with insight, cinematic savvy and a sense of scale that would make David Lean proud.

The screenplay (by Chadha,  Paul Mayeda Berges and Moira Buffini) concentrates on the last days of British rule in India in 1948, and the efforts of the last Viceroy of that country, the famous Lord Louis Mountbatten, to juggle dozens of competing interests to ensure that the new Indian republic gets off to a good start.

As it turns out, this is a fool’s errand, thanks to the perfidy of Mr. Churchill’s government (represented here by actors like Michael Gambon and Simon Callow). which is pulling strings behind the scenes.

But Mountbatten, a supremely decent man as played by “Downton Abbey’s” Hugh Bonneville, is a hopeful, sincere and largely selfless warrior doing what he thinks will be best for millions of Indians.

The film follows two trajectories.  First there’s the arrival of Mountbatten and his Lady Edwina (Gillian Anderson) and his installation as Viceroy amid all the pomp and ceremony of a royal coronation. Unlike virtually all of the Viceroys who served in India over three centuries,  Mountbatten and his wife are concerned mostly with the common good.

While Lord Mountbatten spars and cajoles with the leaders of various factions — historic figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah — his wife turns to humanitarian concerns. Both work to eliminate the Brit racism that seeped through previous administrations. Both seriously try to understand the culture and ethos of the great continent which they are charged with giving away. Continue Reading »

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“BEACH RATS”: Adrift in Brooklyn

September 12, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“BEACH RATS”  My rating: B

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Thirty years ago a film dealing with the subject matter of “Beach Rats” would have been labeled a “gay” film and aimed specifically at audiences looking for  a satisfying coming out story.

Well, that was then.

Eliza Hittman’s second feature (after “It Felt Like Love”) is about a young man who is probably gay, but it’s less obsessed with his sexuality than with his general cluelessness.

Frankie (Brit actor Harris Dickinson) lives in Brooklyn with his mother, younger sister and soon-to-be-dead cancer-riddled father. He’s out of school and jobless, and spends his summer hanging out on the beach with a few of his childhood friends, know-nothings whose world view is limited to vaping and the availability of pot and pussy.

Frankie has a secret. He’s been visiting online gay chatrooms, tentatively exploring the possibilities. Every now and then he’ll arrange for a tryst with one of these men, who are clearly smitten with Frankie’s body and all-American good looks.

Writer/director Hittman takes it for granted that Frankie’s gay.  But like a lot of young people he’s not sure what he is.

Early in the film he’s picked up by a local girl, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), who spots him at a Coney Island fireworks display and zooms in.  Frankie begs off that he’s too tired to have sex, but over several weeks he and Simone will get intimate.   It’s hard to say whether he enjoys the sex or simply views it as good camouflage, throwing off any friends or family members who suspect he swings another way.

If our protagonist were, say, a middle-class suburbanite, he’d probably find himself in an LGBT teen support group.  But Frankie’s living in a macho-drenched working-class corner of Brooklyn. About all he knows about being gay is that it’s majorly uncool with his vaguely criminal buds. Continue Reading »

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“MARIE CURIE: The Courage of Knowledge”

September 9, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Karolina Gruszka

“MARIE CURIE: THE COURAGE OF KNOWLEDGE” My rating: B

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

Well, this certainly isn’t your Greer Garson version of physicist Marie Curie.

Marie Noelle’s film is about the trials the brilliant Curie endured because she was a woman in a man’s world; it’s also about the  affair with a married co-worker that nearly scuttled her chances for a second Nobel Prize and admission to the French Academy of Science.

This combination of feminism and heavy breathing could have been a recipe for diaster.  But Noelle and co-writer Andrea Stoll keep all the parts in narrative and emotional balance, with the result that “Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge” feels low-keyed and classy even when its leading lady is lounging about in the altogether.

The film begins with the idyllic marriage of Marie (Karolina Gruszka) and Pierre Curie (Charles Berling), partners both in life and in the lab. They’re raising a large family, experimenting with radium as an anti-cancer therapy, and sharing a Nobel Prize for science. In just a few quick, impressionistic scenes director Noelle depicts their blissful, fulfilling lives.

Then Pierre is killed in a street accident, and Marie is left to continue her work alone.  Well, not exactly alone.

Her colleague Paul Langevin (Arieh Worthalter)  provides intellectual and, to a degree, moral support as Marie comes to terms with Pierre’s death. Eventually the attraction gets physical.

Paul has a rather common wife who wants him to give up pure science for a well-paying job in industry. Eventually the wronged spouse steals love letters between her husband and Marie and launches a very public scandal. Marie’s sexual transgression only proves to the stick-in-the-muds of academia and science that a woman has no business in their calling. (That plenty of male scientists keep a mistress without anyone raising an eyebrow is just one more example of the double standard at work.)

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“NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG”: Lessons from Dan

September 7, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

David Bald Eagle, Christopher Sweeney, Richard Ray Whitman

“NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG” My rating: B-

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

In attempting to de-romanticize white notions of Native Americans,  “Neither Wolf Nor Dog” often comes perilously close to having just the opposite effect.

You can only hear so many words of wisdom from a 95-year-old Lakota elder before the mind starts wallowing in cliches about the noble red man.

Happily Steven Lewis Simpson’s film sidesteps most of the major cultural traps that make negotiating this particular landscape so dangerous.

This low-budget effort — filmed mostly on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation — is one of the more perceptive films about white/Indian relationships.

Based on Kent Nerburn’s semi-autobiographical novel, the bulk of “Neither Wolf…” is a reservation road trip in which an outsider gets a crash course in modern Indian ethos.

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“CROWN HEIGHTS”: Long time comin’

September 7, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Lakeith Stansfield

“CROWN HEIGHTS” My rating: C+ 

94 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The real-life miscarriage of justice depicted in Matt Ruskin’s “Crown Heights” is both outrageous and all too common.

In 1980 Colin Warner, a native of Trinidad living in Brooklyn, was implicated in the shooting death of another young man. A witness claimed that Warner drove the killer’s getaway car; the victim’s brother said Warner’s mug shot (Warner had a history of car theft) looked like one of the shooters.

Warner had never met any of these individuals and was at a loss to explain his predicament. Even the detectives who arrested him  suspected that he probably didn’t do it…but they needed to clear the case and move on.

As a result, Colin Warner spent nearly two decades in prison before an extraordinary effort on the part of one of his friends led to his release.

“Crown Heights” is basically a legal procedural that takes a docudrama approach. This is both its strength and its weakness.

Writer/director Ruskin appears to hew closely to the facts of the case. But he also refuses to speculate on his characters’ inner lives…with the result that the film, despite its incendiary nature, feels emotionally neutral.

It’s easy enough to become furious about what happened to Colin Warner; but as drama “Crown Heights” leaves us wanting.

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