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“COLUMBUS”: Architecture of yearning

August 31, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“COLUMBUS” My rating: B 

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Columbus” is an art film with all the good and not-so-good that suggests.

This audacious feature debut from Kogonada (the one-named video director who creates special DVD features for many of the Criterion Collection classic film releases) is a visually brilliant experience that sometimes feels as if it’s in no hurry to go anywhere.

It’s been very well acted, but keeps its emotions under wraps.

Set in Columbus, IN, this hard-to-classify effort (not quite drama, certainly not a comedy) centers on Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a recent high school graduate, a volunteer at the local library and an architecture geek.

She’s in the right town, since Columbus is a virtual showcase of buildings by modernist masters like I.M. Pei, Robert A.M. Stern, Eero Saarinen and Richard Meier. Casey knows these structures inside out; she’s even figured out how to sneak into some of them at night so that she can enjoy her own private reveries.

To the extent that “Columbus” has a plot it involves the arrival of Jin (John Cho), who has traveled from Korea to the States because of a developing family tragedy.

Jin’s father, a famous architectural historian, has suffered a stroke on the eve of a lecture at the local university. Now he’s in a coma and Jin, being the dutiful Korean son, is expected to sit at his bedside until the old man either recovers or succumbs.

Except that Jin and his father have long been estranged. Instead of hanging around the hospital, Jin looks for diversion, and he finds it in Casey, from whom he bums a cigarette and with whom he tours the local architectural hot spots.

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“MENASHE”: Bumbling toward heaven

August 31, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Menashe Lustig

“MENASHE” My rating: B

82 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

It takes a while to get a handle on Menashe (Menashe Luskin), the hapless, rotund Hasidic grocery clerk at the center of documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein’s first foray into fictional filmmaking.

Ruddy cheeked, balding and bearded, Menashe is like a clumsy, disheveled dancing bear. He’s got plenty to do at the tiny shop where he works in Brooklyn’s Borough Park — carrying crates, mopping floors, helping customers — but he’ll ignore his duties in a heartbeat if he spies an opportunity for a philosophical discussion on some obscure point of religious practice. His employer is perennially exasperated.

Menashe wants more than anything to live the life of a good, pious Jew, but fate conspires against him. His wife Leah recently passed after a long illness, and his rabbi has ruled that Menashe’s son Rieven (Ruben Niborski) must live with his holier-than-thou brother-in-law Eizik (Yiel Weisshaus). Tradition maintains that a child must be reared by a mother.

Remarriage isn’t likely. Menashe and his late wife did not get along and he much prefers the life of an ascetic bachelor. A coffee date with an eligible widow is a disaster; it ends with her eye-rolling diss of Hasidic men: “Your mothers spoil you; then your wives take over.”

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“UNLOCKED”: Betrayed at every turn

August 31, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Noomi Rapace

“UNLOCKED” My rating: C

98 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Despite a “name” director and an impressive cast of solid B-listers, the spy drama “Unlocked” feels terribly generic.

Viewers may be forgiven for thinking they’ve seen it all before.

CIA interrogator Alice Racine (Noomi Rapace), on the rebound from a disastrous assignment that led to mass civilian casualties, is now posing as a London social worker, collecting evidence on possible terrorist activities within the Islamic community.

When the agency snatches a courier carrying messages between a radical imam and a terrorist developing a biological bomb, Alice is called in to break the captive’s will and get details on the impending attack.

Except that the CIA dudes running the interrogation seem a bit dicey…in fact, Alice finds  herself a pawn in a rogue operation. Marked for death by her own people, she barely escapes and goes on the run.

Among her supposed allies are a CIA bigwig back in the States (John Malkovich) and her agency mentor (Michael Douglas). Unsure who to trust among her own colleagues, Alice turns to a Brit intelligence master (Toni Collette) and at one point teams up with a petty crook (Orlando Bloom) whom she discovers burglarizing an apartment where she has taken refuge.

Peter O’Brien’s screenplay keeps us guessing; almost nobody in this movie is what they first seem.

There is much running around and the bodies pile up, but nothing about “Unlocked” is particularly compelling.  Director Michael Apted (whose impressive resume includes “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorillas in the Mist,” lots of first-rate HBO and Showtime offerings  and the brilliant multi-decade “7 Up” documentary series) keeps things moving but never makes us care.

| Robert W. Butler

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“HAROLD AND LILLIAN”: Hollywood love story

August 24, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY”  My rating: B+

94 minutes | No MPAA rating

If Harold and Lillian Michelson had been, say, an accountant and a waitress, the story of their long marriage would be compelling enough.

But as fate and luck would have it, these two East Coast natives found their calling in Hollywood. In a town filled with egos and eccentricities, they embodied the sort of rock-solid relationship that set a high bar on Tinseltown matrimony.

This unusual (yet amazingly down to earth) couple emerge as quiet heroes in Daniel Raim’s fascinating, informative and inspiring “Helen and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story.”

Harold was a storyboard artist and later an art director and production designer. Lillian ran her own research library, amassing a vast collection of books on just about everything that could be used by filmmakers to research their projects.

As the years passed they raised three sons (one of them autistic) and became  touchstones of sorts for other movie folk. They were decent, kind, hard-working and unbelievably talented.

“You felt you were with the best of Hollywood as it can be as a lifestyle,” said one colleague. (That explains why the makers of the animated “Shrek” based the characters of the king and queen on the Michelsons.)

Harold went from advertising art to movie storyboarding with Cecille B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.”  In filmed interviews (he died a decade ago) Harold says he never met DeMille. He just looked at the script, made pen and charcoal drawings of what each shot might look like on the screen, and sent them up the chain of command.

Nevertheless, when you compare the finished film with Harold’s drawings you realize that DeMille and Co. were pretty much copying what Harold had given them, right down to the type of camera lens required for a specific shot.

Remember the famous shot in “The Graduate” in which a nervous Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is framed by the triangle of Mrs. Robinson’s (Anne Bancroft) thigh and calf?  That was Harold Michelson’s idea.

“The Graduate”

Also the sequence in which Benjamin dives into a swimming pool and surfaces to throw himself on a floating air mattress…which instantly becomes Mrs. Robinson on a hotel bed.

There’s a reason most movie storyboards go missing, says one Hollywood insider. No director wants to admit the best visual ideas in his film came from the storyboard artist.

Mel Brooks, for whom Harold storyboarded “Spaceballs,” recalled that his ideas were the difference between just OK and terrific. Harold produced “little goodies that made you look like a great filmmaker.”

Danny DeVito, a longtime friend and collaborator (and a producer of this doc), says of the process: “You’re directing through sketches.”

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“BRIGSBY BEAR”: A furry Dr. Who

August 22, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“BRIGSBY BEAR”  My rating: B+

100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Describing a film as “sweet” is tantamount to giving it the kiss of death (when it comes to movies we’re a sweet-aversive culture), but there’s no other word to describe the oddball beauty of “Brigsby Bear.”

Balancing lightweight comedy, melancholy undercurrents and an ultimately uplifting message, Dave McCary’s feature directing debut (after several shorts and many segments of “Saturday Night Live”) in some ways resembles such innocents-on-the-loose titles as “Being There” and “Edward Scissorhands.”

Our protagonist is James (“SNL’s” Kyle Mooney), who has spent his entire life in a bomb shelter with his parents (Mark Hamill, Jane Adams) after the outside world has turned toxic. At least he thinks they’re his parents.  Shortly after the film begins he learns that he was kidnapped as a newborn and has been raised in isolated secrecy.

Now the puzzled and perplexed James has been “rescued” and returned to the suburban home of his natural parents (Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins) and spunky younger sister Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins). They’re eager to make him welcome (well, maybe not Aubrey so much) but there are plenty of adjustment problems.

James has only known two other humans his entire life, and now he’s told they’re criminals of the worse sort. The existence he knew was a total sham. He knows nothing about contemporary society, about pop culture, about the latest trends in language or social behavior.

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“INGRID GOES WEST”: Single white female

August 22, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Elizabeth Olsen, Aubrey Plaza

“INGRID GOES WEST” My rating: B

87 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Nobody does nuts like Aubrey Plaza.

Oh, she can play “normal” if required (TV’s Parks and Recreation”), but she really shines when the lets her crazy flag fly, as exemplified by her mental inmate in TV’s “Legion,” her suburban zombie in “Life After Beth” and her scary Medieval nun in the recent “The Hours.”

So Plaza is right at home in “Ingrid Goes West,” writer/director Matt Spicer’s very black comedy about an unhinged celebrity stalker.

As the film begins our heroine crashes a wedding and sprays Mace in the bride’s face.  (We later learn that the two women are strangers, but that Ingrid has been following the nuptial preparations on Instagram and is incensed at not being invited.)

When next we see Ingrid she’s being discharged from a mental facility. Shortly thereafter her mother dies, leaving Ingrid with $60,000.  She decides to relocate to Los Angeles so that she can be closer to a woman she has been obsessing over via social media.

Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen) is a perky, self-centered cutie who has become a celeb by displaying so much of her life on the Internet.  Like a Kardashian, she’s famous mostly for being famous. She has no discernible talents (she might find a gig as a personal shopper, though everything she bought would reflect her tastes rather than those of a client).

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“THE MIDWIFE”: Opposites attract

August 18, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Catherine Deneuve, Catharine Frot

“THE MIDWIFE” My rating: B 

116 minutes | No MPAA rating

Two of France’s greatest actresses square off for the first time in “The Midwife,” delivering a quiet drama that engrosses without resorting to big “actorly” moments.

Claire (Catherine Frot, so terrific in last year’s “Marguerite”) is the title character of Martin Provost’s film, an employee at a Paris maternity clinic that soon will be shuttered to make way for a big corporate-run hospital.  She’s offered a job with the new outfit, but can’t abide the impersonal atmosphere of quota-run medicine. Which is a big problem…her work is the great joy of her life.

Mostly she lives a solitary, monkish existence. Her college-age son (Quentin Dolmaire) has quietly drifted away (there’s no mention of his father). And Claire is so health-conscious that she’s given up meat and wine (why live in France if you’re going to eat like an ascetic?).

Enter Beatrice (Catherine Deneuve), an aging party girl who has returned to France after years of jet setting. Back when Claire was a teen her father — a swimming champion — had an affair with Beatrice that broke up his marriage. After a few months Beatrice abruptly ended that relationship to gadabout the globe.

Now she’s come back to Paris to reconnect with the love of her life…only to be told by Claire that after being abandoned by Beatrice her brokenhearted father killed himself.

As far as Claire is concerned, after delivering that information she owes Beatrice nothing.  But the older woman reveals that she is dying of a brain tumor — not that she’s going to let a little thing like that cut into her lifestyle of good food and wine, smoking and gambling.

“The Midwife” is basically the story of how the vivacious, hard-living and unapologetically selfish Beatrice slowly transfers some of her values to the good, gray Claire.

That widening of Claire’s narrow horizon extends to a sweet affair with a truck driver (Olivier Gourmet) whose vegetable patch abuts her own.

There are no acting fireworks here.  Writer/director Provost has given us a drama that mostly adheres to the quiet rhythms of real life.

But these two effortlessly luminous actresses make the story compelling.

| Robert W. Butler

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“WIND RIVER”: Indian country

August 17, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Jeremy Renner, Gil Birmingham

“WIND RIVER” My rating: B

*113 minutes | MPAA rating: R

With his screenplays for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” Taylor Sheridan joined the ranks of our best storytellers of the contemporary American West.

He cements that reputation — though not without a couple of minor missteps — by writing and directing “Wind River.”

Set on the sprawling Wind River Indian Reservation in mountainous central Wyoming, this snowbound mystery is triggered by the death of an 18-year-old Arapaho girl. Apparently she ran for several miles barefoot through a blizzard before succumbing to sub-zero temperatures. But what — or who — was she running from?

Her body is discovered by Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a hunter for the wildlife service whose job is to eliminate wolves, cougars and other predators dining on domestic livestock. Soon he’ll be tracking down two-legged predators.

On one level “Wind River” is a buddy movie pairing the woods-smart Cory with Florida-reared Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), an FBI agent dispatched to investigate what appears to be a murder on tribal land. He knows every snowfield and ravine within hundreds of square miles; she shows up without so much as a pair of long johns.

But as seems always to be the case with a Sheridan film, just as important as the mystery is the milieu in which it’s set.

In this case it’s a world of natural beauty and aching poverty, dying traditions and doped-up  youth. Here white assumptions collide with Native American realities. Resentments and prejudices can surface at any time.

Renner’s Cory is the perfect guide through these conflicting cultures. Born nearby and as comfortable in a cowboy hat as a fur-lined parka, he’s divorced from an Arapaho woman with whom he has a young son. In short, he’s a man with one foot planted in the white world and the other in Indian country.

Sheridan’s screenplay provides plenty of thumbnail portraits of colorful characters. Continue Reading »

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“WHOSE STREETS?”: Walk a mile in my shoes

August 17, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“WHOSE STREETS?” My rating: B+  

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The 2014 killing of unarmed Michael Brown by a Ferguson MO police officer was a watershed moment in American race relations, spawning the Black Lives Matter movement and creating widespread resistance among African Americans to social, economic and law enforcement inequality.

It’s one thing to talk about these issues.  It’s another to live them.

After  the Brown shooting,  filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis took their cameras to the streets of Ferguson to record the aftermath: protests, looting, rioting (whether by protestors or police depends on your political outlook) and grass roots organizing.

The result is “Whose Streets?”, an incendiary 90 minutes that doesn’t even attempt a conventional evenhanded analysis of the situation.

Folayan and Davis’ film jumps feet first into the action, recording events in the streets in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and, as months go by, examining the growing resistance within the black community.

“Whose Streets?” wants us to feel African American outrage and dismay. It does’t analyze it. It doesn’t provide commentary or counterpoint. It simply observes.

And in doing so this documentary allows viewers to feel  what it’s like to be a black person in Ferguson.

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“PAINT IT BLACK”: Obsessive aftermath

August 17, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Alia Shawkat

“PAINT IT BLACK” My rating: C+

94 minutes | MPAA rating: R

With a title like “Paint It Black” you don’t expect a barrel of monkeys, nor do you get one with actress Amber Tamblyn’s directing debut.

Indeed, “Paint It Black” is a self-consciously artsy downer; not even a last-shot glimmer of hope is likely to rouse audiences out of their glum funk.

Which is not to say the film is terrible.  It’s got some terrific acting and creative visuals. But it lacks the emotional substance to make us care.

Current indie “it” girl Alia Shawkat stars as Josie, an artist’s model, black-out alcoholic and punk music groupie in pre-cell phone ’80s Los Angeles.

Early in the film (the screenplay is by Ed Dougherty and Tamblyn, adapting Janet Fitch’s novel) Josie receives news that her boyfriend Michael, who disappeared some time earlier, has committed suicide in a cheap hotel room.

In flashbacks we see how they met (she posed for nude studies in the class where he was an art student).  Their relationship, depicted in silent (save for music) snippets scattered throughout the film, is presented using Hallmark card visual shorthand (we see them discovering a junked upright piano, painting it together in their living room, spooning in bed etc.) .

They seem happy enough, though what a late-night carouser like Josie sees in the squeaky-clean Michael (Rhys Wakefield) is a mystery. Truth is, because he has only a few words of dialogue in the entire film, we get almost no sense of his personality.

Which makes Josie’s post-mortem obsession with Michael all the more unfathomable.

Turns out Josie isn’t the only one with Michaelmania.  His mother Meredith (the great Janet McTeer), a famous concert pianist, is also driven to the edges of madness by her grief and fury at having had to share her boy with this other woman.

The meeting of the two women is memorable — at Michael’s funeral Meredith tries to strangle Josie in front of the casket and a mortuary full of shocked mourners. Later Meredith raids the apartment where Josie and Michael lived, stealing all of his drawings, journals and personal effects.  Josie retaliates by sneaking into Meredith’s hilltop mansion and stealing back as much of the loot as she can carry.

We’re poised to see the story become a possibly violent test of wills between two women. But it never gets that far.

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