Butler's Cinema Scene

“TURN IT AROUND: THE STORY OF EAST BAY PUNK”  My rating C+ (Opens Aug. 12 at Screenland Tapcade)

155 minutes | No MPAA rating

Exhausting but nevertheless energetic, “Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk” contains more information  than most of us will never need to know about the rise of punk music in the San Franscisco area.

Corbett Redford and Anthony Machitiello’s polished documentary is clearly an act of love. They bring to the table an encyclopedic knowledge of the scene, the bands and players who made the music, the promoters who gave them places to perform, the underground media types who chronicled  and promoted the movement.

Narrated by none other than the great Iggy Pop, this massive opus (2 hours, 35 minutes) mixes clever animation, talking heads, old performance footage and vintage graphics to lay out the tale.

Over in posh San Francisco the fading hippie movement was still wallowing in its own musical decline (in this telling Fillmore Ballroom promoter Bill Graham comes off as a hopeless tool of the establishment). But across the bay in Berkeley and in a host of nondescript working-class cities the kids were creating their own sound, inspired by the British punk movement but with its own indelible American stamp.

The music was driving and relentless (guitar solos were sneered at) and the lyrics embraced teen angst and fierce opposition to the system. Any system.

The film does capture the us-vs.-them attitude that prevailed among young punk purveyors and  fans, and there’s just enough of the music on the soundtrack to give you a sense of the chaotic, liberating scene.

Drawbacks? Well there are maybe three dozen interviewees, ranging from minor players to major figures (Jello Biafra, Billy Joe Armstrong), and while it’s amusing to witness the plump middle age into which so many of  these snarling rebels have slid, most of them are limited to, like, two sentences of on-camera talk before something else fills the screen.

The audience for “Turn It Around” mostly will be limited to hard-core punk fans. But they will not be disappointed.

| Robert W. Butler

Charlize Theron

“ATOMIC BLONDE”  My rating:  C+ 

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Leggy Lorraine Broughton, the nearly superhuman Cold War spy at the center of stylish “Atomic Blonde,” is all platinum hair, high fashion and fierce physicality.

The performance is barely skin deep. Good thing the skin belongs to Charlize Theron.

It’s hard to recall another recent movie in which the camera so obsessively and totally dwells on its leading lady. Theron,  one of the film’s producers, always has been an attractive screen presence (she won an Oscar for making herself ugly to play a serial killer in 2003’s “Monster”), but here she radiates an icy beauty that is overwhelming.

Even bruised, battered and bloody she is gorgeous.

That watchability is vital, for big chunks of “Atomic Blonde” — based on the graphic novel “The Coldest City” — are narratively incomprehensible.

The story begins in 1989 London where Lorraine, looking as if she’s just gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali, is summoned to MI6 headquarters for a debriefing. One of her bosses (Toby Jones) and an American CIA bigwig (John Goodman) want details on her recent mission to Berlin. The bulk of the film unfolds in flashback.

In this retelling Lorraine is dispatched to Germany to retrieve “the list,” a directory of Western agents in the possession of an East German security official who wants to defect (Eddie Marsan). “The list” is a classic Hitchcock “Macguffin” — we never learn how it was compiled or by whom, only that both sides are desperate to lay their hands on it.

Leading the search is the Brits’ cynical Berlin station chief, Percival (James McAvoy), who has “gone native,” running a black market operation, moving back and forth over and under the Berlin Wall. In this setting, communism is on its last legs, with frustrated East Berliners holding massive protests.

There’s a French spy (Sofia Boutella of “The Mummy”) with whom Lorraine has an energetic roll in the hay (our heroine’s sexuality is quite fluid), and an assortment of thuggish Eastern Bloc assassins and torturers.

It’s all rather confusing. Kurt Johnstad’s screenplay is a jumble of tongue-twisting foreign names and clunky exposition interrupted by periodic outbursts of violence. Continue Reading »

“DUNKIRK”  My rating: B

105 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

Largely jettisoning character development and conventional exposition in favor of a you-are-there immersion, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is clearly a descendent of “The Longest Day,” producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s massive 1962 recreation of the D-Day invasion.

It moves swiftly and explains little, weaving together three story lines in a chronologically jumbled narrative that covers a week’s worth of history as the British nation rallies to rescue more than 300,000 troops trapped by Germans on the French coast in the early years of World War II.

Nolan’s unconventional storytelling is simultaneously confusing and compelling.  It’s disconcerting to jump back and forth between a daytime aerial dogfight and a nighttime sea illuminated by fires and explosions. Don’t expect an explanation of what’s going on.

But by eschewing a linear narrative Nolan is able to ramp up the tension, zigging and zagging between cliffhanger moments as various characters fight to survive.

The first of these tales is set among the soldiers crowded on the beach, sitting ducks for the German pilots who seem to control the sky.

A British naval commander (Kenneth Branagh) desperately coordinates an evacuation that relies on the Mole, the sole pier in water deep enough to accommodate a large ship.

Most of this sequence centers on a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) who is desperate to save himself. He poses as a stretcher bearer, hoping to get aboard a medical ship being loaded with the wounded. He’s fortunate enough to take refuge in an evacuation ship, but it is torpedoed and he must return to shore. He eventually joins another unit taking refuge in the hold of a beached trawler…they’re hoping for high tide to take them to sea while the boat becomes a target for Nazi marksmen.

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