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“CHUCK”: If you wanna you can bleed on me

May 25, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Liev Schreiber as boxer Chuck Wepner

“CHUCK” My rating: B

98 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Watching a familiar actor utterly lose him/herself in a role is one of the deep pleasures of moviegoing.

Liev Schreiber makes that transformation in “Chuck.” But then so do Naomi Watts (a.k.a. Mrs. Schreiber), Elizabeth Moss, Ron Perlman and Jim Gaffigan.

The subject of director Philippe Falardeau’s bracing little film (the screenplay is credited to Jeff Feuerzeig, Jerry Stahl, Michael  Cristofer and Schreiber) is Chuck Wepner, the  New Jersey club fighter known affectionately/sardonically as the “Bayonne Bleeder” for his willingness to be beaten to a pulp.  (In fact, “Chuck’s” original title was “The Bleeder.” Wish they’d stuck with it.)

In 1975 the virtually unknown Wepner got a crack at taking away Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight belt in a bout conceived and advertised by promoter Don King as a blatant racial  confrontation.

Werner’s fight strategy was pretty simple: “I could’t hit  him. I figured I’d wear him down with my face.”

Wepner didn’t win, but he lasted for more than 14 bloody rounds against the world’s best, sending the champ to the mat once and losing by a TKO with only 19 seconds left in the fight.

Out in Hollywood a struggling actor named Sylvester Stallone was so inspired by Wepner’s David-and-Goliath story that he wrote a screenplay called “Rocky.”

“Chuck” isn’t really a boxing film. Rather, it is simultaneously a fact-based yarn about the ever-widening fallout from the Ali-Wepner fight and a character study of a Palooka whose a brief brush with fame went straight to his head.

Schreiber’s Chuck, who narrates his story, is by most accounts a pretty average guy. He worked as a nightclub bouncer and as a debt collector for a loan shark, though his heart wasn’t in it. (“I was never good at roughing guys up. Too nice.”)

His wife Phyllis (Moss) is the family breadwinner, thanks to her gig with the U.S. Post Office. Chuck shows his appreciation by writing heartfelt doggerel about her virtues.

Eventually an admirer lands Chuck a liquor distributorship.  It’s an OK living, but it provides way too many opportunities to hang around bars and pick up other women. (It also provides an opportunity for a soundtrack filled with disco hits.)

The Ali fight provides Chuck with bragging rights and celebrity status.  Once “Rocky” becomes an Oscar-winning phenomenon, everyone assumes he must have sold his story to the  movies for big bucks.  In fact, Chuck didn’t earn a cent off the film.

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“JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT”

May 25, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Jeremiah Tower

“JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT” My rating: B-

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Jeremiah Tower isn’t a household name…unless you’re a hard-core foodie.  In which case he is a god walking the earth.

Tower’s career as a chef goes back 40 years to the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, where with owner Alice Waters he pioneered the notion of local ingredients and a distinctive California cuisine.

Lydia Tenaglia’s documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” covers its subject’s triumphs (the San Francisco hot spot Stars) and failures, his long period of exile in Mexico and his recent short-lived resurrection as the head chef at the Tavern on the Green in NYC (the place, apparently, where old chefs go to die).

Tower is an important and controversial figure in the world of American cuisine, at least according to  famous talking heads like Martha Stewart, Anthony Bourdain (a producer of  the film), Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali.

But Tenaglia’s film is perhaps most powerful in its efforts to understand a man regarded even by close acquaintances as unknowable.

Tower was the son of rich jet-setters who taught him by example how to live well. And that’s about all they taught him. One of the film’s more revealing anecdotes relates his hard-drinking parents’ surprise at learning that young Jeremiah had for months been living undetected in their mansion; each assumed the other had arranged for him to be sent to a boarding school.

He grew up charming, handsome, bisexual — and enigmatic. He had lovers and friends, but he reserved his true passions for food.

We see him wandering around Aztec ruins in Mexico, spouting philosophy. (Tower seems much more comfortable discussing ideas than feelings.)

The film’s final passages describe how Tower came out of retirement to take over Tavern on the Green, and how it all blew up in his face.

There are traces of bitterness in Tower’s comments about the debacle, but ultimately he’s a man who seems absolutely content just to be with himself.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE LOVERS”: Muddled romance

May 25, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Tracy Letts, Debra Winger

“THE LOVERS” My rating: B 

94 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Spectacularly acted and deliciously dark, “The Lovers” is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and drama.

Azazel Jacobs’ cinematic faceslap centers on the fiftysomething Michael and Mary (Tracy Letts, Debra Winger), a suburban  couple who  have been married for so long that they’ve given up searching for that old spark.

They’re more like roommates than spouses. Most of their conversations center on the mundane; they can coast a long way on “We’re out of toothpaste.”

But each is having a secret extramarital affair.

Michael is doodling with Lucy (Melora Walters), a  ballet instructor at least a decade his junior whose neediness is off the charts.

Mary is getting it on with Robert (Aidan Gillen, Littlefinger on “Game of Thrones”), a writer who’s given to lurking outside her place of work.

Both Lucy and Robert are absurdly vulnerable and emotionally naked.  They’re more like a couple of lovesick teens than adults, and Michael and Mary are exhausting themselves trying to please their lovers without giving away  the game at home.

It may be time to fish or cut bait.  Lucy and Robert are tired of the lies and excuses and each lays down the law:  End the marriage.  Now

Independently, Michael and Mary both promise that they’ll bring down the curtain  during an upcoming reunion with their college-age son.

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“PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES”: Cinematic self abuse

May 25, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Johnny Depp

“PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES”  My rating: C- 

129 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

At this late stage audiences for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” should know better than to expect any surprises.

Like all of its predecessors, “Dead Men” is as shiny and polished as a hand-blown glass Christmas ornament — and just as empty.

The plot (the screenplay is credited to Jeff Nathanson) is predictably incomprehensible.

Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), the grown son of series regular Will Turner (Orlando Bloom, who has maybe 90 seconds of screen time), is determined to save his father from eternal enslavement on the sunken ship the Flying Dutchman. (Thwaites is such a bland screen presence that he achieves the near impossible by making Bloom seem dynamic.)

To break that spell Henry will have to obtain several powerful talismans:  a pirate diary containing a hidden map, a compass with mystical properties,  Poseidon’s trident.

He bickers with a young woman, Carina (Kaya Scodelario), who is so much smarter than the oafish and superstitious men around her that she’s repeatedly condemned as a witch. Wanna bet they’re going to move past bickering and fall in love?

The series regulars — among them Geoffrey Rush as the dour Captain Barbossa and the crew members of the Black Pearl — give their usual one-note performances. Most of these characters were set in stone four movies ago and haven’t evolved one whit.

That goes especially for star Johnny Depp, whose Captain Jack Sparrow remains an unchanging and buffoonish blend of swash and swish. For this viewer, anyway, the charm wore off several films back. Continue Reading »

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“BLACK BUTTERFLY”: Rocky Mountain low

May 25, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Antonio Banderas, Piper Perabo

“BLACK BUTTERFLY” My rating: C+

93 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Brian Goodman’s “Black Butterfly” is a moderately effective thriller with several “gotcha!” twists…until it delivers one gotcha twist too many.

Paul (Antonio Banderas) is a once-promising novelist and screenwriter now fallen upon hard times. He sits in his remote cabin home in the Rockies (actually, the film was shot in Italy) pecking aimlessly at his typewriter, drinking heavily and hoping for inspiration. It isn’t forthcoming.

Meanwhile a serial killer has been terrorizing the neighborhood, snatching young women who are never seen again.

During a confrontation at a local diner with a bad-tempered trucker, Paul is defended by Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a mysterious drifter. Thankful for the intervention, he invites Jack to stay a few days at his home.  Jack agrees to make some repairs to the place, which the financially-strapped Paul must reluctantly sell.

But there’s something a bit off about this guest.  Jack keeps in his backpack newspaper clippings about the missing women. He can be surly and suspicious.

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“A QUIET PASSION”: Mighty words

May 18, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle as the Dickinson sisters

“A QUIET PASSION” My rating: B 

125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Like most of Terence Davies’ films, “A Quiet Passion” moves at a glacial pace that taxes an audience’s patience.

Stick with it, though, and you’ll get Cynthia Nixon in the performance of a lifetime.

As poet Emily Dickinson, Nixon (most of us will always know her as the red-headed Miranda on HBO’s “Sex and the City”) plays a physically passive character.  About the most exciting thing Emily Dickinson does is leisurely walk through her family’s 19th-century garden beneath a parasol.

But beneath that civilized, socially-acceptable exterior there beats an angry heart, and periodically it surges to the forefront with dazzling results.

Davies’ screenplay follows Emily from her graduation from a girls’ school (in early scenes she’s played by Emma Bell) to her death in 1886 at age 55. With the exception of an opening scene set at the school, Davies film unfolds entirely in the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Massachusetts — fittingly so, since by middle age Emily was something of a recluse who devoted herself to her ailing mother.

She also devoted herself to her writing,  though Dickinson  died before her work was widely distributed.  Today, of course, she’s regarded as one of best poets this country ever produced, but during her lifetime she saw only about a dozen poems printed in local newspapers.  And those were heavily tinkered with by editors who disapproved of her creative punctuation and other eccentricities.

Film biographies of writers are usually odd affairs.  Nothing terribly interesting in a person scribbling with a pen or pecking at a typewriter.  Davies includes a few shots of Emily writing, but mostly he uses Nixon’s voice-over narration to read relevant Dickinson works.

What the film is really about are Emily’s interactions with her family and friends, and how they reveal her mind and personality. Some of these confrontations are genteel and measured, others volcanic.

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“FOLK HERO & FUNNY GUY”: Road trip

May 18, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Meredith Hagner, Alex Karpovsky, Wyatt Russell

“FOLK HERO  & FUNNY GUY” My rating: C+

88 minutes | No MPAA rating

A moderately diverting buddy/road movie, “Folk Hero &  Funny Guy” isn’t incisive enough to capture our imaginations. But it isn’t awful, either.

Jeff Grace’s comedy stars Alex Karpovsky (a regular on HBO’s “Girls”) as Paul, a professional standup comic whose career has hit a creative wall.  Basically he’s been repeating his material for so long that he’s been bypassed by the modern era. (I mean, the guy still tries to get mileage out of a joke about e-vite invitations.)

Turns out Paul’s best friend from childhood, Jason (Wyatt Russell), is a nationally known folk rocker with a burgeoning career.  Jason suggests that Paul accompany him on his new solo tour as an opening act.

Paul needs the work and the exposure.  Jason wants to re-bond with his bud. What could go wrong?

Enter Bryn (Meredith Hagner), a guitar-strumming gal whom they encounter at an open-mic night.  Jason impulsively asks her to join the tour (after impulsively taking her to bed).

Except that schlubby Paul also has the hots for this newcomer, who seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping both men at arm’s length.

And that, folks, is pretty much it.

You can say this for “Folk Hero & Funny Guy”…it feels right.  Paul’s comedy is sometimes wince-inducing, but it has enough sparks of wit to let us know he’s capable of more.

Russell and Hagner’s musical passages are, well, pretty freakin’ great.  In most movies like this the musical performances are never good enough to convince you that the  audience in the movie is genuinely  going nuts for the concert. Here you believe.

| Robert W. Butler

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“NORMAN”: Charlie hustle

May 18, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Richard Gere

“NORMAN”  My rating: B

118 minutes | |MPAA rating: R

You don’t have to like Norman Oppenheimer, the fast-talking character played by Richard Gere in “Norman,” to appreciate his energy and drive.

Norman is a hustler and a schmoozer, an arm twister and a facile liar. When necessary he can be a party crasher and a stalker.

He appears to be a businessman (his card vaguely reads “Oppenheimer Strategies”) who specializes in putting together deals. More accurately, he puts together people far more capable than himself who can put together deals. With luck Norman gets a cut of the action.

One of the wonders of Gere’s performance (just when did he become such a terrific actor?) is that even while Norman remains a mystery, a cypher, he’s strangely compelling.

(The movie has a secondary title: “The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.” That right there tells you what we can look forward to.)

In the early scenes we see Norman pestering casual acquaintances and heavy hitters on the New York financial scene (among the players are Michael Sheen, Dan Stevens, Josh Charles and Harris Yulin). Outwardly Norman oozes confidence and professionalism. He’s impeccably dressed and groomed.

But beneath that show of casual affluence you get a whiff of angst from a minor player desperate to be part of the big game. Norman is usually broke; he pops Tic Tacs in lieu of meals. He can’t afford an office, conducting all his business over his cell phone.

Writer/director Joseph Cedar’s film turns on Norman’s courting of an Israeli deputy minister visiting the Big Apple for a conference. Eshel (an excellent Lior Ashkenazi) is a bureaucratic  nobody grateful that this apparent go-getter of an American wants to befriend him. Norman even treats him to the city’s most expensive pair of men’s shoes.

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“CHASING TRANE”: A love supreme

May 12, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

“CHASING TRANE” My rating: B

99 minutes |No MPAA rating

Most practitioners of the arts seek a compromise between vision and commerce.  Your art may be pure, but what does that matter if it doesn’t sell?

The saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-’67) seems not to have been concerned by matters of money or of popularity. As the new documentary “Chasing Trane” makes clear, he followed his muse wherever it took him, sometimes into aural landscapes that continue t0 perplex even his biggest fans.

John Scheinfeld’s “Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary” wastes no time making its case that the legendary jazz man was an artist of the first order, comparable to Beethoven or Shakespeare.

A staggering array of fellow musicians (Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson…just for starters), Coltrane biographers, his children and stepchildren, even a former Presdient of the United States testify not only to his talents but to the spirituality which fueled Coltrane’s musical adventurousness. He was so adept at channelling his emotions into his playing that listeners report being moved to tears without understanding how or why.

The facts of Coltrane’s career are cleanly laid out before us:  His childhood as the grandson of a minister, his work in the 1950s with the Miles Davis Quintet during its most productive period (his playing on the classic album “Kind of Blue” made him a household name among jazz fans) and later with Dizzy Gillespie.  His heroin addiction, which threatened to derail his career until he heroically kicked the habit cold turkey.

In 1961 Coltrane had a Top 40 hit with his instrumental take on “My Favorite Things” from the white-bread Broadway musical “The Sound of Music.”

In response to the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham church in which four little girls died, Coltrane wrote and recorded the tune “Alabama,” described by former president and part time saxophonist Bill Clinton as a prime example of  Coltrane’s creativity and depth. It is, Clinton says with uncharacteristic poetry, a work “screaming with pain, undergirded by love.” Continue Reading »

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” A DARK SONG”: The necromancy of forgiveness

May 11, 2017 by butlerscinemascene

Catherine Walker

“A DARK SONG” My rating: B

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s easy enough to scare audiences with shocker editing and gross-out special effects.

But a film that gets under your skin and gnaws away at your nerve endings from the inside out…well, that’s something special.

“A Dark Song” is a horror movie, yes, but it’s also much more.

It’s a docudrama about the preparations for an Aleister Crowley-style summoning of demons and angels.

It’s a two-handed acting extravaganza that demands tremendous subtlety from stars Catherine Walker and Steve Oram.

And it’s an unexpectedly uplifting morality play that toys with shock film cliches but ultimately transcends them.

Liam Gavin’s film opens in a long-unoccupied manor house in Wales.  Sophia Howard (Walker) is being shown the place by a realtor. Apparently she has very specific requirements as to the remoteness of the property and the number of rooms. She agrees to lease the place for a year.

She’s then visited by Solomon (Oram), a balding, bearded, pudgy occultist with whom she’s been in contact. Gradually the nature of what they’re up to becomes clear.

Sophia wants Solomon to lead her through an elaborate ritual that will result in the appearance of her guardian angel. This exercise may take half a year, during which time Sophia must follow Solomon’s instructions to the letter.  She’s already abstained from sex and alcohol for several months. She’s purchased weeks’ worth of food. Once the ritual begins neither can leave the premises without dire consequences.

Now this may seem like so much fantastic b.s., but Gavin and his players are so good at establishing their characters and setting a slowly tightening mood of suspense and dread that an audience can’t help but buy into it.

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