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“LITTLE MEN”: Innocent youth

September 29, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

**** and ****

Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz

“LITTLE MEN”  My rating: B

85 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Suffused with somber wisdom and and delicate emotions, Ira Sachs’  “Little Men” is a terrific movie about boyhood friendship.

It’s also about conflicts in the adult world that can destroy that innocent and easygoing intimacy.

Thirteen-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) is initially dismayed when his parents move from glamorous Manhattan to pedestrian Brooklyn and the building long owned by his recently deceased grandfather. Yeah, there’s more room in the rent-free second-floor apartment where Grandpa lived…but it’s Brooklyn.

He undergoes an attitude adjustment after meeting Tony (Michael Barbieri), whose mother Leonor (Paulina Garcia) operates a dress shop on the ground floor.

The kids complement each other nicely.  Jake is quiet and thoughtful; Tony is brash and confidant (and very, very bright).  Moreover, they share a love not only of video games but of the arts.  Jake is a promising painter and Tony has set his goal on becoming an actor.

Over time they set in motion plans to get into an arts-themed high school.

The boys are so tuned in to each other’s emotions and intellects (there’s just the slightest suggestion that Jake might be gay, but the matter is left hanging) that they’re late in realizing the conflicts developing in the adult world around them.

Jake’s parents — his psychoanalyst mother Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) and struggling actor father Brian (Greg Kenner) — discover that Leonor has been paying Grandpa a fraction of what should be the going rent on her storefront shop in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

Leonor maintains that she and the old man were very close (just how close is a matter for speculation) and that he wanted her to have the space more or less in perpetuity.  Furthermore, she maintains she was more of a family to him than his flesh and blood across the East River.

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“THE DRESSMAKER”: High fashion and spaghetti Westerns

September 29, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet

“THE DRESSMAKER” My rating: B-

119 minutes | MPAA rating: R

So many stories, moods and contradictory elements are swirling around in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “The Dressmaker” that it’s no wonder it never settles down into a coherent whole.

Parts of this Down Under oddity, though, are delightfully memorable.

Adapting Rosalie Hamm’s novel with her husband, filmmaker P.J. Hogan (“Peter Pan,” “Muriel’s Wedding”), Moorhouse has given this period piece a distinct visual look and no shortage of eccentric characters.

And almost everywhere you look, “The Dressmaker” is paying homage to other films and literary works.

There is, for starters, the film’s basic setup: A woman returns to the provincial town of her childhood, not so much to be reacquainted with old friends as to explore her tormented past and perhaps take revenge on those who made her youth a living hell.  That, combined with its blend of absurdist humor and angry drama, makes “The Dressmaker” a sort of modern-day clone of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s often-revived 1956 tragicomedy “The Visit.”

At the same time “Dressmaker” borrows freely from the spaghetti Western tradition. Though it’s in Australia, the town to which our heroine returns looks like nothing so much as a barren Wild West burg, complete with dirt main street, weird rock formations, ramshackle buildings and  a few leafless dead trees.

David Hirschfelder’s musical score is heavy on ersatz Ennio Morricone, right down to the electric guitars, pounding tympani and clanging chimes.

It’s 1951 and after an absence of nearly 20 years Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) has returned to dusty Dungatar (emphasis on the “dung”). She moves back in with her half-cracked mother Molly (Judy Davis), who lives in bag-lady squalor in a crumbling hovel overlooking the town.

Tilly reintroduces herself by attending a local football match in a flaming red evening gown that must be the brightest object within 100 square miles.

In the years she was away Tilly worked in the fashion industry in London, Paris and Milan and she relishes the opportunity to rub the townspeoples’ faces in her sophistication.

Some locals aren’t buying this vision in their midst.  As a child Tilly was suspected of murdering a classmate and was shipped off to a boarding school in Melbourne for her own safety. She’s not exactly everyone’s favorite person.

But others, mostly long-put-upon women, see her arrival as a godsend.  Especially after Tilly uses her dressmaking and makeup skills to transform a drudge of a shopgirl (Sarah Snook) into a glamorous fashion plate capable of luring and hooking the wealthiest young man in town.

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“EVA HESSE”: A short but productive life

September 22, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse

“EVA HESSE”  My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 23 at the Tivoli)

108 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Eva Hesse” is a pedestrian documentary about a major artistic figure.

Go for the information, not for the telling.

A child of refugees from Naziism, Eva Hesse in her brief life more or less created the post minimal art movement by incorporating into her pieces mass-produced objects in plastic, latex, fiberglass and other nontraditional (for art, anyway) materials.

Her goal, according to one admirer, was “to make art on the borderline of uncontrollability.”

Eva’s private life was a mess (“There’s not been one normal thing in my life.  Not one.”) and she died of cancer in 1970, when she was only 33. Yet she opened up untold possibilities for her fellow artists.

Ironically, the unconventional materials she employed now pose big headaches for museums that display her work. Many of her pieces are literally decaying before our eyes — a conservatorial nightmare that she seems to have foreseen and approved of.

“She didn’t just manipulate materials, she was the material,” an admirer says. That philosophy extends to the temporary nature of her art. Here today, gone tomorrow. Continue Reading »

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“KLOWN FOREVER”: Dirty middle-aged men

September 22, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Caspar Christensen, Frank Hval

Caspar Christensen, Frank Hvam

“KLOWN FOREVER” My rating: C+ (Opens Sept. 23 a the Alamo Drafthouse)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

At about the 37-minute mark the wooly and borderline  reprehensible Danish comedy “Klown Forever” delivers the biggest laugh of any film of 2016.

I’m talking gasping-roaring-fall-out-of-your-chair-even-if-you’re-watching-it-alone-at-home funny.

It involves a naked man and a curious Great Dane.

‘Nuff said.

The rest of “Klown Forever,” a sequel to the 2010 “Klown,” is a bit of a hit-or-miss affair. Those who loved the first movie (or the original Danish TV series, which has been called a Scandinavian “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) will undoubtedly be primed for more rude, absurdist, man-centric humor.

Once again our heroes are Casper (Casper Christensen) and Frank (Frank Hvam), whose show-biz partnership reminds a bit of that of Rob Bryden and Steve Coogan in “The Trip” films. Apparently the two are partners in some sort of comedy undertaking, although we never see them at work.

Mostly they’re getting into trouble.

Casper  is a bachelor horn dog who cannot think past his pecker. Frank is a husband and father who is always being led astray by his priapic best bud.

The plot centers on Casper’s decision to go it alone, looking for new career opportunities in Los Angeles. Left behind, Frank is bereft…and of course ends up following his pal to LaLa Land where new opportunities for misbehavior are always presenting themselves.

They rub elbows with some celebrities (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Isla Fisher and Adam Levine, playing themselves), get picked up by some ladies of questionable repute, and have a falling out over Casper’s sexually active daughter (Simone Colling).  Meanwhile Frank’s long-suffering wife (Mia Lyhne), must decide whether to forgive her hubby’s trespasses or leave his stupid ass.

The moral of the “Klown” universe is that boys will be boys and men will be even worse. If you can get behind that world view, then this might be right up your alley.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE HOLLARS”: Family dysfunction dramedy

September 22, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

John Krasinski, Margo Martindale

John Krasinski, Margo Martindale

“THE HOLLARS” My rating: C+

98 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

John Krasicki’s strengths as an actor — a sly sense of humor, emotional openess, a charitable view toward his own and other actors’ characters — are also on display in his feature film directing debut.

But despite a cast to die for and some heartfelt sentiment, “The Hollars” is a near miss, a movie in which everything seems just a degree or two out of whack.

Jim Strauss’s screenplay is yet another dysfunctional family dramedy.

Illness in the family brings NYC office drone John Hollar (Krasinksi) back to his middle American hometown. He leaves behind his pregnant girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) and a dead-end job — what he really wants to do is write and illustrate graphic novels.

Ma Hollar (Margo Martindale) has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Even with that against her she shows more common sense than the menfolk of her clan, who are more or less eccentric idiots.

Dad Hollar (Richard Jenkins) lives in an emotional bubble of denial. Whenever he steps out of that bubble he collapses in tears. And he’s run the family’s plumbing business into the ground, forcing him to fire his oldest son Ron (Shallot Copley), who now lives in the basement.

Ron is a near-moron who is stalking the ex-wife with whom he has two little girls. And he harbors some absurd notions about minorities (he assumes that his mother’s surgeon, an Asian American, must be a master of at least one martial art).

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“SNOWDEN”: The geek’s conscience

September 15, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

snowden-750x490“SNOWDEN”  My rating: B

134 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was practically made for Oliver Stone.

Government overreach, conspiracy and corruption, plus a hero who acts alone in defiance of hopeless odds — they’re all the elements of a typical Stone film (“Wall Street,” “Platoon,” “Salvador,” “JFK,” “Born on the Fourth of July”).

And with age has come a certain mellowing of the Stone approach. It’s not like he’s any less radically left — it’s just that now he can make his case without the hysteria and hyperbole that often marred his earlier work.

And in Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stone has a leading man seemingly at the peak of his powers.

Those whose minds are not already made up when it comes to l’affaire Snowden will find Stone’s new film “Snowden” largely convincing. Even if you’re inclined to brand Snowden as a traitor worthy of death, the film will remain troubling.

(OK, time out. Let me say up front that while “Snowden” is a good film, it pales in comparison with “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary from 2015 in which the real Snowden, a newly-minted international fugitive hiding in a Hong Kong hotel room, is interrogated by the journalists who would leak his most inflammatory revelations to the awaiting world. Everyone should see “Citizenfour.” But most people dislike documentaries, and so the fictional Stone version will be the one most people will see and remember. Fact of life.)

Most of ”Snowden” is one long flashback. In the present we’re in that hotel room with filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and reporters Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson).

Tell us about yourself, one of the journalists says, and the next thing we know we’re at an Army training camp where young Edward Snowden is preparing to take on the terrorists who leveled the World Trade Center. Continue Reading »

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“HIERONYMUS BOSCH, TOUCHED BY THE DEVIL”: Angels and demons

September 15, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

bosch-temptationstanthony“HIERONYMUS BOSCH, TOUCHED BY THE DEVIL” My rating: B-

86 minutes | No MPAA rating

Under most circumstances the Tivoli Theater would play an art-themed documentary like “Heironymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil” for one night only. Maybe two at most.

But Pieter van Haste’s film has a Kansas City connection that makes it of more than routine interest to folks hereabouts. Which is why today it begins a week-long run at the Westport art house.

The movie follows a team of art historians and museum types as they prepare for a special exhibition of the paintings of the Dutch master Heironymus Bosch — famous for his hallucinogenic depictions of heaven and hell — in his hometown of Den Bosch in the Netherlands.

The show (it ran earlier this year) celebrated the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, and featured as many of his paintings as the curators could lay hands on (only about two dozen authenticated Bosch works are recognized).

What makes this of local interest is that in researching Bosch’s output the experts determined that a painting held by the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art for the last 70 years (most of that time in storage), was indeed done by the hand of Bosch and not one of his imitators or pupils.

The “discovery” of the Nelson-Atkins’ “The Temptation of St. Anthony” occurs in the last 20 minutes of the documentary.

Up to that time the film focuses on preparations for the big show. We see how art historians use infrared technology to peer beneath the surface of works to reveal earlier images that subsequently were painted over.

An expert in wood — Bosch painted on wood panels — can count the tree rings in a particular piece and identify years of drought. Comparing those rings to the records of rainfall and drought 500 years ago, he can approximate the year the tree was cut down.  A wood panel that was harvested after Bosch’s death cannot have been painted by the master himself.

The film also devotes much time to the cautious dance of courtship and rejection as the Dutch scholars attempt to convince the staff at Madrid’s Prado Museum — the single largest repository of Bosch paintings — that they should lend their masterwork, the triptych “The Garden of Delights,” for the show.

In a quiet but emphatic display of curatorial territoriality, the Spaniards turn down the request.

All this is mildly interesting but a bit dry.  The film fares better when it zeroes in on the paintings themselves, lingering on Bosch’s scary/fascinating menagerie of demonic creatures, on the twisted naked forms of tortured souls, and on his eerie depictions of nighttime landscapes illuminated by mysterious fires (no doubt inspired by a devastating conflagration that destroyed Bosch’s hometown when he was a boy). Continue Reading »

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“MR. CHURCH”: Solemn Murphy

September 15, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Eddie Murphy

Eddie Murphy

“MR. CHURCH”  My rating: C+

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

An opening credit for “Mr. Church” claims that the film was “inspired by a true friendship.”

Actually it seems to have been inspired by every other racially-tinged tearjerker ever made.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t work, at least part of the time.

Director Bruce Beresford (“Breaker Morant,” “Tender Mercies” and especially “Driving Miss Daisy”) is a skilled enough director to finesse many of the emotional and narrative landmines that litter Susan McMartin’s screenplay, and the performances of Britt Robertson, Natascha McElhone and Eddie Murphy in the title role are good enough that we’re moved…even if we resent it.

The film’s first five minutes unload enough revelations to fill an entire movie.  The time is the mid-’70s, the location Los Angles.

The beautiful Marie Brooks (McElhone) is the single mother to young Charlotte/Charlie (played as a child by Natalie Coughlan).  Charlie awakens one morning to find a rather elegant black man (Murphy) cooking a gourmet breakfast in the kitchen.

Charlotte is informed that the cook, Mr. Church, was bequeathed to Marie by her former lover, a wealthy  married man who before dying specified that Mr. Church work as a cook and caregiver until Marie’s death, and that thereafter he will continue to receive his salary for the rest of his life.

What Charlotte doesn’t know is that her mother is dying of cancer. Thus this unusual gift from her one-time paramour.

Except that Marie hangs in there. Expected to last only six months, she lives for another six years. And Mr. Church faithfully sticks around.

By this time Charlie is a teenager (Britt Robertson, who has the unusual ability to convincing play any age between 16 and 30). She heads to college on the East Coast, but after a year or two turns up on Mr. Church’s doorstep, pretty and pregnant. They resume the unofficial father/daughter relationship that has sustained them for most of Charlie’s life.

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“THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS”

September 14, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

beatles_592x299“THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS”  My rating: B+ (Opens Sept. 15 at the Tivoli)

106 minutes | No MPAA rating

There have been plenty of Beatles documentaries and no doubt there will be plenty more.

But if I had to explain to one of today’s teens what Beatlemania  was all about, I’d sit them down to watch Ron Howard’s “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.”

The doc focuses on the first five years of the Beatles’ timeline, ending with the 1966 concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park that ended their live performances.

Employing endless archival footage (some of it shot by fans and never before disseminated) and cleaned-up audio tracks that prove just how terrific a live band the Fab Four were (even if concertgoers couldn’t hear much because of all the screaming), the movie is more than just a factual document.

It is an emotional one.  Want to know what it was like to be young in 1964? Watch this movie.

What’s really amazing is how well the four Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr — kept their shit together in the madhouse of Beatlemania.  They were bemused and not a little awed by it all, but tried to keep their heads on straight with cheeky humor and a what-the-hell attitude.

Asked if they saw themselves as pioneers of a cultural revolution, the Beatles said they were having a good “larf.” Who knew when it might end?

Ringo reveals how they had an entire floor of New York’s Plaza Hotel and still couldn’t get any privacy.  The four lads ended up hiding in a bathroom, laughing over the insanity of it all.

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“SULLY”: Mr. Deeds lands an airplane

September 8, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Aaron Eckhart, Tom Hanks

Aaron Eckhart, Tom Hanks

“SULLY”  My rating: B  

96 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Clint Eastwood is not a film stylist. No fancy camera angles. No innovative editing. No signature flourishes.
What he is is a terrific and seemingly effortless storyteller, one of the best now making movies.
Exhibit A is “Sully,” Eastwood’s recreation of 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson,”  in which a crippled jetliner landed on the Hudson River without the loss of one of the 155 souls aboard.
Tom Hanks stars as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the 40-year aviation veteran who within seconds of losing both engines to a flock of Canada geese realized a return to La Guardia Airport was impossible…that the only chance of salvation was a water landing.
Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay (based on the memoir by the real Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger) devotes half of the film’s 96-minute running time to the brief flight and the crash itself.  
The near-disaster is experienced from several vantage points (pilots and crew, passengers, first responders, witnesses), with each iteration providing new insights and not a few thrills.
This is absorbing, shocking, logic-defying stuff.
Now we all know that nobody died on US Airways Flight 1549. Still, the film generates tension by revealing that  NTSB investigators were all but prepared to pin the blame on Sully and first mate Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart). (The film takes dramatic license by launching the hearings immediately after the incident; in reality, they came 18 months later.)
Computer simulations suggested that the damaged aircraft could have returned to the airport. Did Sully make a bad call that put everyone on board at risk?

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