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“A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING”: Stranger in a strange land

April 21, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

***, Tom Hanks

Alexander Black, Tom Hanks

“A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING” My rating: B+ 

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Tom Tykwer’s “A Hologram for the King” begins with what appears to be a music video.

Tom Hanks, in suit and tie, is moving through a suburban neighborhood singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” As he cover the song’s lyrics — “You may find yourself looking for your large automobile; you may find yourself without a beautiful house, without a beautiful wife…” –those objects of middle-class American happiness and stability vanish in clouds of garish purple smoke.

What the hell kind of movie is this, anyway?

Well, it’s a pretty great one, actually, although its charms are slow in developing.

That musical interlude, it turns out, is a dream that businessman Alan Clay (Hanks) is having while napping on a jet bound for Saudi Arabia. He awakens to find himself in the middle of an Islamic religious ceremony. He’s the only person on board not dressed in white and making a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Alan, whose career and marriage both have hit rock bottom, is trying to start over. He’s landed a job with a huge American telecommunications firm and is en route to Saudi Arabia to make a presentation of his firm’s latest technical innovation, a communications system that allows callers to converse with a life-size, three-dimensional hologram of the person on the other end of the line. The Saudi king will personally choose the winning bid; the job will be worth millions.

Being a can-do sort of guy and a born salesman, Alan hopes to reverse his business fortunes. Things aren’t so easily fixed in the marriage department. His ex wife  hates his guts. Mostly Alan feels guilty because he can no longer pay for college for his adoring daughter (Tracey Fairaway), who has dropped out and taken a job waitressing.

From the minute he touches down, things start going wrong. Alan has a killer case of jet lag and keeps missing the shuttle to the city of the future out in the desert where he’s to make his presentation. The Saudi bigwigs with whom he is supposed to meet have made themselves scarce and the three American technicians already on site are working out of a huge tent where there’s no wi-fi, inadequate air conditioning, and nothing to eat.

It’s going to be a disaster. Except that it also may be the greatest experience of Alan Clay’s life.

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“BORN TO BE BLUE”: Blue-eyed jazz

April 14, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

“BORN TO BE BLUE” My rating: B

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

We are introduced to musician Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) in a filthy jail cell. He’s lying on the concrete floor in a fetal position, sweat pouring off him, surrounded by cigarette butts. He seems to be going through heroin withdrawl.

So we know from the getgo that “Born to Be Blue,” Canadian filmmaker Robert Budreau’s feature about the “James Dean of jazz,” is going to be a rough ride.

Trumpeter/vocalist Baker (1929-1988) is famed as the inventor of West Coast swing. He is also the very model of the white junkie jazz genius, his main competition for the title being the late Art Pepper.

“Born to Be Blue” isn’t a formal biopic. Rather, writer/director Bureau attempts something like Todd Hayne’s Bob Dylan-themed “I’m Not There.” Think of it as a fantasia on the life and loves of a terrific musician who was also a deeply flawed individual.

The junkie jazzman is hardly a new cinematic concept, but “Born…” benefits from what may be Hawke’s strongest performance. Chet Baker was a handsome, charismatic charmer who, when he wasn’t creating great music, was battling demons.

Watching Hawke’s work here, we realize why people were drawn to Baker, and why most eventually bailed.

The film begins in 1954 with the young Chet playing New York City, pursued by swooning bobbysoxers and desperate to earn the approval of his idols and competitors, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

In this black-and-white segment he picks up a beautiful black woman and takes her to his hotel suite, where she turns him on to heroin. Their buzz is interrupted when the woman (Carmen Ejogo, the Brit who played Coretta Scott King in “Selma”) breaks character and accuses Chet of ignoring their dialogue and improvising.

 

 

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“EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!”: Long night’s journey into hangover

April 14, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Welcome to the Animal House

Welcome to the Animal House

“EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!” My rating: B 

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Nothing much happens in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” Nor is the film in any hurry to get there.

But that’s the movie’s charm.

Set in 1980 on the weekend before fall classes begin at the fictional Southeast Texas University, this rollicking comedy envisions how the high school athletes from Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” might deal with their first college experience.

Our hero is Jake (Blake Jenner), a lanky, smart and just-a-bit naive kid who looks like a young Matt Dillon.  Jake has landed a scholarship to play baseball at SETU. He’s been assigned to live with other players in a ratty, water-stained off-campus residence.

Any resemblance to “Animal House” is not coincidental.

Jake arrives as a couple of the upperclassmen are using a garden hose to fill a waterbed. The added weight threatens to bring down the kitchen ceiling. One resident doesn’t see the point: “It’s like having sex with a girl on top of another really fat girl.”

Jake and the other freshman players are welcomed to the club with good-natured hazing, practical jokes, and much loquacious philosophizing from Finn (Glen Powell), a fabulously entertaining chap who is part intellectual, part standup comic, and mostly party animal.

The older guys show the newbies the campus ropes. They cruise the dorm parking lots where the coeds are moving in.  They sample the night life:  a disco ballroom, a country/western dive, a punk rock club.

Along the way Jake meets a cute performing arts major (Zoey Deutch, daughter of actress Leah Thompson and director Howard Deutch) with whom he begins what might become a monumental romance.

 

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“THE ADDERALL DIARIES”: Sins of the fathers

April 14, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Ed Harris, James Franco

Ed Harris, James Franco

“THE ADDERALL DIARIES” My rating: C+ (Opens April 15 at Standees Theatre)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

For a good chunk of its running time “The Adderall Diaries” looks  like yet another drug-addicted-author-with-writer’s-block movie. And do we really need another one of those?

The upside is that if you stick with writer/director Pamela Romanowsky’s adaptation of Stephan Elliott’s 2009 crime memoir, it eventually pays off. Kind of.

Nestled in this tale of sex, drugs, self-righteousness and  self-hatred is a sobering lesson about who we think we are and how others see us, about parental concern and parental guilt.

The question is whether your average viewer can hang on long enough to get to the message.

As the film begins writer Elliott (James Franco) is coasting on the fame of his last book, a searing examination of his childhood as the son of a brutal father, and an adolescence spent on the streets or as a ward of the court.

But at a public reading from the tome, the proceedings are interrupted by an angry man — Elliott’s father (Ed Harris) — who announces that contrary to the best-seller’s assertions, he is not dead but very much alive.

“I should be getting royalties for this shit,” he yells. “You people are all fools.”

Not only does Daddy’s unexpected appearance threaten Elliott’s credibility as a nonfiction writer, it sets the author on a downward spiral. His agent (Cynthia Nixon) has secured a big publishing deal for his next book, but Elliott now finds he cannot write.

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“MY GOLDEN DAYS”: Look back, with ruefulness

April 14, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

**,**

Quentin Dolmaire, Lou Roy-Lecollinet

“MY GOLDEN DAYS”  My rating: B- (Opens April 15 at the Tivoli)

123 minutes | MPAA rating: R

First love can be tough. If we’re lucky we can look back on it with fondness, even while acknowledging how we screwed it up.  Sometimes things go south and it’s really nobody’s fault.

Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days” is a sequel to his 1996 breakthrough film “My Sex Life,” in which he gave us his big-screen alter ego, Paul Dedalus (Mathieu Amalric), a young intellectual  juggling several women.

The new film opens with Paul Dedalus (Amalric once again) returning to France after living most of his adult life in Russia.  Before he can get into the country, though, must have a sit-down with a government security man (Andre Dussollier) about why according to passport records he’s been living the last three decades in Israel.

This leads to the film’s first flashback, a bit of mini-espionage in which the teenage Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) used a high school field trip to the U.S.S.R. to smuggle documents to Jewish refuseniks.  He even gave his French passport to a young Jew his own age, and that man used it to relocate to Israel.  This segment plays like The Hardy Boys Do James Bond.

Once that business has been cleared up and the middle-aged Paul is free to reenter France, the second and more substantial of the film’s flashbacks kicks in.  In this one Paul is a college student who on a weekend break to visit his family falls for one of his younger sister’s friends, the pouty/sexy Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet).

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“MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”: Shine a light

April 7, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

midmaxresdefault“MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”  My rating: B

112 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is almost no element of “Midnight Special” that hasn’t been already thoroughly mined by other science fiction/fantasy films over the last 40 or so years.

And yet through some sort of cinema alchemy writer/director Jeff Nichols makes it all fresh and compelling.

Nichols is the Arkansas auteur of oddball down-home dramas like “Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter” and “Mud.” Here he ventures into full-blown genre moviemaking, and for the most part sucks us in and leaves us wanting even more.

The film begins with three individuals on the run. Roy (Michael Shannon), his eight-year-old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, the scene-stealing kid from “St. Vincent”), and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are making their way across Texas and into Louisiana in a beat-up car that has more Bondo than paint.

Alton is a strange kid who sits in the back seat wearing sound-damping headphones and blue swimming goggles. Since they travel only at night he uses a flashlight to read a stack of comic books.

Turns out the trio are the object of a massive manhunt, not only by the feds (FBI, CIA, whatever else you got) but by the members of a Texas religious cult with whom Elton has lived for the last two years.

Apparently the kid has had visions which have now become as much a part of the sect as the shapeless sisterwife dresses worn by their womenfolk. Incensed that Elton’s dad has snatched him up, the cult leader (Sam Shepherd) dispatches a couple of heavily-armed members of the congregation (Bill Camp, Scott Haze) to recover the boy in the few days remaining before a prophesized day of judgment.

Nichols’ strength as a storyteller is that he doesn’t drop too much up front. His films are voyages of discovery in which audiences pick up the characters’ backgrounds and info about the plot in dribs and drabs.

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“KRISHA”: Home is where they have to let you in

April 7, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Krisha Fairchild

Krisha Fairchild

“KRISHA” My rating: B

83 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The dysfunctional Thanksgiving gathering has long been the subject of cinematic exploration, usually played for knowing laughs.

But writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ debut effort “Krisha” plumbs harrowing depths other filmmakers flee in horror, along the way establishing a narrative style so realistic that you can almost smell the turkey roasting.

In a long, uninterrupted tracking shot, we’re introduced to Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), who parks her ratty pickup truck in an upscale suburban neighborhood and goes door to door looking for her sister’s address.

With a wild mane of nearly-white hair and the sort of long granny dress that screams “hippie Earth mother,” the sixtysomething Krisha locates the right McMansion, is admitted, and finds herself surrounded by an extended family. There’s the usual oohing and aahing about how the kids have grown (they’re mostly college age now) and nice things are said about the new baby.

Everyone seems welcoming, but it’s clear that Krisha is something of a black sheep seeking to be readmitted to the fold. While a dozen or more relations fuss over the big meal, roar at the televised football game, or roughhouse out in the back yard, Krisha stands a bit apart, soaking it all up and looking just a bit fearful.

The first 40 or so minutes of the film are purely observational, and anyone who’s attended a big family holiday celebration will feel right at home with the happy chaos, the babble of several simultaneous conversations, the small pack of dogs underfoot.

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“MARGUERITE”: Tin ear, warm heart

April 7, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Catherine Frot

Catherine Frot

“MARGUERITE” My rating: B+

129 minutes | MPAA rating: R

You can approach “Marguerite”  as a cruel joke, a satire of a wannabe opera singer who doesn’t realize just how awful her voice is.

Fine. Come to laugh. But you’ll leave in a much more sober and contemplative frame of mind.

Xavier Giannoli’s lush period film is set in the early 1920s and was inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), an American socialite who despite a total absence of vocal talent forged a career as an operatic soprano. She became a minor celebrity based on the entertainment value of her off-key recitals.

Giannoli’s fictional “heroine” is Baroness Marguerite Dumont (a spectacular Catherine Frot), who as the film begins is hosting a charity concert on her estate outside Paris.  The highlight of the event will be a rare performance by the Baroness.

A tone-deaf, music-mangling performance, as it turns out, one marked by grandiose theatrical gestures and much caterwauling.

The members of the Mozart Society, which runs mostly on donations from the Baroness, applaud furiously. Others in the crowd — like Lucien (Sylvain Dieuaide) and Kyrill (Aubert Fenoy), two young artistic radicals who have crashed the party — are simultaneously appalled and delighted.

Kyrill declares the performance — and Marguerite’s total lack of self-awareness — a daring new art form (“She’s so sublimely off-key”).  Lucien critiques the concert for a Paris newspaper, parsing his words so carefully that it can be read either as a ringing endorsement or a devastating pan.

The ever-hopeful Baroness takes the review as proof that she should move her career out of the parlor and onto the world’s great concert stages. The plot of “Marguerite” is about her determination to share her “gift” with the world, and the efforts to prevent that great embarrassment.

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“DEMOLITION”: Dismantling numbness

April 7, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal…tearing stuff down

“DEMOLITION”  My rating: B- (Opening April 8 at the Glenwood Arts)

101 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Mental health professionals tell us there’s no “correct” way to grieve. How you mourn depends on who you are.

Even so, it’s hard to sympathize with Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal), the young widower at the heart of Jean-Marc Vallee’s “Demolition,” a film that for much of its running time dares you to care before enventually finding its emotional center.

After losing his wife in an auto accident, it quickly dawns on Davis that he doesn’t feel grief. Or much of anything.

Before the funeral he practices crying in front of a mirror, just so he’ll be able to pass himself off as the bereaved spouse people expect.

But it’s all for show. While Phil (Kansas City’s Chris Cooper), Davis’ father-in-law and boss at a Wall Street investment firm, is obviously shattered by loss, the dead-eyed Davis is simply numb.

He does get worked up by one thing. While waiting in the emergency room, Davis was ripped off by a hospital vending machine that took his money and failed to deliver the M&Ms. Now he sends bizarre rambling letters to the vending machine company’s complaints department.

He’ll tell you it’s not about the money. It’s about the principle. But what it’s really about is having something to obsess over so he doesn’t have to face himself, his loss and his growing sense that he really didn’t know his wife at all.

Vallee, whose “The Dallas Buyers Club” and “Wild” melded art film sensibilities with great acting and strong storytelling, goes out on a limb with “Demolition.” For big swatches of the film he and screenwriter Bryan Sipe give us a protagonist  we can’t figure out or necessarily like.

They create an emotional palette that veers from overt displays of gut-tearing sorrow (from Cooper’s character) to black humor and atavistic outbursts.

The film’s title refers to Davis’ growing mania for destruction. He devotes a night to dismantling his home refrigerator. At the office he takes apart the partitions in the men’s room. Eventually he stops showing up for work and instead pitches in — without pay — to help tear down a house. Still wearing his business suit he takes a sledgehammer to walls and beams. Continue Reading »

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“BASKIN”: Bogeyman

April 7, 2016 by butlerscinemascene

Welcome to hell...

Welcome to hell…

“BASKIN” My rating: C+ 

97 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s not my cup of viscera, but the Turkish horror entry “Baskin” gets points for the supreme confidence with which first-time director Can Evrenol handles a preposterous story.

Like a campfire yarn meant to scare the youngest kid in the Boy Scout troop, the film makes no sense narratively or logically, but instead develops an atmosphere of horror, dread and gross-me-out gore that will have some viewers closing their eyes in self defense.

The film opens in a roadside diner in rural Turkey where five cops are taking their evening meal. They’re like police officers everywhere — self-assured, cocky good ol’ boys fueled by questionable eating habits and displays of machismo.

Before they get in their van and head off to a nearby disturbance call one of the cops very nearly gets into a brawl with a waiter who doesn’t sufficiently defer to his authority.

Dispatched to a nearby town the officers first encounter a family of frog hunters camping out beside a swamp. Possible inbreeding (among the hunters, not the frogs) seems likely.

Then the cops enter an old abandoned police station, start poking around in the dark cellars, and become the prisoners of what I assume is a coven of witches.

One by one the coppers are dispatched in ghastly ways by a nightmarish figure identified in the credits as the Father.  This horrifying creature is played by Mehmet Cerrahoglu, reportedly an acting novice who was discovered working in a public parking lot. He may have been chosen for his bizarre physiognomy, but Cerrahoglu appears to be a natural actor — delivering  one of the most memorable depictions of evil I’ve ever seen.

Despite its conceptual shortcomings — like refusing to explain what’s going on — “Baskin” has been very well acted and the production effort is first-rate.

Good luck sleeping after this one.

| Robert W. Butler

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