Heartfelt moments


By Roger Moore


FILM: Lee Daniels’ The Butler
CAST: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, John Cusack, Cuba Gooding Jr
DIRECTION: Lee Daniels

Occasionally moving, sweeping in ambition yet often haphazard in execution, Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an epic that more closely resembles a made-for-TV movie or miniseries, albeit one from the high-minded heyday of TV movies, the ’70s.
Covering more than 80 years of American history through the eyes of a White House butler and his family — decades of strife and conflict, from segregation to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency — The Butler features Oscar winner Forest Whitaker in the title role, Oscar nominee Oprah Winfrey as co-star, and Oscar winners Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr and Vanessa Redgrave in supporting roles. The director of Precious is like catnip to actors.
We follow a sharecropper’s son who saw his father murdered by a white landowner (Alex Pettyfer) in 1920s Georgia, a boy raised to know service, that “The room should feel empty with you in it” by the matron of the house (Redgrave), who rose from hotel waiter and butler to the White House, just as Eisenhower (Williams) is deciding to send troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools.
No matter how careful the instructions from his peers (Lenny Kravitz, Gooding) about how he should “never listen or react to conversations”, Cecil Gaines hears all and sees all. And every now and then, Kennedy (James Marsden, a dead ringer for Bobby, too short for Jack) or Nixon (John Cusack) or Reagan (Alan Rickman, the most presidential of the lot) will actually ask his opinion, being the handiest black voter these seven presidents whom Cecil served know.
Meanwhile, at home, Cecil’s wife Gloria (Winfrey) drinks and tries to raise their two sons in the absence of a husband who lets his job come first.
“I don’t CARE what goes on in THAT house,” she grouses. “I care what goes on in THIS house.”
And well she should, because their college-bound son (David Oyelowo) is travelling through the ’60s and ’70s like an African-American Forrest Gump — jailed as a Freedom Rider, fan of Malcolm X, a man in the hotel room with Martin Luther King Jr just before his murder and later a Black Panther militant.
The strains of the times play out in pop-music montages, news footage of assassinations and riots and Walter Cronkite detailing the horrors of the Vietnam War and annoyances of gas rationing.
But as a movie, Lee Daniels’ The Butler — the title was the subject of Hollywood arbitration — is as ungainly as that title. It’s a maddeningly spotty exercise, covering too much too quickly, with clunky, pointless narration and soap opera-ish melodrama, taking attention from the sweep of history.
Daniels is at a loss to get all the history and adequate screen time for that embarrassment of acting riches. And the director of the atrocious Paper Boy neglected to get convincing impersonations from some of the actors playing these famous public figures. Schreiber is a swaggering LBJ, but suggests no hint of a Texas accent, and Williams has little of Eisenhower’s commanding presence, though Cusack gets Nixon’s shifty-eyed desperation to be liked like Ike just right.
All that said, though, there are heartfelt moments that remind us why this “inspired by a true story” seemed moving enough to film. All this really did happen over the course of the life of one man (the real butler’s name was Eugene Allen), from lynchings and the murder of civil rights activists to an African-American president.
Whitaker’s stillness and dignity anchors the picture, and he lifts Winfrey’s game in their scenes. Gooding stands out as a wise-cracking, James-Brown impersonating fellow White House butler.
And it’s worth waiting through the clunky passages and off-key performances to catch Jane Fonda’s classy turn as Nancy Reagan, to see Rickman’s soulful yet steely performance as the president most often derided as “an actor” — Nancy’s husband.
The patchwork story and pacing robs The Butler of the wit and heart that might have made it a companion piece to the far simpler and more powerful The Help. – MCT

Running on empty


By Colin Covert


FILM: Getaway
CAST: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight, Rebecca Budig
DIRECTION: Courtney Solomon

In Getaway, Ethan Hawke plays a veteran auto racer named Brent Magna. And that’s really all you need to know. A movie that gives its hero such a dorky mock-macho name isn’t likely to have a lot of imagination to fuel the rest of the picture. This high-speed, high-impact car chase caper is creatively running on fumes and four flat tyres.
It doesn’t have a plot, really. It’s more a first draft of an outline of a notion. Brent Magna’s wife is kidnapped. Brent Magna must follow the kidnapper’s instructions to keep Mrs Brent Magna alive. Brent Magna is ordered to race through the city streets in a hot rod, creating chaos. Brent Magna scatters many pedestrians, sideswipes many police cars and careens around many corners. It reads better than it plays. Getaway is not a movie, it is a list of traffic violations.
In theory this material could be the basis for a stupidly awesome live-action cartoon, but that would call for a stratospheric level of self-awareness and filmmaking ingenuity. This is not Crank, the intentionally outrageous Jason Statham movie. This is a movie for people who view Crank and don’t get the irony.
Getaway takes place mostly inside a speeding car at night, focusing on Hawke’s grimacing face, giving the action a serious lack of visual variety. The chase scenes are ugly, smeary, low-res messes that resemble video from a bargain-brand cellphone.
Director Courtney Solomon mimics Tony Scott’s cut-cut-cut style without understanding how to edit those fragments coherently.
It’s unclear why the film is set in Sofia, Bulgaria. Perhaps it’s because the city has an endless supply of stupid patrol officers, who think they can run a supercharged Shelby Super Snake Mustang off the road with their Fiat-style police cruisers.
Jon Voight appears as The Voice, a disembodied pair of lips seen in closeup, who sends Brent Magna his orders via Skype. Selena Gomez plays an abrasive little spud, who leaps into the car and just happens to know the key to the convoluted plot. Hawke’s unchanging expression is a “what have I got myself into” gape that could reflect his character’s plight, or his own chagrin at signing on for this disgrace. — Star Tribune (Minneapolis)/MCT

A timely, riveting tale


By Cary Darling


FILM: Fruitvale Station
CAST: Michael B Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer
DIRECTION: Ryan Coogler

At its most basic, Fruitvale Station is about a man being shot to death.
But it isn’t a whodunit. Based on tragic real-life events in 2009 when unarmed 22-year-old Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a cop at Oakland, California’s Fruitvale train station, it begins with grainy cellphone footage of the actual killing.
It then tracks back in time to what led up to that horrible encounter and, even though we know where this dark road travels, the remarkable Fruitvale Station still manages to be both sorrowful and suspenseful while also celebrating a life only half-lived.
What’s even more amazing is that this film — the Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance and one of the winners in the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes — is director/writer Ryan Coogler’s first feature.
Michael B Jordan (Friday Night Lights) turns in a riveting, star-making performance as Oscar Grant, a somewhat aimless young black man with a girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), a young daughter (Ariana Neal) and few prospects. He has lost his job at a grocery store for being late too often, he’s got a record, and he’s very much tempted to go back to hustling dope.
Despite all that, Oscar isn’t a bad guy deep down. He enjoys fatherhood and being a son — much of the film is devoted to him getting ready to celebrate the birthday of his mom (Octavia Spencer, The Help). But as events move relentlessly toward the foregone conclusion, Oscar finds himself in a situation spiralling hopelessly out of his control.
Coogler, who shot the film with a sense of swagger that belies his age of 27, doesn’t paint Oscar as a saint but just as a guy who has made bad choices in his life. Coogler has admitted to taking liberties with the truth — a scene with a dog apparently was totally invented for the film — and those who take the rookie policeman’s side in the ongoing controversy about what happened that night might see it as one-sided and manipulative. We certainly don’t get to know the cops beyond their show of brute force. Still, especially in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and controversy, Fruitvale Station is a compelling portrait of a life ended too soon. — Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT

DVDs courtesy:  Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha