Film Review: Lee Daniels’ The Butler (dir by Lee Daniels)

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dare I admit it?

When I saw Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I was not impressed.

Yes, the audience applauded as the end credits rolled. And yes, I know that almost all of the mainstream critics have given it a good review. I know that Sasha Stone has been hyping it as a surefire Oscar contender. I know that, up until 12 Years A Slave introduced us all to an actress named Lupita Nyong’o, Oprah Winfrey was considered to be the front-runner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

But it doesn’t matter. The Butler did little for me.

I also realize that the film ended with a title card that announced that what I had just watched was dedicated to the American civil rights movement. In many ways, that title card felt like emotional blackmail, implying that if you criticized The Butler than that meant you were also criticizing the brave, real life men and women who risked their lives to fight for equal rights.

However, when you put emotions and good intentions to the side, the fact of the matter is that Lee Daniels’ The Butler is not that good of a movie. One need only compare The Butler to some of the other films that were released this year that dealt with the African-American experience — films like 12 Years A Slave and Fruitvale Station — to see just how safe and uninspiring The Butler truly is.

The Butler tells the story of Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker), the son sharecroppers (played by David Banner and Mariah Carey) in the deep south. After Cecil’s father is murdered by plantation owner Thomas Westfall (Alex Pettyfer), Cecil is raised and educated by the wealthy Annabeth Westdall (Vanessa Redgrave). Eventually, the teenaged Cecil leaves the plantation and ends up working in a hotel where he’s educated in how to be a master servant by the elderly Maynard (Clarence Williams III, who brings a quiet dignity to his role). Cecil eventually gets promoted to a hotel in Washington, D.C. It’s there that he meets and marries Gloria (Oprah Winfrey).

In 1957, Cecil is hired to work at the White House. Along with befriending two others butlers (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Lenny Kravitz), Cecil also gets the chance to observe history play out first hand. Starting with Dwight Eisenhower (played by Robin Williams) and ending with Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman, giving a performance that is incredibly bad), Cecil watches as President after President deals with the civil rights movement. Some presidents, like John F. Kennedy (James Marsden) are portrayed as being heroes while others, like Richard Nixon (John Cusack), are portrayed as being villains but all of them have the watchful eye of Cecil Gaines in common.

Meanwhile, at home, Gloria has a brief affair with Howard (played by Terrence Howard and really, you have to wonder what Cecil was thinking leaving his wife alone with anyone played by Terrence Howard) and Cecil’s oldest son, Louis (David Oyelowo), gets involved with the civil rights movement and grow increasingly estranged from his father.

The Butler actually starts out pretty well. There’s a lengthy sequence where Louis and a group of students are trained on how to conduct a sit-in that’s extremely compelling to watch. However, then John Cusack shows up wearing a big fake nose and the entire film starts to fall apart.

From a cinematic point of view, the film fails because it ultimately seems to be more dedicated to trotting out a parade of celebrity cameos to actually telling a compelling story. As is his usual style, Lee Daniels directs with a heavy hand and, as a result, the film is full of emotionally-charged scenes that fail to resonate for longer than a handful of minutes.

My main issue with The Butler is that the film literally contains no surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary happens and, at no point, is the audience actually challenged to consider the way they view history or race relations. Whereas films like Fruitvale Station and 12 Years A Slave truly challenge our assumptions, The Butler encourages us to pat ourselves on the back for being so enlightened. Every single frame of The Butler is specifically designed to fool us into thinking that we’re watching an important and challenging movie.

Because of a silly copyright lawsuit, the official title of The Butler is Lee Daniels’ The Butler. However, that title is very appropriate because The Butler is definitely a Lee Daniels film. Even if you didn’t know it beforehand, it would be easy to guess that the same man who directed Precious and The Paperboy also directed The Butler. As a director, Daniels specializes in making simplistic points in the most bombastic way possible. The results are films, like The Butler, that are more concerned with manipulating an audience than challenging an audience. When audiences applaud at the end of The Butler, they aren’t so much applauding the film as much as they are applauding themselves for having seen it.

Film Review: The Canyons (dir by Paul Schrader)

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Do you remember that YouTube video of Chris Crocker screaming, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” while tears and eye liner ran down his face?

That’s often the way that I feel about Lindsay Lohan, a talented actress and a fellow redhead whose career has been destroyed not so much by her own mistakes but by the fact that the tabloids refuse to allow her to move on from those mistakes. It seems that, regardless of what Lindsay Lohan does, not a single story will be written about her that doesn’t mention that she’s spent time in rehab and jail or that doesn’t offer up some sort of tawdry speculation about her private life.

And that’s unfortunate because, regardless of what the tabloids may say, Lindsay Lohan remains an excellent actress who is capable of doing a lot more than parodying her own image in Scary Movie 5.

Consider, for instance, her performance in The Canyons.

In The Canyons, Lohan plays Tara, the world-weary girlfriend of a wealthy sociopath named Christian (James Deen, who may not be a great actor but still projects a proper mix of charm and menace). Christian is a film producer whose need to control and dominate is demonstrated in both the way he manipulates actor Ryan (Nolan Funk) and the way he arranges for Tara to have sex with strangers while he films the action.

Tara and Christian live a life that epitomizes empty luxury, an existence defined of ennui where casual cruelty is the norm. However, when he discovers that Tara is secretly having an affair with Ryan, Christian’s carefully constructed facade of control starts to fade away. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian’s obsessiveness and manipulative mind games eventually lead to a brutal act of violence…

When it was released earlier this year, The Canyons got terrible reviews and the film is definitely uneven. Bret Easton Ellis’s script is predictable and, while director Paul Schrader captures some haunting images of Los Angeles at its most languid, the film also is a bit too slow for its own good. Schrader takes Ellis’s pulpy script and attempts to use it to craft an existential portrait of American culture and he doesn’t quite succeed.

However, to a large extent, The Canyons is redeemed by Lohan’s excellent performance. In Lohan’s hands, Tara becomes a survivor who has sacrificed her innocence but still has yet to develop the hardness that one needs to survive in Ellis and Schrader’s Los Angeles. As cynical and decadent a character as Tara may be, Lohan plays her with just enough hints of optimism that it’s impossible not to regret the loss of who she was before she met Christian.

It’s a performance that manages to redeem a film that, without Lohan, would have been one of the worst films of 2013.

For that reason alone, perhaps it’s time to leave Lindsay alone and she what she’s capable of doing when she’s simply allowed to act.

Ghosts of Christmas Past #24: It’s a Wonderful Life

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Just in case you somehow missed your chance to see one of the greatest films ever made, here’s Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve seen this movie a countless number of times. I can recite every line by memory. And yet, every time I watch it, I still get tears in my eyes. If you missed it on TV this year, please feel free to watch it below.

Incidentally, I always related to Violet.

44 Days of Paranoia #30: Nixon (dir by Oliver Stone)

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Oliver Stone’s 1995 presidential biopic, Nixon.

Nixon tells the life story of our 37th President, Richard Nixon. The only President to ever resign in order to avoid being impeached, Nixon remains a controversial figure to this day. As portrayed in this film, Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins) was an insecure, friendless child who was dominated by his ultra religious mother (Mary Steenburgen) and who lived in the shadow of his charismatic older brother (Tony Goldwyn). After he graduated college, Nixon married Pat (Joan Allen), entered politics, made a name for himself as an anti-communist, and eventually ended up winning the U.S. presidency. The film tells us that, regardless of his success, Nixon remained a paranoid and desperately lonely man who eventually allowed the sycophants on his staff (including James Woods) to break the law in an attempt to destroy enemies both real and imagined. Along the way, Nixon deals with a shady businessman (Larry Hagman), who expects to be rewarded for supporting Nixon’s political career, and has an odd confrontation with a young anti-war protester who has figured out that Nixon doesn’t have half the power that everyone assumes he does.

Considering that his last few films have been W., Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and Savages, I think it’s understandable that I’m often stunned to discover that, at one point in the distant past, Oliver Stone actually was a worthwhile director. JFK, for instance, is effective propaganda. Nixon, which feels a lot like an unofficial sequel to JFK, is a much messier film than JFK but — as opposed to something like Savages — it’s still watchable and occasionally even thought-provoking. Thanks to Hopkins’ performance and, it must be admitted, Stone’s surprisingly even-handed approach to the character, Nixon challenges our assumptions about one of the most infamous and villified figures in American history. It forces us to decide for ourselves whether Nixon was a monster or a victim of circumstances that spiraled out of his control. If you need proof of the effectiveness of the film’s approach, just compare Stone’s work on Nixon with his work on his next Presidential biography, the far less effective W.

(I should admit, however, that I’m a political history nerd and therefore, this film was specifically designed to appeal to me. For me, half the fun of Nixon was being able to go, “Oh, that’s supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller!”)

If I had to compare the experience of watching Nixon to anything, I would compare it to taking 10 capsules of Dexedrine and then staying up for five days straight without eating. The film zooms from scene-to-scene, switching film stocks almost at random while jumping in and out of time, and not worrying too much about establishing any sort of narrative consistency. Surprisingly nuanced domestic scenes between Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen are followed by over-the-top scenes where Bob Hoskins lustily stares at a White House guard or Sam Waterston’s eyes briefly turn completely black as he discusses the existence of evil. When Nixon gives his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention, the Republican delegates are briefly replaced by images of a world on fire. Familiar actors wander through the film, most of them only popping up for a scene or two and then vanishing. The end result is a film that both engages and exhausts the viewer, a hallucinatory journey through Stone’s version of American history.

Nixon is a mess but it’s a fascinating mess.

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Ghosts of Christmas Past #20: Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

We have a few traditions here at the Shattered Lens. One is that we watch Night of the Living Dead on Halloween. Another is that we watch Treevenge during the holiday season.

And of course, on the weekend before Christmas, we watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Enjoy!

44 Days of Paranoia #29: A Face In The Crowd (dir by Elia Kazan)

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Elia Kazan’s 1957 political satire, A Face In The Crowd.

The film opens with radio producer Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) visiting a local jail in Arkansas. She’s looking for human interest stories that she can feature on her show and she discovers one when she meets an imprisoned drifter named Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith). When Marcia interviews him, Rhodes proves himself to be a natural performer, telling folksy jokes and launching into a song about being a “free man in the morning.” Rhodes proves to be so popular that, after he’s released from jail, he pursues a career in show business with Marcia as both his manager and, eventually, his lover.

Moving to Memphis, a renamed Lonesome Rhodes eventually lands his own television variety show and he soon starts doing irreverent commercials for local companies. Along the way, Rhodes also finds a new manager, the glib and manic Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa). With the help of Joey, Rhodes becomes the spokesman for a fake energy supplement, Vitajex.

As Rhodes’ fame grows, so does his ego. After dumping Jeffries, Rhodes impulsively marries a 17 year-old majorette (Lee Remick). His show also goes national and Rhodes soon starts to use his influence to try to both promote an incompetent, business-backed Presidential candidate and to destroy anyone who he considers to be an enemy. As his show’s disillusioned head writer (Walter Matthau) puts it, Rhodes has become a “demagogue in denim.”

A Face In The Crowd is a personal favorite of mine. Director Kazan deftly mixes satire with melodrama and, with the exception of the weak ending, the film’s vision of media manipulation and demagogic celebrities probably feels more plausible today than when it was first released. The film is full of great performances, from the avuncular Walter Matthau to vulnerable Patricia Neal to the innocent-and-then-not-so-innocent Lee Remick. Anthony Franciosa is wonderfully glib and sleazy and it’s a lot of fun to watch his joy at discovering how easy it is to manipulate the world.

Ultimately, however, the film’s success is mostly due to Andy Griffith’s amazing performance as Lonesome Rhodes. Griffith, displaying all of the folksiness but none of the empathy that would be displayed in his later television show, turns Rhodes into a force of nature, a smiling charlatan and a charismatic sociopath who manipulates for the pure enjoyment of manipulation.

To make the obvious comparison, it’s very easy to imagine Lonesome Rhodes getting his own show on MSNBC, where on a nightly basis he could bark orders at his followers and ridicule anyone who dares to question him. But even beyond that, the character of Lonesome Rhodes resonates. I’m from the South. I grew up down here and I live down here. I can tell you, from my own personal observations and experiences, that we still have our share of demagogues. Some of them run in elections and some of them preach on Sunday but all of them have got a bit of Lonesome Rhodes inside of them.

For that reason, A Face In The Crowd is probably more relevent today than it’s ever been.

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44 Days of Paranoia #28: The Departed (dir by Martin Scorsese)

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take look at the film that the Academy named the best picture of 2006, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

The Departed takes the plot of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and transports it to Boston. For years, crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has ruled South Boston with an iron fist. However, police Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his assistant, Sgt. Dignan (Mark Wahlberg) think that they have finally found a way to take Costello down. They recruit police academy trainee Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to go undercover and infiltrate Costello’s organization. To help establish his cover, Costigan drops out of the academy and does time in prison on a fake assault charge.

Meanwhile, Costello has an agent of his own. Years earlier, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was specifically recruited and trained by Costello to become a mole inside the Massachusetts State Police. Sullivan soon finds himself also working under Queenan.

While the amoral Sullivan finds it easy to deal with his dual role of being both a cop and a criminal, the far more emotionally unstable Costigan has a much more difficult time of it. Not helping is the fact that Costello turns out to be a legitimate madman who spends half of his time dismembering people and the other half serving as a secret informant to the FBI. While Sullivan smoothly works his way up the ranks, Costigan pops pills and becomes more and more paranoid.

Eventually, both Costigan and Sullivan are ordered to uncover the double agents in their respective organizations. What they don’t realize is that, even as they both attempt to learn the other’s identity, they are both seeing the same woman, psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga.)

In the scene below, which happens to be my favorite from the entire film, Costigan and Madolyn make love after Madolyn assures Costigan that she doesn’t have a cat. That makes sense when you consider that Costigan is essentially a rat.

I have to admit that, as much as I did appreciate certain parts of the film, I was still disappointed the first time I saw The Departed. It wasn’t so much that the movie itself was bad as much as it was the fact that it didn’t live up to the standard set by previous Scorsese films. The film seemed to somehow be both conventional and overly busy at the same time, with the constantly moving camera and the propulsive soundtrack feeling more like they were more the result of a director trying to be like Scorsese than Scorsese himself. While I appreciated the comedic relief of Alec Baldwin’s performance as Queenan’s rival on the force and I thought that Matt Damon made a compelling villain, both Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Sheen seemed to have been bitten by the overacting bug. It was hard not to feel somewhat disappointed that, after waiting for over three decades to be honored by the Academy, Scorsese finally won his Oscar for The Departed.

However, with subsequent viewings, The Departed has grown on me. Once I was freed up from the expectations that come from watching a Scorsese film for the first time, I was able to enjoy The Departed for what it actually was, a very well-made and entertaining crime drama that occasionally flirted with being something more.

Watching The Departed for a second time, I was better able to appreciate the sly humor of Jack Nicholson’s performance. As played by Nicholson, Frank Costello becomes both the devil incarnate and a somewhat pathetic relic who is incapable of understanding that his time has passed. Watching Nicholson for a second time also led to me better appreciating Martin Sheen’s performance. Since Nicholson and Sheen are meant to the equivalent of the angel and the devil sitting on Damon and DiCaprio’s shoulders, it was necessary for Sheen to be as virtuous as Nicholson was demonic.

By the time that I watched The Departed for the third time, it was a lot more obvious to me that the entire film was, more or less, meant to be a satire. What Nicholson’s criminal empire and Sheen’s police force have in common is that neither one of them works the way that they’re supposed to. If there’s anything to be learned from the film, it’s that nothing means much of anything. (The Coen Brothers would be proud.)

Finally, after multiple viewings, it becomes obvious that The Departed is very much a Scorsese film. Even if his direction isn’t quite as showy as viewers have come to expect, there’s still enough little touches and details that remind us that this film was made by a master. To cite the obvious example that everyone cites, just watch for the X’s that always somehow manage to appear on the wall or the carpet before anyone in the film dies. With multiple viewings, It also became obvious to me that even if this film was set in Boston and not New York and even if the characters were Irish and not Italian, this film was still thematically pure Scorsese, dealing with themes of guilt, identity, punishment, and martyrdom.

Like all worthwhile films, The Departed is one that grows better with subsequent viewings.

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44 Days of Paranoia #27: The Lives of Others (dir by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, let’s take a look at a German film from 2006, the Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others.

The Lives of Others takes place in 1984. Germany is split between the capitalist West and the communist East. The government of East Germany maintains its power by strictly controlling the flow of information and keeping its citizens in perpetual fear of the secret police, the Stasi.

Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch) is a successful and internationally renowned playwright, as well as being the lover of actress Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Cultural minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) is himself obsessed with Christa-Maria and, eager to get Dreyman out of the way, he orders the Stasi to put the playwright under surveillance.

Ambitious Stasi officer Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) is eager to pursue the assignment, seeing it as an opportunity to further his own career. However, the officer that Grubitz assigns to bug Dreyman’s apartment, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), is less enthusiastic about investigating someone who appears to be a loyal communist. As Wiesler secretly gets to know both Dreyman and Christa, he finds himself becoming more and more disillusioned with the government that he has sworn to serve.

When Dreyman does finally decide to challenge the government (by writing an anonymous article on the high suicide rate in East Germany), Wiesler finds himself forced to decide whether to turn Dreyman in or to try to protect him.

Much like The Conversation, The Lives of Others is one of the best films ever mare about surveillance. Along with portraying, in very convincing detail, the drabness of living in a society where all thought is policed, The Lives of Others is also a portrait of people for whom a state of paranoia and fear has become the norm. The Lives Of Others may be set in the past but, considering what we now know about NSA spying, the film feels less like a history lesson and more like a very relevant statement about where we might be heading to in the future.

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Dance Scenes That I Love: It’s A Wonderful Life

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, this year, the toadsuckers at NBC (the same people who put Whitney on the air and who fired Dan Harmon from Community) decided to bump the annual showing of It’s A Wonderful Life on December 14th so that they could re-air the Carrie Underwood version of The Sound of Music.

Really, NBC? The remake of The Sound of Music may have gotten great rating when it first aired but it wasn’t that good. In fact, it was downright annoying at times. Meanwhile, nearly 70 years after it was first released, It’s A Wonderful Life remains a classic.

With that in mind, here’s one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. And yes, it is a dance scene.

NBC will air It’s A Wonderful Life on December 20th.

44 Days of Paranoia #26: Compliance (dir by Craig Zobel)

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Minor Spoilers Below)

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at one of the most disturbing films of 2012, Compliance.

Compliance opens with the dowdy and middle-aged Sandra (Ann Dowd) arriving at the fast food restaurant that she manages. Sandra, at first glance, seems to be a rather forgettable and conventional, the type of person who we see every day but don’t give much thought to. It’s only when Sandra gets a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer that we start to see the disturbing reality underneath Sandra’s perfect facade.

The man tells Sandra that one of her employees may have stolen money from a customer’s purse. He asks Sandra to detain the employee until the police arrive. Based on a vague description given by the man, Sandra decides that the employee in question must be Becky (Dreama Walker), a cashier who Sandra earlier had some conflict with.

Sandra calls Becky into her office and confronts her with the man’s accusations. When Becky denies them, the man tells Sandra to strip search Becky. Though she is initially hesitant, Sandra does perform the search and finds nothing.

However, the man isn’t finished humiliating Becky. As the man’s instructions grow more extreme and bizarre, Sandra soon starts to recruit others to help her keep Becky under watch.

Compliance is a portrait of both abusive authority and petty sadism. Dreama Walker is sympathetic as Becky while Ann Dowd turns Sandra into a frighteningly plausible monster. And, make no doubt about it, Sandra is a monster. The prank call simply gives Sandra an excuse to unleash all the resentment that she feels towards the younger and prettier Becky and it leads to a very interesting dynamic in which both the caller and Sandra become allies in a conspiracy to humiliate and, ultimately, dehumanize Becky. Throughout the film, the caller’s claims grow more and more flamboyant and we, as an audience, are forced to decide whether Sandra is genuinely fooled or if she’s just using the call as an excuse to justify acting on her own resentments.

What makes Compliance especially disturbing is that the film itself is based on a true story. Most film usually use the term “based on a true story” quite loosely but Compliance sticks very closely to the facts of something that happened in a McDonald’s in 2004. Just like in the film, a man pretending to be a police officer called the McDonald’s and told the manager that one of the cashiers was suspected of being a thief. Just as in the film, the caller ordered the cashier to be stripped naked and eventually ordered the manager’s fiancée to sexually assault the cashier.

When that incident made national news, I know that a lot of people (like me) reacted by wondering how the manager could have been so stupid and making a few jokes about the type of people who make a career out of fast food. As a society, we tend to assume that incidents like this are somehow not the norm.

However, as Compliance demonstrates, there was more to this incident than just stupidity. We are continually told that we have to automatically respect and obey anybody who presents himself as being an authority figure, whether it’s the uniformed cop who responds to any hint of dissent with either his taser or his gun or just some unseen guy on the phone who claims to be an officer of the law. We’re continually told not to question men in authority, instead we’re simply to assume that anything they say is both important and correct. As Compliance demonstrates, sadists like Sandra are not as unusual as we like to assume. They’re just doing what they’ve been bred to do.

They’re following orders and respecting authority.

They’re maintaining compliance.

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