Tag Archives: president

Lee Daniels’ The Butler

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butler

Director: Lee Daniels

Writer: Danny Strong

Based On: Article (A Butler Well Served by This Election) by Wil Haygood

Starring: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Oyelowo, Lenny Kravitz

Tomatometer: 72/79/83 (all critics, top critics, audience)

Spoiler-free Summary: Cecil Gaines leaves the cotton farm on which he grew up to become a butler at The White House.  Through eight presidential terms (1952-1986), he witnesses history from the front row.

Two Cents: Oprah Winfrey has not acted in a live action movie (non-animated) since 1998’s Beloved, for which she also served as a producer.  Oprah’s extended hiatus from acting is just one reason she was a curious choice to play Gloria Gaines in The Butler.

Lee Daniels’s latest film is already somewhat famous for having 41 producers.  In essence, that means over 40 individuals contributed some portion of a $30 million, in order to get this movie made.  Surprisingly, Oprah was not one of those people.  Sure, it can be surmised that Oprah didn’t believe in the movie enough to sink her cash into it.  However, I don’t buy that.

I’m not one to spend other people’s money, but $30 million (or any portion of it) is rather insignificant to Oprah.  Plus, with the cast the Daniels was able to assemble, this movie was never going belly up.  My guess is Oprah wanted this opportunity to prove that she can truly act.  She didn’t want to be the kid whose parents donated a library, so he could go to Harvard.  Undoubtedly, Oprah’s commitment to appear in the movie was an important consideration for investors, as her presence all but guaranteed decent box office numbers, but we won’t hold that against her.

I respect Oprah’s attempt at proving her acting legitimacy, but, unfortunately, the queen of daytime television falls short in her role.  Many people believe that talent elevates talent.  For example, a great quarterback can make mediocre receivers look like hall-of-famers.  In many cases, though, talent can differentiate itself like water floating on oil.  In The Butler, the lead roles are inhabited by incredibly talented actors.  Of the three male leads, two have won an Oscar, and the third was nominated for one.  That’s intimidating company for anyone, let alone a woman who’s been sitting on a couch for the last 15 years.  Oprah does a decent job, but she is so outmatched by her screen partners that she overreaches, at times, and comes across as amateurish.

Let’s spend some time talking about the good actors!  Forest Whitaker was mesmerizing in The Last King of Scotland.  Without question, he is one of the most skilled actors of his generation.  In this film, he portrays such an extensive range of emotions, it’s impossible to imagine a role he couldn’t play.  His performance, though understated, is remarkable.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is a tragically underused actor.  Despite an Oscar for his performance in Jerry Maguire and stellar performances in Men of Honor, Radio, and others, he only seems to pop up every so often, and almost exclusively in roles that demand an African American male.  He’s too good to spending so much of his time on straight-to-DVD garbage.  Plus, he plays ice hockey!  On the regs!

One of the highlights of this movie is the parade of presidents that wafts through the story.  The performances are, as a whole, pretty darn good.  Liev Schreiber as Lyndon Johnson and John Cusack as Richard Nixon are the most impressive, but the cameos are all fun.

I’m hoping for an Oscar nomination for Debra Denson, the head of the makeup department.  I won’t bet on it, but she deserves one.  She did a superb job with all the characters, especially Oyelowo’s Louis, Robin Williams’s Dwight Eisenhower, and Schreiber’s LBJ.

I recently criticized the lack of realistic racism in 42.  While watching Daniles’s film, I specifically kept my eye out for his treatment of our country’s embarrassing history of prejudice.  As strange as it sounds, Daniels nailed it.  While 42 made me feel bad for Jackie Robinson, having to put up with a few morons, The Butler made me feel disgusted, exhibiting racism as the grotesque, widespread hysteria it truly was.  There’s no question, it was far worse in real life, but Daniels’s depiction of American racism and segregation seems incredibly authentic for a movie with a PG-13 rating.

Should I/Shouldn’t I: The Butler is not a top-flight biopic, and it’s not a thrilling work of historical fiction.  It is, however, a (generally) superbly acted feel-good movie that provides an unprecedented glimpse into the most famous residence in the Western Hemisphere.  The unique view of American presidents offered here is fascinating, if not surprising, and Cecil Gaines’s front row seat to history is reminiscent of Forrest Gump’s.  The script is unremarkable, but the story is quite the opposite.  If you enjoy American history, you’ll appreciate this journey through one of its more dynamic eras.

Sundae Rating: Two scoops with whipped cream

Olympus has Fallen

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olympus fallen

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt

Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Rick Yune, Dylan McDermott

Tomatometer: 49/41/79 (all critics, top critics, audience)

Spoiler-free Summary: Leonidas is a Secret Service superstar.  One Christmas Eve, he elects to save the President’s life, instead of letting him die.  The President gets pissed, subsequently throwing Leonidas off his detail.  Eighteen months later, with tensions rising along the North/South Korean border, the South Korean Prime Minister visits the White House, a.k.a. Olympus.  Things don’t turn out quite as planned, and Olympus falls into the hands of a terrorist.  Leonidas fills in for John McClane, who was filming something else.

Two Cents: 2013 is starting to look like 1998, 2006, and a host of other years.  You know, those years when Hollywood collectively decides XYZ is the hot, new thing, subsequently multiple movies about the ame thing.  In 1998, we watched Earth get destroyed by a giant space rock in Deep Impact, only to see mankind (except for John McClane, of all people) narrowly avoid a similar space rock-induced disaster in Armageddon less than two months later.  Similarly, in 2006, we were mesmerized by The Illusionist, the first magician-gone-bad movie in quite some time, just two months before its doppelganger, The Prestige, magically appeared at a theater near you.  With that same unbridled creativity, we welcome Olympus has Fallen, the appetizer to the main course that is White House Down.  In most cases like these, the first course is satisfactory, but inferior to the second.  (No Strings Attached (1/11) vs. Friends with Benefits (7/11)?  I rest my case.  [Fun Fact: Justin Timberlake starred {though, with his acting skills, I should probably use a different word} in FwB, but only after recording an album titled No Strings Attached with N*Sync.])  While Olympus is certainly a satisfactory action film, we’ll have to wait until June 28th to see if it can break the curse of the first-born.

Gerard Butler is a man’s man.  Sure, he plays soccer with Jessica Biel once in a while, but who wouldn’t?  Butler kicks some serious behind in this movie, but he’s a good enough actor to be taken seriously, even when the story takes a hard left toward ridiculousness.  He’s got emotion and charisma; he’s not just a The Rock with a gun, as is often the case with action stars.  Of course, this movie is about one thing – action – but Butler does a good job of keeping the viewer invested in the story, while none of the other actors/characters do much of anything.

As President Asher, Aaron Eckhart is lifeless.  As Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs, Angela Bassett completely loses Stella’s groove.  As Agent Forbes, Dylan McDermott makes the closing argument in the case for TV stars to stick with TV.  Melissa Leo is unrecognizable as the Secretary of Defense (she won an Oscar, for crying out loud!).

During the third act, the movie actually becomes comical, ending with one of the worst closing one-liners of all time (possibly on par with the closing one-liner in Vantage Point).   Of course, I may be a bit biased here, since I once wrote a screenplay about the White House being taken over by terrorists, but at least mine was a comedy; I was willing to acknowledge the fact that the whole premise is a joke.  However, Fuqua does a good job of keeping the action going throughout the film, making the weak plot more than bearable.  Of course, that’s just putting a Bandaid on a cracked skull, but it’s a common practice (For example, this morning, on a Delta flight, I saw a man ask the flight attendant for “one of those seatbelt thing”.  A moment later, the flight attendant brought over a seatbelt extender, an extra strap and buckle to be attached to the man’s existing seatbelt, because he couldn’t fit it around his stomach.), so, I’ll give him a pass.  Furthermore, the entire film takes place in The White House, one of the most interesting buildings in the world.  I did a boatload of research about 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for my screenplay, but I still learned a bunch of cool facts from Fuqua’s film (assuming most of the “facts” are, indeed, facts and not, simply, “facts”).

By the way, I’m 98% certain that this conversation took place a few years ago:

Film Producer #1: We’re making a movie about a crisis in the White House.

Film Producer #2: We should get Morgan Freeman to play the president during a crisis.  He’s done it a million times!

Film Producer #1: We totally should.  But, is it too obvious?

Film Producer #2: I know!  Let’s pull a fast one on everyone and NOT make Morgan the president.  Instead, we’ll make him the Speaker of the House, and people will be like, “What?  You guys are geniuses!  I never saw that coming!”.  Then, five seconds into the movie, he’ll become the ACTING president!

Film Producer #1: Let’s give ourselves a raise.

Should I/Shouldn’t I: I think there’s a Constitutional amendment that makes it mandatory for Americans to see action movies involving the President of the United States.  If that’s the case, you could do worse than spend two hours in a theater with Olympus.  Although he’s chosen some mediocre material this time around, and pinched a few pennies on the special effects, Fuqua is a supremely talented director (he helped Denzel win an Oscar for Training Day) working with a usually-stellar cast.  The final product is not nearly as great as the sum of its parts, but you will be entertained by Olympus‘s action sequences, the terrorists’ intricate coup, and Butler’s ability to not suck when so much around him is sucking.

Sundae Rating: Two scoops