Movie review: Acting makes 'The Butler' worth the price of admission
- Details
- Published on 30 August 2013
- Written by Tim Wyman
(Rated 6 out of 10 stars.)
(132 minutes. Rated PG-13 for some violence and disturbing images, language, sexual material, thematic elements, and smoking.)
Among the carnage of every summer's big-budget, wanna-be blockbusters, oftentimes a charming film emerges from the settling dust. This year, Hollywood has given us a winsome little picture, "Lee Daniel's The Butler," that in many ways is the best thing to which audiences have been treated this summer.
Daniels produced and directed the Oscar-nominated "Precious" in 2009, and this film is most certainly a commendable follow-up. What problems the film has (and there are a few) are completely in the writing because, without any doubt, all the technical elements are exceptionally good. Initially, I thought the choice of title was a bit egotistical, but I have since discovered that Daniels did just want "The Butler" but that title evidently had trademark and licensing issues.
"The Butler" is a biopic (very) loosely based upon the life of Eugene Allen who served, obviously, as a butler at the White House from the end of the Truman administration through the second term of the Reagan administration. The script was written by actor and up-and-coming writer Danny Strong (who incidentally is heavily involved in the screen adaptation of the third "Hunger Games" movie) and while it ultimately proves to be its downfall, the project itself is extraordinarily ambitious in its scope.
There is much to like about this movie, and I found myself mesmerized at times with the legions of exceptional actors this film paraded out. The Butler is played by Forest Whitacker, and lets start the Oscar buzz for him now--he was that good. Whitacker is one of the least known, yet most recognized and assuredly talented actors working today. He was most critically-acclaimed for a brilliant film, "The Last King of Scotland", for which he won Best Actor, and most would know his first big break in "Good Morning, Vietnam" where he played the driver for Robin Williams who kept turning the ignition on an already running jeep.
Oh, yeah! Him!
Well, go see him in this movie as Whitacker put on an acting clinic that ought to be studied in acting classes across the country. He played his character with exquisite charm, was fascinatingly understated, and Whitacker displayed reserved emotions that were held, mainly, at a gently rolling boil throughout the film. His work was captivating, and as you watched him, you understood every emotion and every thought whether he verbalized it or not.
His wife was played by none other than Oprah Winfrey, and for the most part she was as good as her reputation, although she did slip in and out of the 1950s black vernacular rather noticeably in the early parts of the movie. Moreover, for most of the first part of the film, it was hard to look at Oprah and suspend my disbelief and thus buy into her character. However, as the film moved toward its climax, the writing for her became a bit meatier and she was much more fluid. I must praise, she was rather good.
The cast of supporting actors in this film was achingly good, and one was better than the last as they took their turn on the screen. Highlighting a list that included Terrance Howard, Lenny Kravitz, Vanessa Redgrave (who is still stunningly beautiful at her age), and David Oyelowo, was audience favorite Cuba Gooding, Jr. While the writing was clearly slanted for Gooding, this is one of the better acting jobs he has given of late. He also had one of the funniest lines in film in recent memory, delivered with an acerbic wit that caused me to laugh out loud for the next few minutes. Thankfully, there was only one other person in the theater.
Where the film failed grandly was with regard to the interaction Whitacker's character, Cecil Gaines, may have had with the presidents over the course of his career. Moreover, with so little screen time given to each president, the weird choices Daniels made of the actors who played the various presidents worked against him.
Robin Williams looked, acted, and sounded nothing at all like Eisenhower, and this was utterly distracting. While James Marsden did a serviceable job as Kennedy, the choice of the charismatic John Cusack as uncharismatic Richard Nixon was dumbfounding. Just when I did not think it could get worse, they let Alan Rickman play Ronald Reagan. While he rather looked like Reagan, he still sounded like and had the speech patterns of Professor Snape. I must admit, however, the scene with Liev Schreiber as LBJ was two minutes of classic material.
All of these very talented actors might have worked well in their respective parts had we been given two hours to adjust to their presence. In two minute scenes, it just seemed absurd.
This absurdity did nothing but shine the spotlight on the biggest issue I had with the film. The writer could never truly make what he wanted this movie to be. For the most part, the biopic on Whitacker's character spread well beyond his job and what little relationships he had with various presidents, and instead dealt with the much bigger issue of civil rights and how his family engaged this time in history. As the film moved onward, we saw how this family was directly attached to every civil rights landmark event in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was way too hokey how Whitacker was with each president at their time of greatest crisis.
I kept waiting for something more. The movie did not offer a statement of some societal ill as much as it gave us an orderly checklist of every horrid event from the beginning of the civil rights movement right through the election of President Obama.
I wanted to connect with the film, and was rooting for that precisely to happen. The writer and filmmaker, I think, wanted this movie to be the defining civil rights film of our time. That aspiration grossly failed.
What we got instead was a combination of "Forrest Gump", "Roots", and "Driving Miss Daisy."
And one of my pet peeves about Hollywood is that they have to expand characters, rewrite history, and alter personalities to fit the political slants of today. There was much in this film that was entirely untrue and completely fictionalized. Hunt down Michael Reagan's comments about the film if you want an interesting interview about that topic in general.
What should have happened was the film should have explored the relationship that Whitacker's character--the true butler, Eugene Allen--may have had with any president. But the good news is that we got to watch some of the most talented actors of our generation for two hours.
That alone is worth the price of admission.
I give it 6 of 10 stars.
25th Annual Illinois Blues Festival this weekend
- Details
- Published on 29 August 2013
- Written by Paul Gordon
Jay Goldberg's baby turns 25 this weekend and he couldn't be more proud. And with the entertainment he has lined up for the party, he expects thousands to brave the heat and show up on Peoria's riverfront Friday and Saturday.
Goldberg's baby in this case is the Illinois Blues Festival, sponsored by Budweiser, that kicks off at 6 p.m. Friday and continues through Saturday, with blues star Kenny Wayne Shepherd anchoring the performances that will occur on three stages.
"I consider this my little baby," said Goldberg, concert promoter and owner of Jay Goldberg Events+Entertainment. "Not only was it my first big annual festival but it's the kind of music I was into and it's very historic music for Peoria because of the musicians who would come up the river."
It also is historical locally in that it was the first concert on Peoria's riverfront in what is now Festival Park. At the time it started it was Eckwood Park, before there was any retail or museums or much else in the area of the foot of Main Street. "The first one was when the riverfront was nothing more than a parking lot. I remember people leaning on the parking meters while watching the concerts," he said.
Mayor Jim Maloof greeted the artists to kick off the festivities and the headliner that first year was KoKo Taylor, who was known as Queen of the Blues. One of her opening acts was a group called the Kinsey Report, which is performing on Center Stages on Saturday.
Goldberg said it was a big event for the riverfront and added that is one reason he and his company work hard to keep it fresh and appealing every year. As it has grown in reputation, so has the number of headliners it has attracted.
Besides Kenny Wayne Shepherd and the Kinsey Report, this year's Center Stage performers include Elvin Bishop, The Jeremiah Johnson Band, Marcia Ball, Paul Thorn and South Side Cindy & The Slip Tones.
The Blues Tent will feature local favorites Jimmy Binkley, Preston Jackson and Barry Cloyd as well as the Peoria All-Star Jam.
There will be workshops for guitar and the harmonica in the Blues Tent and The Landing Stage will be the site of The Road to Memphis competition and the International Blue Challenge on both Friday and Saturday.
The Road to Memphis competition allows unsigned Illinois bands to compete for entry into the International Blues Challenge. It is sponsored by the River City Blues Society, with help from a grant from the Illinois Blues Coalition.
Again this year Presley's Outdoor will host the Great American Fish Fry on the festival grounds.
Goldberg noted that last year's Illinois Blue Festival was the only one thus far to be forced inside because of weather. The remnants of Hurricane Isaac brought a deluge of rain to central Illinois and the festival was moved to Expo Gardens.
Rain won't be a problem this year, but performers and audiences will have to deal with intense heat. Goldberg hopes that doesn't affect the size of the crowds.
"We've had heat in the past and still got big crowds. I'll take the heat over rain any day," he said.
Goldberg said he is proud of what the Blues Festival has become. When he started it longevity wasn't on his mind; survival was.
"I knew that if I wanted to stay in this business I had to create my own annual events. I could not count on what kind of concerts would be available to promote year to year, so I had to make things happen myself. So I started us in the direction toward annual events and the Illinois Blues Festival was the first one," he said.
Now the annual Summer Camp at Three Sisters Park in Chillicothe and the Grand National event on the riverfront are his biggest annual events.
"The Blues Festival, though ... Like I said, it's my baby."
Weekend passes for the Blues Festival are $30 in advance or $35 at the gates while one-day tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the gate. They can be purchased online at www.jaytv.com, www.illinoisbluesfestival.com; by phone at (800) 514-3849 or at Peoria-area CO-OP Records stores or at Emack's & Bollio's Ice Cream on the riverfront or in Peoria Heights.
To view a complete schedule of events visit www.illinoisbluesfestival.com.
The NL Central race: Three teams could be playoff bound
- Details
- Published on 27 August 2013
- Written by Steve Griffith
Normally this time of year I would say something about how the temperatures have begun to moderate and the feel of the brisk autumn air is creeping in to major league ballparks across America. However, as the temperatures in the Midwest heat up, so does the pennant race in the NL Central.
One month ago it appeared as if the Cardinals were going to blow every other team in all of baseball out of the water. But as quickly as the Cardinals began to push towards 30 games over .500, they seemed to take a month off and found themselves trailing the Pittsburgh Pirates by 3.5 games.
Fast forward to today. The Cardinals sit 0.5 games ahead of Pittsburgh for the top spot in the NL Central and 1.5 games behind the ailing Atlanta Braves for the best record in baseball.
As with all of life, however, the Cardinals should cherish every day they sit atop the NL Central standings because, for the first time since Barry Bonds was in Pittsburgh, the Pirates are still in the hunt and only six wins away from finishing the season at .500 or better, a feat they haven't accomplished since 1992. With recent trades bolstering their lineup, including the addition of Marlon Byrd and John Buck from the New York Mets, it seems likely they will stay in the hunt to the end.
I'm not foolish enough to think this is a two team race, however. The defending NL Central division champion Cincinnati Reds sit just 3.5 games out of first place and saw the recent return of slugger Ryan Ludwick with the return of pitching ace Johnny Cueto just over the horizon.
The Cardinals will play the Reds and the Pirates six more times each over the last 31 games of the season, while the Pirates and Reds will square off against each other six more times (the last three being the final series of the regular season).
The question we need to address isn't whether these three teams will all be in the playoffs, along with the Dodgers and the Braves, but rather how will they line up to get in?
With the addition of an extra Wild Card, winning the division becomes so much more important and beneficial. If you don't believe me, ask the 2012 Atlanta Braves or Texas Rangers. A loss in the one-game Wild Card playoff can completely devastate what would have been a remarkable season. There is so much that can happen in the course of only one game. One ball between the legs of the shortstop; one hit batter or passed ball; one pitch you should have hit to the next county but you couldn't get the bat off your shoulder or one double play can send a team packing for vacation while the other team continues its dance with destiny.
The Pirates are 8-5 against the Cardinals heading into their final six
games together, but while the Pirates have seemingly been stymied by the heat the Cardinals' bats have been rising with the mercury. While the Cardinals have gone 15-10 so far in the month of August, thanks in large part to the recent power surge in the offense, the Pirates have gone just 11-12, with the Cardinals winning three of the last four head-to-head matchups.
The chances of the Reds gaining ground on either St. Louis or Pittsburgh, while not impossible, seem improbable. The Reds are 6-7 so far against the Pirates this season and are yet to win a series against St. Louis, with a head-to-head record of 4-9.
Here is how I see the standings after 162 games for these three teams:
1. St. Louis 94-68
2. Pittsburgh 92-70
3. Cincinnati 89-73
The Pirates will end up beating the Reds in the Wild Card game, then have a much easier road divisional series against the Atlanta Braves than the Cardinals, who will end up playing their first series against the hottest team in recent memory, the LA Dodgers.
Come to think of it, maybe winning the division isn't that meaningful after all.
Celebrating Fogelberg this weekend
- Details
- Published on 28 August 2013
- Written by The Peorian
A concert by the Don Campbell Band, which recently released a two-CD set that was a tribute to Peoria native Dan Fogelberg, will highlight the Fourth Annual Dan Fogelberg Celebration Weekend this Friday and Saturday.
The Campbell Band is from Maine, where Fogelberg lived the last years of his life. The tribute CD set, titled "Kites To Fly," has been nominated Tribute Album of the Year by Independent Music Awards.
It's Campbell's first appearance at the Fogelberg celebration, which is produced by the Fogelberg Foundation of Peoria that was responsible for the Fogelberg Memorial in Riverfront Park.
The concert will be at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Scottish Rites Cathedral in downtown Peoria. A reception will follow the concert. Tickets are $35 and can be reserved at www.df.peoria.com.
Earlier on Saturday the Foundation will host a reunion picnic at Riverfront Park at the site of the Dan Fogelberg Memorial.
On Friday the Foundation will host a welcome party at the Cornerstone Building in downtown Peoria. The party will feature other Fogelberg tribute artists from around the country in an acoustic format.
Tickets for the welcome party are $30.
Fogelberg died in 2007 at the age of 56 from advanced prostate cancer.
The Foundation was started by friends who grew up with Fogelberg in Peoria and with the blessing of his widow and his family as a way to fund the celebration and raise money to benefit various charitable organizations while honoring the musical legacy of Dan Fogelberg.
The Fogelberg Foundation of Peoria plans to sponsor events that engage and support fine arts through live performance of music, displaying of art work, or the performance of live theater. Those events also will include information that will assist in creating community awareness of prostate cancer testing and research.
The Foundation will establish a charitable fund that will support fine art projects, accept scholarship/grant requests, and award recipients based upon funds available. It also will maintain and expand the Dan Fogelberg Memorial site at Riverfront Park.
Enjoy drive-in theaters on their 80th anniversary, while you still can
- Details
- Published on 26 August 2013
- Written by Bill Knight
The drive-in theater turned 80 years old this summer, but this summer is when Peoria's Landmark Drive-In started its first full season, continuing into September.
The first official drive-in theater was in Camden, N.J., which ushered in the era in 1933. By the mid-1950s one in four moviehouses in the country had an outdoor screen where people packed into cars, used playgrounds before sunset, ran to the concession stand and settled in to enjoy movies and a car's passengers, either talking or trying not to doze with other kids in the backseats.
Soon, real estate prices, TV and alternative activities combined to cut the number of drive-ins from 5,000 nationwide to fewer than 400 today.
One of them is in Peoria.
After a trial run of five weeks last summer, Landmark Drive-In this May opened on the north-end parking lot of the property at 3225 N. Dries Lane in Peoria. It can accommodate 200 cars and on Fridays and Saturdays features mostly films that have been out for a while ("The Blind Side" and "Gremlins," Indiana Jones and even "Plan 9 from Outer Space," plus other family fare), available as licensed DVDs shown via a large-venue projector.
"The picture is absolutely fantastic, a real upgrade from last year," said manager Zach Washburn, who for eight years worked at the High Lite 30 Drive-In in Aurora, then the biggest in Illinois.
"It was a piece of history," he says.
History could be repeating itself, if on a more modest scale. Landmark and a handful of new drive-ins, such as the Coyote Drive-In in Fort Worth, Texas, could signal a comeback of sorts, together with a market to which watching movies while sipping micro-brewed beers or enjoying other refreshments is appealing.
One speed bump on the road back to the lazy, crazy days of summers watching films under the stars is the "modernization" from celluloid to digital, which is threatening all moviehouses, but especially operations in small towns and drive-ins. The motion picture industry in the next year plans to drop 35mm film prints and switch to digital delivery, saving on production and shipping (even if seeming to violate anti-trust laws). Gibson City's Harvest Moon drive-in had a successful fund-raising campaign to make the transition and the twin-screen Autovue in Galva is promoting itself as part of Honda's "Project Drive-In" contest to award digital projection equipment to the top five vote-getters.
Dubbed the Digital Cinema Initiative, it's a costly upgrade that benefits big entertainment conglomerates at the expense of independent operators – and audiences.
"They'd make us jump through a whole bunch of hoops and it's hard to justify a $60,000 to $65,000 investment right now," Washburn says.
Still, for now, an "absolutely loyal audience" is developing, discovering – or re-discovering – fun entertainment that could be appreciated as an endangered species of amusement, Washburn says.
Landmark notes that it doesn't encourage smoking or drinking, but they're not prohibited – nor are pets if Fido wants to watch contemporary character-actor equivalents of Benji, Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin. "Tailgate" cooking, however, is banned on site.
"You get to hang out with friends and family without people harping on you for talking or whatever, and you can picnic, enjoy a cold beer or a cigarette and do what you want and not upset the guy behind you," Washburn says..
The sound – delivered via vehicles' radios on FM 100.7 – is amazingly better than the classic metal speakers on poles that theatergoers detached to hang on their car windows decades ago.
The "seating" is better, too (unless you drive some 1933 roadster): your own car or truck, whether a bucket seat, a rooftop or the bed of a pickup.
"When they come here, a lot of them don't know what to expect and they're surprised – pleasantly surprised," Washburn says. "Being in Peoria, we have high hopes but aren't sure what to expect, really."
Illinois in the 1950s had more than 120 outdoor picture shows, but that number has dropped by
90 percent and few remain in operation.
"I suspect that not many people are going to travel (from the Peoria area) to Galva or Springfield for the drive-in experience, as cool as it is," Washburn adds.
If you go to Landmark's drive-in on some Friday and want more the next night, here are a few drive-in options within a couple of hours driving time from the Peoria area:
Galva AutoVue Drive-In Theater, 8 James B. Young Rd. near the school on the north side of Galva; (309) 932-2919.Harvest Moon Drive-In, 1123 S. Sangamon Ave., Gibson City; (217) 784-8770.Litchfield Skyview Drive-In, North U.S. Route 66 in Litchfield; (217) 324-4451.Midway Drive-In & Diner, 91 Palmyra Rd., Sterling; (815) 622-2900.Route 34 Drive-In, 4468 E. 12th Rd., Earlville; (815) 246-9700.Route 66 Drive-In (formerly the Green Meadows Drive-in), 1700 Recreation Dr., Springfield; (217) 698-0066.Skyview Drive-In, 55700 N. Belt West, Belleville; (618) 233-4400.
Landmark's open-air theater opens at 7 p.m. and shows start at dark. Admission is $5 for adults; $3 for children and $20 for a carload of moviegoers. For films or other details, visit landmarkreccinemas.com or phone (309) 682-6350.
