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PDallas Buyers Club

Opens Fri., Nov. 8 at Harvard Exit and Lincoln Square. Rated R. 117 minutes.

Making a straight white Texas homophobe the hero of a film about the ’80s AIDS crisis doesn’t seem right. It’s inappropriate, exceptional, possibly even crass. All those qualities are reflected in Matthew McConaughey’s ornery, emaciated portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a rodeo rider and rough liver who contracted HIV in 1985. This urban cowboy became an outlaw pharmacist and activist, written up extensively in the Dallas media, far from the New York and San Fran frontlines.

Fond of strippers, regularly swigging from his pocket flask, doing lines of coke when he can afford them, betting on the bulls he rides, Ron has tons of Texas-sized character. He’s a wiry little hustler with jeans sliding off his bony hips when we meet him; and that alarming cough means something malign lurks within his body. But is there any conscience in there, too?

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée from a script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, the unruly Dallas Buyers Club goes easy on the sinner-to-saint conversion story. McConaughey and the filmmakers know that once Ron gets religion, so to speak, their tale risks tedium. For that reason, the film enjoyably careens along with Ron’s unlikely education. Waking up in the hospital after a collapse, he’s incredulous that he’s got a “faggot” disease. Thirty days to live? He doesn’t believe it. And that “cock-sucker” Rock Hudson (then dying of AIDS)? A waste of Hollywood pussy, Ron scoffs to his friends.

But they’re not his friends for long. Ron’s secret gets out, and he’s shunned at work and in the titty bars. Finally this reckless, uneducated galoot goes to the library and reads up on the AIDS crisis. McConaughey looks up from the microfilm kiosk and—Goddammit, how did he become such a good actor?—his eyes fill with silent dread. It’s true. He knows. And he realizes he’s alone, a pariah to his redneck buddies.

As Ron desperately bribes and steals a path to off-label meds, then drives to Mexico to smuggle them from a sympathetic hippie doctor (good to see you, Griffin Dunne), his allies and adversaries do read like fictional composites. There’s nice Dr. Saks (Jennifer Garner) and her profit-minded, drug-trial-chasing boss (Denis O’Hare), plus a friendly cop (Steve Zahn) and the transvestite who becomes Ron’s right-hand woman in the Dallas Buyers Club (essentially the Costco of AZT alternatives). Jared Leto’s Rayon is even skinnier and certainly slinkier than McConaughey, eyebrows plucked, makeup so Dallas-in-the-’80s, wearing her heels and hemlines with authority. Rayon is also an addict, sicker than Ron, but they’re fellow gamblers who delight in beating the house.

Cheats and liars have all the fun, which is why Dallas Buyers Club gets so much play out of Ron dressing up in various costumes, flying to Japan in a cowboy hat, waving his huge Rolex and huger ’80s cellphone, relishing his chance to be more than trailer trash. He’s really living, even as he’s dying. Dallas Buyers Club is ultimately more a caper movie than an AIDS story. There are better, more accurate films about the latter subject, but those are called documentaries. And a quarter-century past the dawn of the AIDS crisis, with modern drugs now keeping the HIV-positive healthy, Ron is the worst kind of role model and the best kind of rascal that the medical journals need. Brian Miller

Great Expectations

Opens Fri., Nov. 8 at Sundance, 
Meridian, and other theaters. 
Rated PG-13. 128 minutes.

Charles Dickens’ 1860 novel of class-jumping seems to defy updating from its Victorian era. Alfonso Cuaron tried to kick Pip and Magwitch into modern New York with his 1998 adaptation; he was roundly booed for the bother. Now Mike Newell—like Cuaron a veteran of the Harry Potter series—has a go with the franchise, and he opts for a conservative approach, not deviating far from David Lean’s 1946 benchmark. It’s the same three-part arc: Pip’s poor, humble origins on the moors; his sudden transformation into a London gent (funded by a mysterious benefactor); and the shattering realization that wealth and beauty are not what they seem.

Parts I and III are the most compelling here. Orphaned young Pip (Toby Irvine) roams the bogs like a frightened marsh bird; the sand and sun are an idyll compared to later scenes in sooty London. There is love from Pip’s blacksmith brother-in-law Joe (Jason Flemyng), then terror at meeting long-locked convict Magwitch (Ralph Fiennes), a fugitive made of mud and anger. In her cobwebbed mansion, Miss Havisham (Helena Bonham Carter) is a more vague, ethereal creature; and her stratagems are less keenly felt than Magwitch’s. He deals with knives and mutton and revenge; she’s the aloof agent of romantic snares, with Estella (Holliday Grainger) her chief instrument of mischief.

Why isn’t this Great Expectations more vital? There are colorful supporting roles for England’s finest (Sally Hawkins, Robbie Coltrane, Ewen Bremner, etc.), but the grown Pip (War Horse’s Jeremy Irvine, brother of Toby) is a handsome bore. He and Estella have no heat, and Pip’s London dissolution with the Finch Club is a snooze. J.K. Rowling has never said as much, but Pip’s magical leap of station makes him a direct forebear of Harry Potter. Harry leaves his lowly suburb for a life of enchantment and danger, while Pip here finally grows disenchanted with gilded city life. That turn ought to be more crushing, like Magwitch’s final flight; yet when Pip goes back to visit the moors, we feel the sting of salt air and regret. Brian Miller

Harry Dean Stanton:

Partly Fiction

Runs Fri., Nov. 8–Thurs., Nov. 14 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated.
77 minutes.

Harry Dean Stanton does not want to talk about himself. This might stop many potential documentary filmmakers from attempting a profile of the weathered actor, now 87. But director Sophie Huber tried anyway; and if the movie fails to give us much factual information about its subject, it certainly captures the aura that surrounds him. We do learn that Stanton was born in Kentucky, did military service, roomed with Jack Nicholson for a while, and has never been married. He lets a few things slip, including the tidbit “She left me for Tom Cruise”—somehow one of those sentences you never expected to hear from the mouth of a character actor this unglamorous. (The ex-girlfriend in question was Rebecca De Mornay, who lived with Stanton before she met Cruise on the set of Risky Business.)

One thing Stanton does like to do is sing, and the movie is strung together with craftily crooned numbers from the country-folk songbook. Stanton’s baritone has frayed a little with age (you might remember him serenading the jailhouse in Cool Hand Luke), but he really understands singing. His old buddy Kris Kristofferson might be on to something when he suggests that music is Stanton’s true passion. Kristofferson rolls by for an interview and a song, and we also hear from Deborah Harry, David Lynch, and Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard (whose Paris, Texas collaboration gave Stanton an unprecedented lead role). The interviews and music are mixed with film clips and smudgy shots of driving around. We also tag along as Stanton gets half-looped on cranberry juice and tequila at his favorite L.A. watering hole.

This barely adds up to a movie, but it is a mood: a sad song playing on the jukebox, the bartender making his last call. For such an accomplished and much-admired actor, Stanton is insecure, and this—rather than privacy—seems to be the reason for his reluctance to talk about himself. One wishes for something as memorable as his Repo Man credo, but no such luck. The most he’s got is a Buddhist-ish idea about “nothing” as the center of himself. His elusive manner, his apparent wish to vanish before our eyes, suggests he might be right. Robert Horton

How I Live Now

Opens Fri., Nov. 8 at Sundance.
Rated R. 101 minutes.

Do teenagers even read the newspapers these days? (No, I know.) Or follow world events on Twitter or TV? Adapted from a 2004 young-adult novel by Meg Rosoff, this movie’s 17-year-old heroine has no interest in world affairs. Why, when she’s shipped from New York to stay with English cousins for the summer, are there armed soldiers at the airport? Petulant, eye-rolling Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) never considers such matters. She’s mad at her father back home, now remarried with a new baby on the way. She initially hates her cousins’ shabby-genteel country home, but never wonders why Aunt Penn, some sort of policy expert, is planning for a third European war.

When it comes, the force of a distant nuclear blast is portended by an eerie wind and frightened dogs. Then a light cloud of ash falls on stranded Daisy, 14-year-old Issac, little Piper, and handsome 18-year-old Eddie (George MacKay), a falconer upon whom Daisy had already developed a silent crush. With Aunt Penn away in Geneva, suddenly they’re a survivalist band in a nation without electricity, ruled by martial law, with roving guerrilla bands in the woods. Needless to say, Daisy will have to get over her teen angst and make like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. This Ronan does with authority. Once a bratty child in Atonement, she’s growing nicely into her nascent stardom.

Kevin Macdonald might not seem the likeliest director for this post-apocalyptic teen romance, and the familiar first kisses and “I will find you!” declarations are pretty routine. Yet How I Live Now is weirder and stronger in depicting England’s descent into violence and near-fascism—like a prelude to Children of Men. A primal switch has been flipped, as if morality disappeared with the power grid. Then you remember how Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland and Oscar-winning 1999 doc One Day in September (about the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack) also charted the abrupt, bloody breakdown of society. Daisy, on her long trek to find Eddie, never asks who the enemy is or why the UK has become a police state. Since Macdonald isn’t directing this film for Times-reading grownups, maybe there’s no point to politics. Still, I think the movie’s intended audience may not remember a shirtless Eddie as much as it will the yipping foxes feasting on stacked corpses at an internment camp. It certainly changes Daisy—and for the better. Brian Miller

La Maison de la Radio

Runs Fri., Nov. 8–Thurs., Nov. 14 at Varsity. Not rated. 99 minutes.

If I told you they were making a documentary about NPR, would you line up to see backstage scenes of Scott Simon, Ira Glass, and Terry Gross? (Personally, I’d flee in the other direction.) And what if the radio hosts were all French? The miracle of Radio France, which is something like the BBC, is that it gets to broadcast several specialized channels—news, arts and culture, classical music, etc.—with scant regard for profit or plebeian taste. (The state-supported broadcaster was gradually privatized under Mitterand.) Located in a large circular fortress in Paris, the enterprise is unapologetically highbrow, and director Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have) is not one to question that mission. Like Frederick Wiseman, he simply looks at and listens to the hosts, technicians, musicians, and producers.

A workplace documentary is only going to be as interesting as the work, and these people are not lion tamers. Meetings and recording sessions are hardly scintillating to watch, though I have seldom seen so many faces concentrating on the precise sound of words. These people are exacting about every syllable and tweak at the mixing board. And we do occasionally venture outside to record wild sounds or report on a soccer game or the Tour de France. One or two moments are even fictional, as when a host asks us to imagine the sonic landscape of 17th-century Paris. The streets are wooden planks and mud, he explains; there’s livestock in the streets; church bells ring the hours; and no one ventures out at night, when wild animals creep back into the city. And there you might imagine a Victor Hugo story—but written for the ear, not the page. Brian Miller

The Motel Life

Runs Fri., Nov. 8–Thurs., Nov. 14 at 
Grand Illusion. Rated R. 85 minutes.

It’s a long way down to the pit where the Flannigan brothers find themselves in The Motel Life. This film, based on a 2007 novel, takes place in the cheap roadside motels of Reno and Elko, Nevada, where brothers Frank (Emile Hirsch) and Jerry Lee (Stephen Dorff) have resided since they were teenagers. The motel life is not the good life. It’s filled with poverty, depression, and delusion, suitably rendered by directors Alan and Gabe Polsky.

This is a stark and direct film with a fairly straightforward story, once it gets to it. Jerry Lee made a tragic mistake and didn’t own up to it; instead he botched a suicide attempt, putting a bullet in his previously amputated right leg. Now the brothers are on the lam, broke and bleeding, with nowhere to go. How the Flannigans descended to this day-to-day desperation is a more complex story, one that Motel Life tries to cram into the opening 15 minutes. It’s a disorienting bit of exposition, jumping among three different time frames, plus a couple of animated fighter-pilot fantasy scenes.

In his novel, Portland author and musician Willy Vlautin took more time to weave the Flannigan brothers’ hard-luck story into their current predicament. Running a pinched 85 minutes, this adaptation has no such luxury, which is a shame. When Motel Life does slow down and focus, it gets better. Hirsch, Dorff, and Dakota Fanning (as Frank’s love interest) are all convincing as beautiful losers. (Kris Kristofferson also shows up for a flaccid turn as the straight-shootin’ car-salesman father figure to the brothers.) Scenes between the brothers are the most powerful, charming and heartwarming despite the film’s pervasive anxiety and dread. To soothe his brother’s pain, Frank tells fantastical stories filled with buxom sexpots, bloody fights, and vanquished villains (vividly animated by Mike Smith), while Jerry Lee shares advice from Willie Nelson’s autobiography to help Frank cope with his own internal wounds. These tender performances do more to convey a history of hard living, and the bonds that history has created, than any number of flashbacks ever could. Mark Baumgarten

Sundance Shorts 2013

Runs Fri., Nov. 8–Thurs., Nov. 14 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 90 minutes.

In The Date, awkwardness that could’ve been played for laughs—the owners of show cats making small talk as the yowls and growls of mating felines alarm an inexperienced chaperone—instead becomes a very human moment of anxiety (then comforted over a smoking break). Whiplash, built around the debut of a member in a school jazz orchestra, elevates the intensity as a teacher terrorizes his players like a drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.

These two films, beginning a collection of eight shorts from the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, sneak up on you—not for any surprise ending or high-concept twist, but for the transformation of simple ideas and choice moments into fully realized little stories.

If features are like novels, shorts can be anything from short stories to vignettes to poems to nonfiction essays. At their best they capture a beautifully observed moment, a lovely metaphor, or an illuminating point of view; and they give emerging filmmakers a chance to learn their craft. This program offers a little of everything: a foreign-language film (The Date, from Finland), animation, a couple of docs, and a variety of styles and sensibilities. The best titles are modest in scope, more concerned with the texture of the moment than the size of the drama.

Skinningrove, a portrait of an isolated British fishing community (also a tour through a photographer’s connection with his subject), and Irish Folk Furniture, a playful celebration of practical artisanship as folk art, make a strong connection with places we might not otherwise explore. The final half-hour isn’t so strong. Jonah loses its characters and themes in a showcase of imagination and digital effects. K.I.T., an awkward comedy about awkward moments, forgets that brevity is the soul of wit.

Thanks to aggressive local programming at SIFF and Bumbershoot’s One Reel Film Festival, Seattle has nurtured an audience for shorts. Roughly midway between those two fests, this compilation offers a varied buffet of flavors—some undercooked, some not for all tastes, but a modest fall sampler. Sean Axmaker

Thor: The Dark World

Opens Fri., Nov. 8 at Ark Lodge and 
other theaters. Rated PG-13. 112 minutes.

Even with its flaws, Thor: The Dark World may be what the wretched Man of Steel should have been. Colorful, godlike hero. Big fights and destruction. Unashamed that it’s from a comic book. Pretty fun. It’s better than Ol’ Goldilocks’ debut in 2011’s Thor—larger in scale, faster-paced, more sure of itself. The fish-with-six-pack-out-of-water shtick is gone, and it’s Hammer Time.

The Marvel mumbo-jumbo: A roiling, magical “Aether” is what Dark Elf Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) needs to destroy the universe in the window that appears every 5,000 years when all nine realms align. Note 1: Not dreamy Lord of the Rings elves, but an unpleasant race that Odin’s father defeated before the universe was formed. (The all-father’s father? Keep moving.) Note 2: Earth and Asgard are two of the realms. Not much about the other seven, but maybe they make all the fabulous Asgardian costumes, like a cosmic Gap.

Earth apparently being the trailer-trash realm, Odin (Anthony Hopkins) wants Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to stop pining about someday-toothless mortal Jane (Natalie Portman), marry warrior-goddess Sif (Jaimie Alexander), and succeed him on Asgard’s throne. But Jane becomes the feisty Aether host body and gets herself invited to Asgard anyway. Awkward? It gets so much worse that Thor unlocks and teams up with treacherous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to save Jane, stop Malekith, and make the universe safe for the Avengers sequel.

Kenneth Branagh’s Thor was respectable, a little dull, not the cream of Marvel’s crop. Its main accomplishment: avoiding laughable ridiculousness with the caped hammer-twirler. Casting still goes a long way. Hemsworth holds his own as jock-god against show-stealer Hiddleston’s drama-god, such that it’s hard to imagine another actor making it work. Branagh successor Alan Taylor comes from good TV (Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Sopranos), and he knows how to keep it moving, give moments to lots of characters, and balance swaggering fights, destruction, and lightheartedness. (See: Thor on the London tube.) The wild climactic battle adds a new wrinkle—and several dimensions—to a tired boss-fight genre.

I say thee nay: scientist Stellan Skarsgård reduced to pantsless comic relief; sidekick Kat Dennings (with a new intern dude) still annoys; Malekith is as two-dimensional as they come; and his attack on Asgard is more Star Wars than Norse. And why just two fighter jets against the giant, world-destroying thing? Oh, right, because it’s a comic book. And take note: Don’t leave before you’ve seen both brief scenes during and after the end credits. Mark Rahner

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