When I saw Butter last year at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival “there were laughs from time to time but my general impression was that audience energy levels eventually turned flat. Because after the first 25 or 30 minutes it was clear that the filmmakers weren’t interested in investing any real human truth or honest emotional underpinnings to any of the characters — with one or two exceptions they’re all playing exaggerated satirical types. And worked-out, semi-logical motivations are few and far between.

“I would love to have fun with a smart comedy that skewers Middle America and Jennifer Garner‘s Michelle Bachmann-like character, but Butter is sloppily written and poorly motivated and simply not a class act.

“Garner’s rightwing bitch is so shrill and constipated and psychopathic that it’s impossible to laugh at or with her after the first half-hour or so. Yara Shahidi , a 10-year-old African-American girl who plays the instigating lead, is the one uncompromised bright note, and is obviously pretty and appealing. Ty Burrell, playing Garner’s hapless, low-key husband, is okay for the most part. But Olivia Wilde‘s stripper character and Hugh Jackman‘s car-salesman doofus are written too crudely and illogically.

“Comedies have to be funny, obviously, but they never work unless they’ve been written and constructed like drama. Once you say, ‘Oh, we’re just making a ‘comedy’ so we can goof off and make fun of this and that and throw reality out the window,’ you’re finished.

“Butter was being compared last night to Michael Ritchie‘s Smile (’75), an admired satire about a teenaged beauty competition in Santa Rosa. Forget it, nowhere near, not even close. [A critic friend] mentioned Alexander Payne‘s Election as another similarity. No way in hell — Butter isn’t remotely in the same league.”

You know what I need? I’ll tell you what I need…seriously. I need a nice long sprawling sequence in a feature film. Perfectly choreographed, five or six minutes without a cut. The opening credits of Touch of Evil, the Copacabana Goodfellas shot….we need one of these every so often. Good for the soul. When was the last one?

You know what I need? I’ll tell you what I need. I need to see a Cameron Crowe movie about a father grappling with his son’s amphetamine addiction. Crowe, a good fellow struggling to re-claim the rep he enjoyed in the mid ’90s to early aughts as a magic-touch director, has been adapting David Sheff‘s “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction” and Nic Sheff ‘s “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.” Yeah! But first give me root-canal surgery.

I raised a son and he turned out to be a drug addict, a parking-lot attendant, an asshole, a racist, an obese layabout, a wife-beater, a birther, a mass murderer….you name it. Oohh, was it my fault? Gee, I don’t feel so good.

Maybe if Crowe’s film is done the right way it’ll remind some of us of Shawn Ku‘s Beautiful Boy(2010), a drama costarring Michael Sheen and Maria Bello about their son being accused of a mass shooting. Or Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin, a story about the raising of a warlock-eyed Beelzebub who shoots up a bunch of high school kids at the end.

I’ve been officially informed that Greta Gerwig‘s character in Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha (a) does not have an Asian stepdad and (b) does not self-adopt an Asian last name out of affection for the films of Wong Kar Wai. The p.r. reps I spoke to yesterday declined to rule out the notion of an Asian influence of some kind, but now they have….fine. As I said yestrday, Frances Ha is expected to play Telluride and will screen in Toronto.

An hour or two ago Mitt Romney let go with a birther ad-lib, obviously calculating that his fans would enjoy it and give him a hand. He was right.

These alternate versions of the recently released Killing Me Softly one-sheet aren’t perfect, but they’re certainly more intriguing, I feel, from a design and thematic standpoint. Thanks and congrats to HE reader Mark Frenden for submitting these less than an hour ago.

The rumors about L.A. Times “Hero Complex” columnist Geoff Boucher leaving the paper in the wake of Patrick Goldstein‘s departure are unconfirmed and not necessarily true. But it sure smells like something, given surrounding stories and activities.

I heard yesterday morning that the L.A. Times‘ highly regarded and well-connected movie industry reporter John Horn is “on the market” — i.e., has been making discrete inquiries about another gig. But I called and wrote quite a few people about this (Horn included) and couldn’t shake a single apple or even a leaf from any tree, so I let it go. But when you add this to Goldstein’s exit and the Boucher talk, it certainly feels like “something’s happening here.”

Disgruntled ex-employee starts shooting, drops several people and then shoots himself or goes down from return fire. So commonplace, so “normal” — a thoroughly American way of dealing with stress, rage and unemployment.

And the more it happens, the more likely that the next whackjob will say to himself, “Well, if nothing else works out and if my ex-girlfriend continues to refuse to speak to me, at the very least I can start shooting and go down in a blaze of anger. And at the very least my rage will be visible and palpable and discussed by the media.”

The late Jeffrey Johnson, 53, a former employer of Hazan Import and a designer of women’s accessories, had been let go about a year ago, according to a City Hall spokesperson. The cops took him out on 33rd street soon after he shot his former boss, but not before a brief firefight. Mayor Bloomberg has just stated in an outdoor press conference that one or more onlookers may have been shot by NYPD friendly fire.

“The cold-blooded killer wore a business suit and was carrying a briefcase when he pumped a pair of fatal bullets into his victim near the 33rd St. entrance to the skyscraper, a witness told the Daily News.

“The well-dressed shooter, after casually strolling away from the murder scene, was gunned down within minutes in a…confrontation with the cops.

“There was blood on the sidewalk,” said witness Rebecca Fox. “It was like a scene out of CSI, but it was real. I was literally shaking.” Seven other people were wounded, none too seriously, before the shooting stopped just after 9 a.m.

For months I’ve been in denial about David Fincher possibly directing a Cleopatra movie staring Angelina Jolie — a truly terrible-sounding idea. Physiologically I’d heard and read the reports but emotionally and psychologically I refused to let them in. So hearing he’s now off the Cleopatra project with Ang Lee possibly replacing him…? No comment with Fincher’s involvement never having been “real” in the first place.

Matthew Modine has assembled a media-rich Full Metal Jacket app that’s full of photos he took during the filming of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1987 war film plus narration and lots of other stuff. I’ve been a fool for this film for 25 years so I lapped i up right away. It costs a little ($14 or $15 bills) but it’s special. I agreed to talk to Modine about it sometime soon.

Another likely Telluride Film Festival attraction, I gather, is Sally Potter‘s Ginger & Rosa. Set in 1962 London, it’s about two young girls (Elle Fanning, Alice Englert) venturing away from a somewhat arrogant, elitist, lefty intellectual environment and finding their way through the city and its attractions. Pic costars Annette Bening and Christina Hendricks. A tipster who’s never really liked any of Potter’s previous films calls it “a huge surprise” and says Fanning’s performance is “extraordinary.”

IMDB logline: “Ginger and Rosa are inseparable. They play hookey together, discuss religion, politics and hairstyles, and dream of lives bigger than their mothers’ frustrated domesticity. But as the Cold War meets the sexual revolution, and the threat of nuclear holocaust escalates, the lifelong friendship of the two girls is shattered by the clash of desire and the determination to survive.”

There’s an upcoming awards season film repping the efforts of past Oscar winners that’s being described as a “total fiasco” by someone who would know. It’s not Robert Lorenz and Clint Eastwood‘s Trouble With The Curve (which I hear is very commercial), it’s not Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, it’s not The Life of Pi and it’s not Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master (which of course has been seen and analyzed by quite a few people at this stage and gotten passing grades all around). But it’s something. It could be Lincoln or Anna Karenina or…I haven’t a clue.