Spinning Into Butter

The biggest lesson from Spinning Into Butter has nothing to do with the ethics of race and more with realizing that every hit play doesn't need to be turned into a movie.

The staging by theater director Mark Brokaw, in his first feature, is, well, stagy. I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting.

The foils have no compunction about hurling ugly truths at each other, most of the time much too literally to work on screen.

The material is crying out for a satiric wit or at least a stronger point of view. Instead, it's a mishmash in which everyone gets to say his piece, but all of it has been said before.

This movie adaptation of Rebecca Gilman's play is a methodical, not to say mechanical and plodding, exploration of identity politics and language.

Spinning Into Butter is the perfect example of a movie taking an interesting premise and, through incompetence of acting, writing and directing, turning it into an unwatchable mess.

if you're not interested in a sermon, you'll want to skip this one

Butter makes a disastrous transition to film, aiming to salvage pertinent points on the witch's brew of racism through a filmmaking undertaking perhaps best described as "total clown shoes."

Painfully earnest and unrelievedly stilted and cliched, the movie is less a drama than a well-meaning but rather ridiculous diatribe.