Stage Hit “August: Osage County” Doesn’t Fully Translate to Screen

220px-August_Osage_County_2013_posterThere are worse ways you could spend two hours at the movies but few as talent-filled as John Wells’s tart melodrama August: Osage County (C-). Drably filmed, oddly paced and crammed with an assorted cast of self-conscious A-listers, it’s an inert film indeed. Meryl Streep makes a marvelously horrible matriarch – a breathy, pill-popping spitfire second cousin of sling blade. I think I saw her chewing on an Osage armoire. Looking sternly Shetland, Julia Roberts is often effective as her dysfunctional daughter. Because the characters are so vile, though, it’s difficult to find the heart of the piece. It’s neither dramatic or funny enough to travel too far from just OK.