DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (M) Directed by Matt Reeves
I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that the whole point of being a film reviewer is to be able to appreciate a movie that you don’t actually like very much.
My mantra was sorely tested at a preview screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Dawn picks up the action 10 years after the events of 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The artificial virus that gave Caesar the chimp his Mensa membership has spread through the apes of the world, who have all trebled their IQs and built themselves a civilisation.
But the same virus has mutated, and wiped out nearly the entire human population. We learn all this via a deft and understated opening credit sequence. And that will be the last time this review requires the words “deft”, or “understated”.
From here on in, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is non-stop conflict and histrionics. First as a small band of humans encounter Caesar and his tribe, and then as parallel insurrections arise in the apes’ and the humans’ societies. Some in each group want war, some peace. A series of bombastic scraps breaks out.
The visual effects here are stupendously good, while the onscreen and mo-cap cast all turn in admirable work. Andy Serkis and Jason Clarke are the ape and human leaders, with Gary Oldman not stretching himself at all as the chief baddie of the piece, and Keri Russell in the thankless and underwritten role of Clarke’s wife.
This is a hugely competent film, with story-telling nous to match its huge technical achievement. But Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is also ceaselessly, stupefyingly violent, and though I respect the quality of the film-making, I find it hard to enjoy a film that is at once so ridiculously silly, and yet so completely humourless. By the end, I felt more beaten up than entertained.
T HE stage musical Jersey Boys has been an international smash hit. The show follows the rise and fall and rise again of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, who laid waste to the American pop charts in the 1960s.
I haven’t seen the stage show – musicals bring me out in a rash at the best of times, and the Four Seasons’ anodyne white-boy doo-wop even more so.
But Clint Eastwood, 84 this year, has made a film of Jersey Boys, and so I dutifully stumped up to see what all the fuss was about. And to be fair, I can see the bones of a good show here, but not one that has reached the screen intact.
The story is an over-familiar one. I’ve lost count of the number of films I’ve seen set in 1950s working-class Italian New Jersey/Brooklyn/Queens. Think the first half of Goodfellas, minus the swearing, the murders, the powerhouse acting, the great script, or the excitement.
Into this bland and stagey setting, Eastwood threads a few of the songs the fans have presumably come to hear, but nothing really stands out, and the only showstopping number is Oh, What a Night, performed over the end credits.
Jersey Boys is a frustrating film to watch. Eastwood is enamoured with the plot and characters and seemingly uninterested in the music, yet I still didn’t feel I’d learned anything or met anybody.
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The gorgeous little Irish film Good Vibrations runs a similar story while following the rise of punk rock in 1970s Belfast. At the end of that film, I felt I’d spent time with real people. At the end of Jersey Boys, I was as uninvolved with Valli and his world as I was going in. Completed in 2013, and out on limited release now, Jake is an Auckland-made indie film with high ambitions and a couple of ideas.
Taking its story cues from Groundhog Day via Fight Club (writer/director Doug Dillaman denies the Fight Club influence, but I don’t believe him) Jake is the story of a bloke in his early 30s, apparently going nowhere slowly in his personal and professional life, who wakes up one morning to find he has been “recast”.
A similar looking but more enthusiastic man will be taking over his life, and Jacob is henceforth redundant.
It’s uncertain whether Dillaman intends his script to be a satire of the uncertainties of being an actor, a sci-fi inflected rumination on the nature of self, or just a Twilight Zone-ish don’t think-too-hard-enjoy-the-ride yarn. Whatever Dillaman had in mind, his film is undone by some awful characterisations – the women here have precisely nothing to do but sit around waiting for the men to show up – and disappointingly pedestrian production.
Only in its last scenes does Jake start to exude the energy and wit that should be the meat and bones of a self-funded indie film. Until then, everything has been tentative and far too conservatively shot. The three leads are fine, with Leighton Cardno and Jason Fitch doing good stuff as Jake/Jacob, while Tainui Tukiwaho makes the very best of being “D”, the comic relief/stoner flatmate on the couch.
I’m a proudly one-eyed Wellingtonian, but it seems to me that the films coming out of Maori and Pacifica Auckland lately are great, while the rest of the indie output from that city is stuck in a Sydney/LA wannabe rut that is mostly pretty tiring to watch.
Jake is only one example of that.
– The Dominion Post
