Tag: monkey movie

Dub’s Take: Better Man (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2 out of 5

What creative doesn’t love a contract, which includes being a good rep by spending your daylight hours fielding endless interview questions from a bevy of international reporters?

Much like film criticism, there’s a finite number of queries before you end up answering the same ones over-and-over again. But you still have to act like you’re chuffed no one’s asked you that one before, just like singer/songwriter/“Better Man” subject Robbie Williams and director Michael Gracey. Any conversation about Better Man is eventually going to devolve into an opinion on whether the monkey thing actually works or not. And much like questions at a press gala, if you have to ask so many of them to get the answer you want, then maybe it wasn’t so interesting to begin with.

Gracey says in the pre-show, “Whatever kind of movie you think (Better Man) is going to be, it’s not that movie.” But it is, following the same Sisyphean tropes that other biopics of its vein already have. While I can respect Williams’ tenacity of spirit, he hasn’t lived through anything the public hasn’t already seen from the celebrity sphere before. If Williams is this in-your-face in Britain then it’s no wonder his movie is struggling at the box office: the public already knows more than it wants to from the covers of tabloid magazines.

Better Man’s resilience, then, relies on its music & aesthetics which, for the most part, are successful. Despite some lackadaisical CGI (Williams’ avatar isn’t as detailed as those in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), the movie still looks good, including a solid visual metaphor for panic attacks. While I can’t see myself picking up the soundtrack album, the music was pretty good, too. If you go solely off the film’s cuts, you’d think Williams is a balladier like solo George Michael: these needle-drops work for the movie’s somber beats, but I longed for more up-tempo numbers like in the show-stopping Take That & Knebworth sequences.

At the film’s midway point, Robbie goes through a frosted-tip phase, but instead of solely colouring the monkey’s head hair blond, the filmmakers dye his face & neck hair, too. Does that mean his chest hair is blond as well? Where’s the walking on all-fours & clattering? Better Man gets points for trying something different, even if it’s a shallow template for another, more-bonkers film with superior follow-through.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Even if the film didn’t totally work, Williams & Gracey concocted some wild, “Across the Universe”-esque fantasy sequences, such as Williams & Raechelle Banno’s courting montage, when Williams is caught with heroin, or the left-field “Beowulf” climax. Would any of these scenes have played better with a human actor as opposed to a monkey? Should there have been more monkey-isms? Did the movie strike the right balance between monkey & man? Do you even care? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

“Planet of the Apes 10” (or “X”), at almost two-and-a-half hours, is too damn long. I wanted a Charlton Heston-style pun with “YA BLEW IT UP”, but I couldn’t figure one out.

I’m no historian either, but wasn’t there a time when movie studios wanted shorter films in theatres to increase the number of showtimes in a day? But the era of butchering overlong “auteur” films has been over for a long time, hasn’t it? Last-century classics like “The Wild Bunch” and “Once Upon a Time in America” were championed once their unaltered versions were repatriated, but it seemed left-minded executives could come in whenever they wanted and cut scenes they thought were superficial. Today, it’s the studios producing these overlong movies, maybe in their post-COVID attempts to revitalize theatrical box-offices with tentpole “experiences”.

I grew up with the “Apes” films up to “Conquest” and I’m always down for a monkey movie. “Kingdom” starts nobly, not only by having lots of different kinds of monkeys in it, but by taking place “generations” after the other entries, serving as a soft-reboot of sorts for the resuscitated franchise. I liked the dialogue’s seasoning of existential despondency and the throwback soundtrack, both which recall the 1968 original. “The Witcher” ‘s Freya Allen successfully auditions for “Tomb Raider” with her role. And the special effects were pretty good, including some effective mo-cap, and a high-angle of some windy trees in the prologue that was eye-catching on a big screen.

But the film is purposeless other than as distraction. Its formulaic first act set-up of rescue & revenge segues to a meandering middle and a predictable end, with too many “what ifs” for a road picture and not enough actual adventuring. Extended passages like a campfire and a cameo from William H. Macy are too much texture for a monkey movie. The worst element is character actor & pasty White guy Kevin Durand’s main antagonist Proximus, for which Durand adopts a problematic Keith David impression. Producers should have just hired Keith David instead.

Nothing here couldn’t have been done in a hour-and-a-half – the median length for all four original Apes sequels. No wonder there’s a conscious audience shift to streaming: who wants to pay modern prices and leave their home to take an uncomfortable nap?

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Do you have any good Charlton Heston or Planet of the Apes puns or jokes? Leave yours in the comment box below!

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Dub’s Take: Godzilla x Kong (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

I think we’ve confidently reached the point where the “kaiju” in a Godzilla movie can easily hijack the film from its human cast. Never was I more malaise-stricken than during the live-action scenes in “Godzilla x Kong”, where capable actors who put in a good performance every time regardless of pay or cast heading (like Rebecca Hall or Brian Tyree Henry) couldn’t save their loquacious appearances from making-plain the techno-babble that rationalizes the film’s monsters & their “world”, in a language understood by us surface-dwellers.

Who cares? Aside from the parallels between the little deaf tribal girl “who holds the key” and all the non-verbal grunting going on between the titans, scenes with dialogue are quickly shoved under the bed when the Big Boys start stomping around.

These action scenes, with decent special-effects even five movies on, are antithetical to those in the recent “Dune 2”: fights have a beginning, middle, and end, without cutaways; they’re generally framed in-full so viewers can see the blows and their consequences; and they weren’t finely-minced in the editing room. The broad stokes of the production design also seem to have some thought put into it: there’s good squish when Godzilla heat-beams into another beast’s mouth; a bridge of bones over a river of lava; a “mini-Kong” that plays like Gollum to King Kong’s Frodo; and the gangly movements of an “evil-Kong” that recalls the uninhibitedness of Mark Hamill’s Joker from the nineties’ “Batman” animated series.

But it’s all still not very original, isn’t it? How many more of these “Monsterverse” movies (and by extension TV series’) are we going to get before audiences get sick of them, or their diminished budgets start to affect what we see on screen, or are remade again? And while the wider design is fun, the details could have used some work: in the climax, the Great Pyramids seem to get destroyed three times over and yet are still standing in the background by the end of the scene. Considering the work that looks like went to the rest of the picture, that’s a big oversight. Doesn’t change that I was entertained.

2.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you a Legendary, or even a Toho, “Monsterverse” fan? Do you think all this talk of “Hollow Earth” dilutes these movies, or is it the most believable alternative to the titans being products of nuclear testing, or extra-terrestrials? Do we even “need” an explanation? And why do audiences seem so concerned with the number of civilian casualties in a superhero movie when even the friendly kaiju seem to take out thousands here (and yes, I know from the “Monarch” show that there’s an Amber Alert in place)? Leave a comment below!

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Dub’s Take: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

“Tarzan 2016” is a thing. What starts promisingly with Christoph Waltz & the great Djimon Hounsou squaring off is squashed once the title screen arrives, and conscious viewers notice the ‘registered trademark’ icon next to the logo. It still begs belief eight years post-release and reeks of corporate interference & franchise ensnarement. It’s mind-boggling thinking of what legal finagling forced such a decision – then you pause the movie on Netflix and it displays the logo on its idle screen without it. It isn’t even on the poster!

You can’t say the writers didn’t try to do something different: instead of another origin story, we open with an edified, middle-aged Tarzan, who retrogresses when he’s used as a pawn in the Congolese mineral trade. But then Waltz’s bad guy devolves into the one-dimensional schtick we’ve seen him do in every role since “Inglorious Basterds”, dragging Margot Robbie’s Jane from one set-piece to another while Alexander Skarsgård’s admittedly-shredded Tarzan is in hot pursuit. The action becomes the only point to the Sisyphysian push-and-pull, and the action scenes are a mish-mash of poor CGI & muted colours. While they’re thankfully not hyper-edited, anything in motion just looks like blobs – particularly the swinging-through-trees, which recall the ‘surfing’ from the 1999 Disney film.

The Casting Director got their budget’s worth, though. Acting is Tarzan 2016’s strongest quality, but was this caliber of work necessary here? Even Samuel L. Jackson had a chance to ham it up a bit, but he’s relatively low-key as the sidekick. There’s a five-second shot where Jackson lands on a tree branch and looks down, and he’s supposed to be hundreds of feet in the air but in reality it’s probably just a green screen beneath him, and it’s believable. I wish the cast’s effort had gone to a story with more follow-through: if not a “Birth of Tarzan” then maybe “Tarzan in Europe”.

2 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Screenshots were author-obtained. Think I’m being too hard on Christoph? How about too easy on everyone else? Like yourself a good monkey movie? Planning to watch it before it’s “removed from Netflix”? Comment why don’t ‘cha!

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Now Available on Laserdisc: Project X

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Phew! It was a tough go, but I made it through two months of consecutive weekly posting. This month – to mix things up – I’m going to be digging into my home video archive to bring you a whole batch of articles on movies I own on the antiquated and inferior home video format known in some circles as the Reflective Optical Videodisc System, or DISCOVISION! I’m sure you’re thrilled.

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