War For The Planet Of The Apes
For most of its running time, Matt Reeves’ new entry in the remarkably durable simian franchise is that finest of blockbusters, combining a grand and at times awe-inspiring sweep with a fine eye for detail. An electrifying early sequence tracks soldiers moving through dense undergrowth, while supertext informs the viewer of the previous Rise and Dawn, before the scene erupts into furious and harrowing combat. This macro and micro scale continues throughout the film, as Reeves leaves the viewer in no doubt that this is a war both for the planet and for souls. Key to understanding these inner and outer wars is the phenomenal performance by Andy Serkis as Caesar, his journey echoing that of many a war film protagonist. Serkis’ performance is enhanced by the extraordinary visual effects that suggest you could plunge your hands into the thick fur of Maurice (Karin Konoval), Caesar’s most trusted friend and at some points his conscience. Equally impressive without digital make-up is Woody Harrelson as the terrifying Colonel who commands the military force against the apes, a chilling combination of Apocalypse Now‘s Kilgore and Kurtz who will stop at nothing to achieve his fanatical purpose. The movie echoes Vietnam war films in other ways such as the guerrilla/gorilla tactics of both sides, shifting loyalties and the steady loss of empathy and humanity among humans and apes alike. Indeed, some sequences echo Holocaust dramas, including a seemingly direct nod to Schindler’s List. Some of the echoes are effective but others too on the nose, while the final act is overly drawn out and there is unnecessary comic relief in the character of Bad Ape (Steve Zahn). The film is at its finest when it is unrelentingly grim, DOP Michael Seresin presenting the horrors and suffering of war with a cold, stark beauty. While Reeves carefully elides outright gore, there is no doubt that many characters are killed and just as many suffer agonies both physical and mental, including an early moment that is quite heartbreaking. Yet WFTPOTA also offers moments of great tenderness and compassion, its most moving moments when Reeves uses a subjective camera that has characters staring directly at the audience. It may be a cliché to present eyes as the window to the soul, but nonetheless a great deal is communicated through these bright eyes that convey the soulful struggle and hard fought war for this planet.
Dunkirk
From its opening extended take of soldiers walking through deserted streets, Dunkirk arrests attention and maintains a tight grip throughout its running time. It is by turns a gripping, moving and eerie experience, more an existential thriller than a war film. It eschews prolonged battle sequences yet the fear of attack by land, sea and air is constant, while aerial dogfights make abrupt intrusions into the visual assembly. Its story progresses through the attempted evacuation of British troops from the French coastal town in 1940, but presents its three plot strands across different time frames – land for a week, sea for a day, air for an hour – simultaneously rather than sequentially. It draws on silent cinema with a great trust in visual storytelling, combined with an intense soundtrack that blends Hans Zimmer’s relentless score with a sometimes suggestive and other times crashing sound mix. It is light on characterisation and dialogue, which combined with its primarily visual storytelling results in a somewhat impressionistic experience. It is in several ways a departure for writer-director Christopher Nolan, being his first foray into historical dramatization while also foregoing a central character such as Bruce Wayne or Dominic Cobb, since its three narrative strands follow a range of figures caught up in the evacuation. On the other hand, Nolan is very much on home turf thematically, as his familiar tropes are present including a layered narrative and an explicit engagement with the cinematic manipulation of time. The intercutting of the three stories echoes the multiple levels of Inception and Memento, as well as the nested narratives of The Prestige and the time-jumping of Interstellar. Nolan and editor Lee Smith cut between these strands, and this discontinuity demonstrates Nolan’s ongoing exploration of trauma and the associated fracturing of the mind.
The film emphasises trauma with Cillian Murphy’s shell-shocked Shivering Soldier, who contrasts with Tom Hardy’s unflappable RAF pilot Farrier, while stoicism informs the older generation both civilian – Mark Rylance’s Mr Dawson – and military – Kenneth Branagh’s Commander Bolton, as well as the younger generation in Dawson’s crew and Fionn Whitehead’s young Tommy on the beach who would be a wide-eyed innocent if his eyes did not hint at what he has seen. This is a recurring feature throughout Dunkirk, as director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema captures close ups of faces and eyes as well as subjective angles and oppressive lighting to convey the imprisonment of the stranded soldiers, also by Nolan’s decision to concentrate the film on the empty stretch of the beaches as well as the pitiless expanse of the sea. For some, this could be alienating as viewers may want a wealth of character detail in order to engage with the drama. But the film’s sparseness is also a great strength as the film creates an immersive and absorbing world that the viewer can themselves inhabit and fear. The ‘enemy’ is only seen in silhouette, which makes them all the more menacing, especially when bullets from unseen sources pepper the soldiers and, in a sense, the viewer themselves. All reactions to film are subjective, and Dunkirk emphasises the subjectivity of experience. Experience is central to the film, the experience of the characters parallel to that of the viewer. As a film, Dunkirk is an intricate and electrifying lattice of image and sound. As an experience, it is ruthlessly efficient and mercilessly tense, a sublime immersion in trauma, time and terror. 
Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical
The best art/entertainment gives to you what you bring to it. I have been a huge fan of Meat Loaf for over twenty years, owning various albums and seeing the big man in concert multiple times. Therefore, I brought expectations and trepidation to Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical, all of them Louder Than Everything Else. Would the show be Paradise By The Dashboard Light or best left At The Lost and Found? Would I Want My Money Back or would there be Not A Dry Eye In The House?
The answers turned out to be yes, no, no and certainly not in my case, as over the course of slightly under three hours Rock and Roll Dreams came Through as I was taken Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Fire, knowing that Heaven Can Wait for this Bat Out Of Hell. I heard songs I know by heart performed in new and exciting ways – especially when solos became duets or even chorus medleys – well as songs new to me that were moving and thrilling. All these songs only previously connected by their composer were integrated into a compelling and moving multimedia experience that plays as a dystopian West Side Story by way of Escape From New York.
I rarely say this but I would have happily gone back the following day for another exhilarating experience that is a Dead Ringer For Love. I sang along, I clapped, I cheered, I laughed, I cried. Meat Loaf is and remains by far my favourite musical artist, because the sheer, extraordinary, unrestrained passion of his work reaches into my soul and wrenches it out into the world, raw and exposed For Crying Out Loud but without a hint of self-consciousness. With a thrill of beautiful agony, Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical did as much as any Meat Loaf album or concert has ever done, while also loosing The Monster to strange new places.
Although Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad, I will not say it is a perfect musical, as some of the songs felt a little forced into the narrative while there were some slightly jarring plot jumps. Furthermore, I will not pretend objectivity (which I think is a fallacy in aesthetic appreciation anyway) because my reaction is profoundly personal and A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste. Meat Loaf means something incredibly special to me, and while I would not expect this music to mean the same to anyone else, I sincerely hope, dear reader, that you have similar Objects In The Rear View Mirror that bring you equivalent exhilaration, passion, awe, wonder and unadulterated love that you Would Do Anything For…
Baby Driver
Baby Driver begins with one of the most arresting openings seen this year. We motor through a car chase over the dulcet tones of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with ‘Bellbottoms’, as the eponymous motorist Baby (Ansel Elgort) evades police with remarkable skills that demonstrate why he is the best driver around. Writer-director Edgar Wright then ups the ante with one of his trademark long takes, as Baby essentially dances his way through the streets of Atlanta to the tune of Bob and Earl’s ‘Harlem Shuffle’. It is an opening of assured choreography and bravura musical choices, that clearly lays out Baby Driver‘s conceit of a heist film shot and edited like a musical. Overall, this conceit works, but the film never quite accelerates to the level achieved during its opening. The performances are very fine, especially Jamie Foxx as genuinely menacing psychopath Bats, while the romance between Baby and Debora (Lily James) is sweet and charming. Wright makes smart use of the Atlanta locations and delivers several rubber-burning car chases as well as some surprisingly nasty gun fights. These sequences fit with the straightfacedness of the film, which may be a surprise for those expecting a comedic tone like Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy as well as Scott Pilgrim VS the World. The lack of comedy is not a problem as the film works as a straight heist thriller with a distinct and imaginative soundtrack. However, in its final act the film meanders off the highway with some ill-judged sentiment that has been previously absent. Sentiment is fine but needs to be there since ignition – here it feels like an incongruous diversion from the brutality of the gangster milieu. In addition, the finale of the film is overdone with more than one too many ‘It’s not over yet!’ moments. Thankfully the film’s denouement avoids mawkish sentimentality, ensuring that this ride gets back on the road rather than becoming a wreck. Baby Driver may not be a perfect journey, but it still offers ample swerves and spins.
Top Six of First Six
Blistering Bayhem! We’re halfway through 2017 and, if you’re like me, you may be thinking ‘Where has the year gone? And what have we done with it?’ One thing I have done is enjoy lots of movies, 30 new releases to be precise. It’s been a varied six months with great stuff as well as dross. After intense thought, I have assembled the following as my top six films of the first six months of 2017.
An exquisite, sumptuous, erotic portrayal of an intriguing, labyrinthine tale.
2. Wonder Woman
A dynamic, inventive, witty and diverse superhero adventure of duty, will, evil and love.
A beautiful, haunting folk tale of survival, solitude and transcendence.
A beautifully composed, exquisitely painful, warm, witty and moving portrait of family, grief and community.
5. Moonlight
A haunting, soulful, beautiful, exquisitely balanced exploration of identity, sexuality and belonging.
An enlightening, compelling and inspiring story of mathematics, race, technology and history.
Biggest Turkey
An underwhelming, painfully obvious franchise set-up that suffers from being literally too dark.
What will the rest of the year bring us? The simple answer is, plenty…
Baywatch
Baywatch is a film of bits. Some of those bits are funny, but the unfunny bits outnumber the funny, so mathematically the film is a failure. And yet, it is a film that’s hard to dislike. The humour comes largely from the mismatched partners in lifeguarding Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson) and Matt Brody (Zac Efron), whose comedic bantering offers some surges of laughter, while slightly damper laughs come from the schlubby Ronnie Greenbaum (Jon Bass) and his crush on CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach) that is the source of much awkwardness. Aside from that, references to the TV show (complete with cameos) are laboured while the drug dealing plot needs more than CPR to make it move. But despite the bagginess of Damien Shannon and Mark Swift’s script, Seth Gordon’s direction has enough straight-faced absurdity to keep the film moving, and every time he is on screen, Johnson’s charisma enervates the potentially soggy material. Baywatch is far from a cresting wave, but its comedic current is diverting enough.
The Red Turtle
Some films are hard to describe in words because they are purely cinematic. Such is the case with The Red Turtle, a nationally complex production between France and Japan, directed by the British-Dutch Michael Dudok de Wit, and distributed by Studio Ghibli. The film’s folk tale-esque story of a shipwrecked man marooned on an island echoes the isolation and drama of All Is Lost, while the beautiful animation and spiritual resonance recalls Life Of Pi, but it lacks the narrative of either. Indeed, the narrative of the film is slim, following the exploits of this unnamed Man and the (very few) others that he encounters. There is no dialogue beyond shouts of ‘Hey!’ and no wraparound story to explain who, where and when the story involves, let alone why. What we are treated to instead are lush yet simple visuals, animation that carries a suffusive, dreamlike quality, and a plot with ambiguous events. On one level the film is about isolation and solitude, yet it also engages with family and connection. More broadly, it is concerned with humanity’s place within nature, best depicted when the Man encounters the eponymous reptile. Arguably, the film progresses through the five stages of grief, the Man exhibiting denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Beyond all of these potential meanings, however, what the film offers is that finest of cinematic experiences – transcendence. There is a strong sense throughout the film of something beyond, something to believe in, something to put hope and faith in; nothing so tangible as the divine or a higher purpose, but an abstract impression of having a place within a wider pattern. Perhaps the film’s strongest cinematic cousin, therefore, is the work of Terrence Malick, as like The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder, The Red Turtle is a sublime and transcendent experience, truly understood only by watching it.
