movies
THE FOUNTAIN OF TRUTH Buds with opposite lifestyles learn the grass isn’t always greener in Dobkin’s body-swap raunchfest.
The Change-Up ★★★★
T
he Change-Up will not be the summer’s biggest comedy, but it may well be its biggest surprise. Before we even get to the movie, let’s take the case of the trailer and TV ads. Could they possibly be less promising? But here’s the funny part: In an age when studios are notorious for cramming a film’s best stuff into its promos, Universal actually saved the laughs for the movie. And — guess what — there are a lot of them. This is a more notable achievement than may be immediately evident, for we are dealing with that most tired and brain dead of genres, the body-swap comedy. These things wore out their welcome back in the ’80s, when a new one seemed to arrive every other weekend along with the latest Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger testosterone-fest. So it was both curious and professionally courageous on the part of Hangover scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore and Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin to take on the challenge of breathing new life into the form. It’s a challenge they meet in large part through a generous infusion of 21st-century raunch. Jason Bateman is Dave, a father and workaholic lawyer who’s up for partner.
Ryan Reynolds is his lifelong best bud, Mitch, a dedicated slacker and ladies’ man. The picture opens with a typical night in Dave’s life. His twin toddlers are wailing, he forces himself awake to change them, and when he bends to reach for a fresh diaper, the audience beholds something it has never beheld on screen before: a close-up of a baby’s butt in the process of firing projectile poo at his face. The stage is hereby set for two hours of variously unexpected and disturbing visuals. It’s fairly obvious why Dave might envy Mitch’s carefree, sex-filled lifestyle, so the film’s creators required a plausible reason why the weed-puffing playboy might reciprocate. This takes the form of Dave’s wife, Jamie. She’s played by the always-appealing Leslie Mann as a neglected beauty on whom Reynolds’ character has long nursed a secret crush. We all know how these deals work. Via one mystical gimmick or another, two people find themselves occupying each other’s bodies. The filmmakers tossed a dart and came up with the guys confessing their fantasy to trade lives while peeing in a public fountain. Boom, the lights go black across the city of Atlanta, and the friends wake up the next morning with their wish granted. Each actor does a credible, even com-
mendable, job of channeling the other’s patented screen persona. It’s big-time fun to watch Bateman stampede through the executive suites of his firm like a freshman at a frat party (“Are these donuts free?”) and attempt to bullshit his way through lifeand-death board meetings. Likewise, Reynolds is convincing in several scenes that provide his inner Bateman with the opportunity to jeopardize his stud status. Mitch is an aspiring actor working his way up the porn ladder. There’s a scene depicting a day on the job that involves a senior citizen and is likely to be seared into your brain for life. I should say no more than that the movie is wall to wall with such moments. Something as freaky as it is funny seems to wait around every narrative corner, and there’s great pleasure in just sitting back and letting the picture serve up its crinkles and shocks. Knife-throwing babies, anyone? Don’t get me wrong: We’re not reinventing the wheel here. But the fact is that most of the summer’s most hyped movies have proved the most disappointing. Unexpected-
ly deft writing, direction and performances combine to make this film way more fun than anyone had reason to expect — and that, if you ask me, is a nice change. RICK KISONAK
REVIEWS
72 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
08.10.11-08.17.11
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes ★★★★
W
hat is it with apes? Last summer, Rick Moody published a novel with a lengthy subplot about an intelligent ape who has a crush on his female caretaker. Then, in February, debut novelist Benjamin Hale gave us The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, nearly 600 pages narrated by another unnaturally smart chimpanzee. Hale’s creation not only lusts after his human trainer, but provides graphic details of their liaisons (to the dismay of some readers). Now, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, Hollywood brings us a “reboot” of the well-worn Planet of the Apes series. James Franco is top billed, but make no mistake: The film’s protagonist is a simian, and he’s more compelling than the hero of virtually any other flick this summer. Perhaps that’s because Caesar — a digital creation modeled on the human expressions of actor Andy Serkis — is no less than the Spartacus of chimps. Mercifully for the audience, however, he’s too busy liberating his fellow apes to express any interest in interspecies romance. The 1968 Charlton Heston film established that 38th-century Earth will be ruled by loquacious apes, while Homo sapiens is reduced to hunting and grunting. How did
this happen? The 1972 sequel Conquest of the Planet of the Apes offered one version of a near-future simian takeover; Rise offers another. Like an old-school science-fiction flick, the film is surprisingly character driven until a final rousing action sequence, and that’s all to the good. Franco plays a scientist messing around with DNA, as Hollywood-handsome scientists are wont to do, trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts his father (John Lithgow). After the virus he’s testing has frightening effects on a subject, ending the project, Franco rescues the subject’s offspring, Caesar. He raises him at home, where the young chimp’s altered DNA quickly manifests itself in intelligence exceeding a human child’s. That’s good news for the scientist, but not for the ape, who’s destined to a life of condescendingly offered bananas and incarceration by his intellectual inferiors. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rise transfers our sympathy from the well-meaning scientist to the supposed “monster” he created, putting us in Caesar’s place as he learns that his human “father” can’t shield him from the cruelties of life. (They include Tom Felton, still working his Draco Malfoy sneer, as the sadistic employee of a primate
refuge.) It’s indicative of Weta Digital’s achievement with motion-capture technology that we never question the reality of Caesar, or of the other apes he eventually recruits for his liberation movement. While the film has its campy moments — such as a callout to the most famous line of the 1968 film — they don’t come from the special effects. Director Rupert Wyatt, who made prison thriller The Escapist, wisely keeps his action setpieces straightforward, so audiences know what’s happening and whom they’re rooting for. And it’s not who you’d expect. Like Avatar and District 9, Rise pulls off the trick of making audiences cheer for nonhumans against humans by appealing to basic human nature: People root for clever underdogs. People like to fantasize about swing-
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE People play second banana to a startlingly expressive CGI chimp in Wyatt’s sci-fi reboot.
ing through the trees, or scaling the struts of the Golden Gate Bridge. People wish they could stop worrying about collapsing financial markets and just enjoy a panoramic view from the top of a redwood. People wonder how their supposedly superior intelligence got them here. Maybe that’s the secret of the ape literary trend. Of course, once the apes take over, they’ll have their own stupid problems. We’ll see in the sequel. M A R G O T HA R R I S O N