Film

Monkey shines

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The motion-capture apes take another step toward world domination in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a film just as good as its predecessor, and certainly a step forward when it comes to pure, unadulterated ass-kicking ape action. The movie picks up 10 years after a well meaning doctor played by James Franco first shot an experimental drug into a chimp and unintentionally initiated the end of the human race. Caesar (Andy Serkis doing his motion-capture best) leads a group of genetically modified apes in the redwoods near the Golden Gate Bridge. Life is good, and the humans have seemingly disappeared thanks to the Simian Flu brought on by the Franco character’s experiments. As it turns out, some humans have survived, led by Gary Oldman’s frustrated Dreyfus, who fears the humans will run out of fuel for their generators. There’s a chance for some hydraulic power via a dam in the woods, a dam that just happens to be near the apes’ compound. A band of humans, led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke) sets out to repair the dam, stumbles upon the apes, and those apes aren’t happy to see them. While Caesar has a few positive memories of humans to go with the bad ones, others are 100 percent justifiably pissed at mankind. Koba (Toby Kebbell), who figured prominently in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, isn’t too happy about his days as a lab experiment. He has no interest in a peaceful existence with humans, and he’s going to do some pretty nasty stuff to ensure acrimony. This not only creates discord between apes and humans, but ape on ape feuding as well.

Everything leads up to an exciting battle between apes and humans in San Francisco, with a decaying Golden Gate Bridge figuring prominently in the action, and the blessed sight of Koba blasting away astride a horse with machine guns in both hands. While this installment isn’t as strong with the human element (Franco rocked in Rise), by Bob Grimm the action in Dawn is far superior. One of the cooler aspects of the film is bgrimm@ that you can’t help but feel bad for Koba, newsreview.com with his clouded-over eye and surgical scars. No amount of compassionately delivered 4 optimism from Caesar will ease Koba’s mind. He’s out to mulch some humans and take no prisoners, and his vengeful mannerisms are understandable. This makes him a great, compelling villain. Clarke, who was awesome in Zero Dark Thirty, holds his own among his motion-capture colleagues. Keri Russell (who worked with director Matt Reeves years ago on TV’s Felicity) does decent supporting work as the soothing companion with some first aid knowhow. Oldman is his typical frantic self as a human with an ax to grind—his character, like many others, lost his family to the Simian Flu. I caught the film in 3-D, and I couldn’t help but notice things seemed a little dark. My first instinct was that the filmmakers were cheating a bit by making things dark so they could cut some corners on the ape CGI. However, when I lifted my glasses, the images did look a bit brighter. Skipping 3-D might be the way to go for Dawn. Reeves, who directed Cloverfield, Let Me In and the vastly underrated The Pallbearer, proves a more than ample choice for the Apes job. He’s already been announced for the sequel, due two years from now. It’ll be interesting to see where the Apes franchise goes next. I’m holding out hope that it’ll jump many years into the future, with the Icarus spacecraft returning to Earth to make some startling discoveries. Icarus was the ship Charlton Heston rode in the 1968 original, and it was mentioned in Rise during some background news footage and newspaper headlines. The return of Icarus would be many kinds of awesome. Ω

"I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-a to chimpanzee!"

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excellent 4 22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, an unlikely duo if there ever was one, basically repeat the same steps of their very funny 21 Jump Street, and they do it in a way that keeps things fresh while knowingly recycling the same plot. This film acknowledges what it is, a run-of-themill sequel, for its entire running time. It’s a selfmocking technique that works well thanks to its stars and the deft comic direction of returning directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are on a roll, having also directed this year’s The Lego Movie. This one picks up where the first film left off, with Captain Dickson (Ice Cube in serious comic overdrive) assigning Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) to college. In college, they will do exactly what they did undercover in the first movie: Infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier. They get the laughs the same way, through Hill’s self-deprecating, rat-a-tat delivery, and Tatum’s dumb lug shtick. It worked well the first time, and it works well again.

5Edge of Tomorrow In the future, Earth is fighting a crazed, vicious alien force that’s shredding our armies with little effort. Tom Cruise plays Cage, an armed forces officer who serves more as a public relations man than anybody who belongs on a battlefield. After a publicity tour, he sits down with a hard-nosed general (a cold Brendan Gleeson) and finds out he's going into battle. Cage is justifiably terrified, and his first taste of battle doesn’t go well, and he’s killed in especially gruesome fashion. For reasons I won’t give away, he instantly wakes up after his death, transported back to a moment shortly after his meeting with the general, and before the battle that will take his life. Cage is in a seriously messed up situation. He starts repeating the same day, and dying every time. He does his best to change that outcome, but he always winds up meeting a grisly death and waking up in the same place. He eventually comes into contact with Rita (Emily Blunt), the military’s poster girl for the perfect soldier. By repeating days with Rita, Cage starts to build himself up as a soldier, discover secrets about the enemy, and increasing life longevity chances for himself and mankind. The film’s handling of this situation is thrilling and even funny, thanks to Cruise’s strong performance and nice direction by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity). It will easily stand as one of 2014’s best.

5Life Itself Roger Ebert saw a lot of documentaries during his reign as the world’s most renowned movie critic. It’s only fitting that one of the last things he did in his life was take part in a documentary that will certainly stand as one of 2014’s best. This gives us the full story on Ebert, retelling the days before he started writing about movies for a living, his Pulitzer Prize-winning career as a critic, and his painful, yet amazingly graceful, last days. Director Steve James had permission to film Ebert in his hospital rooms as he battled cancer. It’s hard to watch what he’s going through, but it’s inspiring to see how Ebert handled his obstacles. Oh sure, James probably shows us some of the more pleasant, upbeat footage, but Ebert’s passion for life was a most genuine one, and no trick editing is required to show us that. The film touches upon two very important partnerships in Ebert’s life: his marriage to Chaz Ebert—who appears often in the film—and his work with the late Gene Siskel. While watching the movie, it seems as if Roger Ebert is narrating, but the voice is that of an impressionist named Stephen Stanton. The resemblance is incredible, as if Roger somehow found his voice again in time to tell us his story. This is sweet, scary, funny, sad and surprisingly entertaining and uplifting. It’s also revealing (I didn’t know he was an alcoholic), uncompromising (some of the medical moments are very hard to watch), and brutally honest. While I give it my highest endorsement, I think Ebert would’ve given it 3 and a half stars out of 4. Hey—he was a tough critic. (Available on VOD, Amazon.com and iTunes during limited theatrical release.)

2Maleficent Angelina Jolie plays the title character, the infamous horned villain from Sleeping Beauty. There’s a little bit of revisionist history here, with Maleficent portrayed as more of a fallen angel rather than a straight up baddie. The whole thing almost works because Jolie is damned good in this film, especially when the script allows for her to bellow curses and just act devilish. It gets a little sleepy at times when it deals with, well, Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning), the young woman who stands to have a very bad 16th birthday thanks to a Maleficent curse. Jolie has a creepy getup that I thought would bother me, but I kind of liked looking at it after a while. It’s the world surrounding her that I found a bit pedestrian. Director Robert Stromberg worked as a production designer on films like Alice in Wonderland, Avatar and Oz the Great and Powerful. I didn’t like any of those movies and, in the end, I don’t really like this one. At this point in watching Stromberg’s work, I’m just not taken by his weird visual worlds. They put me off for some reason, and have a choppy pop-up book feel to them. On the plus side, it is better than Alice and Oz, and perhaps even Avatar. On the negative side, it’s still not all that good.

2Tammy Having co-written this movie, Melissa McCarthy can take a lot of the blame for yet another bad comedy featuring her playing an uninteresting mess of a human being. She stars as the title character, a fast food worker who wrecks her car, gets fired and finds out her husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair in the same day. She winds up hitting the road with her alcohol-swilling, diabetic grandma (Susan Sarandon), and virtually nothing works as far as laughs are concerned. McCarthy and Ben Falcone’s script (Falcone also directs) tries to mine laughs out of grandma being a trashy party girl and Tammy eating too much pie. It wastes the talents of everybody involved, including Gary Cole as a philandering barfly and Mark Duplass as Tammy’s love interest. When Tammy holds up her former burger joint employer, it’s almost funny, but most of that scene was covered in the preview trailer. McCarthy can be hilarious—her best film moment may always be the outtake during the This is 40 credits—but she can also be tedious as she is in this and last year’s Identity Thief. Her next film is St. Vincent co-starring Bill Murray, a film that will hopefully erase this one from our memories.

3Third Person It’s been 10 years since writer-director Paul Haggis won some Oscars for Crash, a good but overrated movie. That film had a bunch of storylines weaving together, and gave some good actors decent showcases. It also seemed to set the stage for a promising directorial career. Haggis has yet to capitalize on his Oscar triumph. His latest probably won’t do much to change that. It’s a respectable but divisive effort that will confound a lot of viewers the way Cameron Crowe’s complex and unjustly maligned Vanilla Sky did. It tries to do a lot, and it doesn’t succeed on all fronts. Some will see it as a train wreck, whereas I see it as a flawed but reputable effort. It’s a puzzle movie with Michael (Liam Neeson), a struggling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, as its centerpiece. His tempestuous lover Anna (Olivia Wilde) comes to visit him in Paris. The two have a strange, sadomasochistic relationship that will be explained. The reasons are a bit preposterous, but they make sense in context. There are two other story arcs featuring Adrien Brody, Mila Kunis and James Franco. The stories tie together with one of those big movie twists that will either make or break the picture for you. I liked the twist, but I wouldn’t argue with you if you hated it.

1Transformers: Age of Extinction Director Michael Bay seems to be taunting his haters at this point, employing all of those things that sicken his detractors, and cranking everything up to disgusting levels. Replacing Shia LaBeouf is Mark Wahlberg. He plays Cade Yeager, a crazy robot inventor living on a farm with his smoking hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). After inadvertently buying Optimus Prime from an old guy at an abandoned movie theater (yep!), Yeager and his daughter wind up fighting alongside the Autobots as they battle an evil race of American-made Autobot clones courtesy of a Steve Jobs-like mogul (Stanley Tucci). The movie is a billion hours long, and none of those hours are ever any good. Some of the visuals pop, but you won’t care because you will be glazed over by the time most of the big action kicks up. If you should choose to see this one, make sure all of your bills are paid, and you’ve winter-proofed your house before you sit down, because you aren’t getting out of that theater for a very long time.