It arrives before you know it – August, the final month of summer (that is according to the most loyal moviegoers… September? What? I CAN’T HEAR you!!…). Here comes a new school year. Here come the New England Patriots fans. Here comes another damn Final Destination sequel…
Now, now – don’t shrug it all off as hopeless just yet. It’s not like August is the cursed cinema cemetery that is January. Two years ago, this month treated us to Quentin Tarantino’s masterful Inglourious Basterds AND the shockingly good alien flick District 9 – both of which were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards the following winter. Could there be a film this year that will match this sort of caliber quality? The investigation begins now with a new GOT ME/LOST ME.
~~~~~
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
starring James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, and John Lithgow. Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Rated PG-13.
Doug Benson is a stand-up comedian I only find amusing every so often, but I share his opinion expressed on Twitter when he stated that he did not desire to see “Rise of the Planet of the Fake Looking Monkeys.” To be completely honest, this also serves as the blunt, book-cover-judging reason I haven’t seen the earlier Planet of the Apes films (save for that Tim Burton remake; we all did stupid things in high school). I realize I owe it to my movie-loving self to see the first Apes film that contains one of the most well-known twist endings of all time (that apparently supplies an unexpected chunk of religious debate in the dialogue), but I can’t escape that feeling that of all the classic films I still need to get through, one with overly ambitious monkey makeup that spawned an unstoppable shipment of disappointing sequels is among the last of the jelly beans.
As the trailer makes clear though, Rise is a prequel that embraces the fact that the majority of folks familiar with pop culture know exactly how that twist in the original goes down. This is also the first of the series to use CGI for the ape characters instead of elaborate costuming, and they netted Serkis (movement actor behind Kong in the most recent King Kong and most famously Gollum/Smeagol in the Lord of the Rings sequels) to play the chimp that started it all. From the trailer, the film looks both frightening and comical (especially the “watching you sleep” moment), but it just doesn’t have that “OMG! I HAVE to see this!” factor it should have. I want to blame Franco for that, but maybe that’s just because it’s fun to blame Franco for letdowns.
LOST ME
~~~~~
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, and Olivia Wilde. Directed by David Dobkin. Rated R.
Just like another comedy starring Reynolds from two summers ago, you cannot avoid the ads for this poop-joke-loving Freaky Friday knockoff. Nevertheless, I looked into its redband trailer (because Bateman getting an eyeful of projectile dookie isn’t crass enough for one’s funny bone). If you’re unlike me and have no problem watching the (mark my words) future Oscar-winner Bateman degrade himself with jokes about bikini-zone freckles, this film will probably have a lot to offer you. However, if you’re the kind of gross-out comedy audience patron I expect you are, you might want to learn a little about this nude scene of Wilde’s (you might feel a slight sting; that’s your common sense uncomfortably twisting and turning).
Dobkin directed Wedding Crashers (a film too sweet for its own good) and the script comes from the guys who wrote The Hangover, a film you might be surprised to learn had a screenplay. These were both hugely successful comedies, and The Change-Up might win the weekend’s top box office numbers too. Me, I’d regret paying full admission for this the next morning.
LOST ME
~~~~~
starring Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, Monica Bellucci, and Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by Larysa Kondracki. Rated R.
Movies based on true stories about heroic upstart women like Erin Brockovich and The Blind Side appear every so often, and like these films, they can earn proper accolades toward the actresses playing these protagonists. This performance from Weisz (Oscar-winner for The Constant Gardener) as Kathy Bolkovac, a post-war Bosnia peacekeeper who is set on uncovering a load of newly found U.N. based corruption, seems in the same boat as Julia Roberts’ and Sandra Bullock’s Oscar-winning roles. The big difference in Weisz’s performance – as the trailer and the critics’ reactions in it suggest – is there appears to be less a sense of obligation from the actress to turn her heroine into a bit of a caricature, even when she’s cracking wise. I like that and hope I’m right about it. The rest of the cast gives me hope as well.
GOT ME
~~~~~
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Tyler Dawson, and Rebekah Brandes. Directed by Evan Glodell. Rated R.
Written by, directed by, and starring Glodell, this little film featuring nobody you’ve probably ever heard of (yeah, me neither) is about a group of young adults who play with flame-throwers and artillery while they wait for the world to end. One of them meets the woman of his dreams, and shortly after, I guess a lot of action and explosions start occurring for some reason. The critics’ blurbs chosen for the trailer come off as long, crazy ramblings in search of something good to say about the film while also greatly succumbing to obligatory mentions of past successful films as desperate comparisons (“Bellflower blah-blah-blah John Hughes blah-blah-blah Fight Club blah-blah-blah…”). This is not a good sign at all, and dammit, NO film will ever be another Fight Club.
LOST ME
~~~~~
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Cool Place
starring Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Neal Cassady, and the Grateful Dead. Narrated by Stanley Tucci. Directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood. Rated R.
Kesey – best known as the author of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which of course was adapted into the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1975 – tried to document a bus trip in ’64 with a group called the Merry Band of Pranksters, but the video footage somehow came out unusable. This new documentary restores that footage. The reason I want to see this is best summed up by what one interview subject of the film says: “Nobody saw us as hippies because there were no such things as hippies yet.” I’d give close to anything to see the authenticity of that initial response from the public.
GOT ME
~~~~~
Return next Monday or Tuesday (I always shoot for Monday) for the GM/LM for August 12th, 2011 which will include The Help with Viola Davis and 30 Minutes or Less with Jesse Eisenberg. If you regularly visit Twitter, feel free to follow @MEIER_in_a_CT and @gttmovies for more instant and unadulterated reactions to movies.