Friday new releases: 10 May 2024

Introductions

Greetings to all the new sub­scribers who have arrived here with encour­age­ment from the lovely David Slack. David said some very nice things about me* in his More Than a Feilding news­let­ter and it’s no hard­ship for me to return the favour. He’s an all round good egg.

This news­let­ter comes out every work­ing day at 3.15 in the after­noon Aotearoa-time. Monday to Thursday I pick a single piece of screen art to recom­mend. Items that con­tain mostly recycled mater­i­al (either from my Capital Times columns or more recently from RNZ) are free to all. If I write some­thing new, some of it is reserved for paid sub­scribers (who also get access to the com­plete archive which is pay­walled after 30 days).

Every Friday I try and cov­er as many new releases as pos­sible, depend­ing on access, ses­sion times, oth­er work, etc.

Because they are all fresh, the Friday new releases are usu­ally (at least par­tially) restric­ted, but because so many of you have just arrived, today’s edi­tion is free to all.

Earlier this week I revis­ited the most recent instal­ment in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series, War for … and was once again moved by how good it was. The tri­logy that star­ted with Rise (2011), fol­lowed by Dawn (2014), is a pretty stu­pendous achieve­ment in Hollywood fran­chise terms. Technically, they are amaz­ing, of course, but the char­ac­ters, stor­ies and themes still man­age to resonate.

Since War, 20^th Century Fox has been absorbed into the Disney empire (and the Fox name has been retired due to neg­at­ive polit­ic­al con­nota­tions). Seven years on, with the new film leav­ing dir­ect­or Matt Reeves and star Andy Serkis behind, I wasn’t sure how it would meas­ure up.

I needn’t have wor­ried. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a worthy chapter in its own right (as well as kick­ing off a new trilogy).

We return to the Planet about 300 years after the death of Caesar in the last film. His name – and mes­sage – is only hazily remembered.

Scattered in isol­ated clans, the apes have developed dif­fer­ent cul­tures and beliefs. Many have nev­er even seen a human – they are known as ‘Echoes’ – and their pre-Caesar his­tory appears to be mostly lost.

We meet Noa (Owen Teague) and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham). Their clan has semi-domesticated eagles and train them to hunt and fish for the vil­lage. An import­ant rite of pas­sage is to claim an eagle’s egg from the highest eyrie and to raise the chick themselves.

On an egg-hunting exped­i­tion, Noa sees a maraud­ing gang of war­like apes with met­al masks. Unable to warn the vil­lage in time, he can­not pre­vent their enslave­ment and instead has to make the per­il­ous jour­ney across coun­try to find and free them.

En route he meets a wise old oran­gutang named Raka (Peter Macon), who knows and reveres Caesar’s laws and attempts to pass them along, and a mys­ter­i­ous human female (Freya Allen) who Raka calls Nova. “We call them all Nova,” he says. “I don’t know why.”

What I enjoyed most about this film was genu­inely not know­ing what was around each corner, so I won’t talk any more about the plot. The char­ac­ters are all strong and dis­tinct – from each oth­er but also from char­ac­ters we have seen pre­vi­ously. It feels fresh, even if at this point in the nar­rat­ive cycle it doesn’t yet have the alleg­or­ic­al or emo­tion­al heft that the earli­er films managed.

Talking of earli­er films, the call­backs to them are judi­cious and satisfying. 

On the bus to the cinema yes­ter­day, I found myself think­ing how refresh­ing it was that the talk­ing apes in these films don’t curse. Well, we can cross that one off the list now.

One final shout out, to Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School gradu­ate Lydia Peckham as the embryon­ic love interest for Noa – it’s not only a big break for her but coin­cid­ent­ally her sur­name is also a plot twist.

We now turn to the bad British 1960s teeth sec­tion of the newsletter.

Jackie Stewart was a phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful Scottish racing driver in the 1960s and 70s. One of the highest paid sports­men of his era, he man­aged to achieve all of this while suc­cess­fully hid­ing the fact that he couldn’t read or write. Back then, dys­lex­ia was barely under­stood and poor Jackie spent his school days being told that he was lazy, stu­pid or “thick”.

That humi­li­ation drove him to become the work­ahol­ic that he still is today, in his 80s.

The doc­u­ment­ary film Stewart is exec­ut­ive pro­duced by his son Mark and there­fore has fam­ily approv­al. While Stewart’s struggles with self-confidence and ego are cer­tainly inter­est­ing, this is no warts and all portrait.

Formula 1 at the time was notori­ously dan­ger­ous and at one point in the film Stewart’s wife Helen points out that all five of their closest friends in racing had died on the track. Stewart’s greatest achieve­ment, then, may have been his decision to retire in 1973 at the peak of his powers – as reign­ing world cham­pi­on – rather than push on against the odds.

A pleas­ant bonus from Peter Jackson’s extens­ive rework­ing of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s raw Beatles foot­age from 1969 (the almost eight-hour doc­u­ment­ary series The Beatles: Get Back from 2021) is that we now get to see a fully restored ver­sion of Lindsay-Hogg’s own movie, Let It Be.

That film was almost instantly sup­pressed as it came out after the band had broken up and was seen by fans as a record of the Beatles deteri­or­at­ing, some­thing they didn’t wish to be reminded of.

We can see it dif­fer­ently now. Just a group of old friends cas­u­ally drop­ping mas­ter­piece after mas­ter­piece and occa­sion­ally dis­agree­ing but without being disagreable.

The film is an excel­lent com­pan­ion to Jackson’s epic – there’s not actu­ally that much cros­sov­er until the rooftop con­cert – and Lindsay-Hogg’s film has a play­ful­ness about the sequen­cing that I really appre­ci­ated. The res­tor­a­tion is sen­sa­tion­al, as you might expect. It looks and sounds fantastic.

MVP remains road man­ager Mal Evans, who we got to see a lot of in Get Back, but an argu­ment could eas­ily be made for the red and white tea tow­el on Ringo’s snare drum, a won­der­fully low-tech solu­tion for the biggest band in the world.

(This reminds me that Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 doc­u­ment­ary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil, is stream­ing on DocPlay in New Zealand and Australia. I should prob­ably check that out.)

*I know it some­times feels like we are all just tak­ing in each other’s wash­ing at times but – the media being in such a par­lous state – if we don’t look out for each oth­er, who will?