The Best Films of 2011 Part 2: 20-11

 

20.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes

As July turned to August it felt like the summer movie season was going to be the worst in recent memory, with Super 8 standing as the lone bright spot amongst the sea of pitiful sequels and sub-par superhero fare.  Shockingly, in the Hollywood Dump Zone that is August, a surprise hit rose out of the mist (yep).  It shouldn’t have happened, of course.  When the early teasers came out proudly exclaiming “from the visual effects studio that brought you Avatar”, you could feel the desperation as the marketing department scrambled.  In the end there is no substitute for having a good, quality product that people like, and they liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes in droves.  A huge box office success – a rare occurrence in a year that saw consistent under-performing from tentpoles – and well liked critically to boot, Rise seemed to have tapped a nerve with audiences.  Personally, I think that was down to the simple reason that it is a good story well told.  Its simple three-act structure is executed almost perfectly and with a minimum of fuss.  A good deal of the credit must go to British director Rupert Wyatt (unknown to me, and my original cry of “studio hack!” saw me eating crow after the screening), who understands the basics of storytelling in an age where visual excess is the raison d’être of so many filmmakers working in The Industry today.  The humans hardly matter, but the focal point of the story was always going to be Caesar, brought to vivid life by the visual effects team and the performance-capture heroics of Andy Serkis.  There were subtleties in his performance and the effects of the completely CGI Caesar that telegraphed a world of meaning and understanding.  Wyatt also understood the value of pacing one’s self.  It moves along at a brisk pace – it is a lean 100 minutes after all – but there’s no rush to throw out huge set-piece spectaculars every twenty minutes lest the audience get bored.  It’s a proper build consisting of establishing the hero and his life, throwing him into a situation where he finds his consciousness raised, and then evolving into a leader.  The inevitable ‘rising’ has all the build-up it deserves, allowing for a cathartic sequence of apes run amok, while still maintaining through almost purely visual terms their location, their goals, where they have to go reach them and what they have to do to achieve them.  Throw in a brilliant ending credits sequence – complete with a pounding John Powell score – and you have the best summer movie of the year.  I wonder as well if part of the reason for its success is the way it seemed to capture the zeitgeist of grassroots civil unrest.  Critics complained about the lack of allegorical substance in the film as compared to the original series, but in the year of the Arab Spring and, eventually, the Occupy Wall Street movement, it feels like too much of a coincidence that one of the biggest films of the year would be about the rebellion of beings abused and mistreated at the hands of sadistic, power-hungry jailers and uncaring corporations.  Caesar’s rebellion against the forces holding him back gave a sense of catharsis to those who feel impotent to act in these troubling times.  Serkis’ performance humanized the downtrodden.  It just so happened to be an ape.

The Myth of the American Sleepover

Late one night, in the waning days of summer, a boy and a girl sit on a floating dock just offshore from a high school party.  The girl, about to enter her freshman year, explains that she skipped a friend’s slumber party to be there.  The boy, about to be a junior, extols the virtues of slumber parties, and mourns the loss of childhood that comes with moving onto the more teenage pursuits of high school parties and social status.  “I don’t want you to buy into all this youthful adventure bullshit,” he explains.  The air of wistful mourning for innocence lost colours every frame of writer/director David Roger Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover.  Not necessarily mourning by the characters, but always by the director and, by extension, the film itself.