Posts Tagged ‘Steve Zahn’

War for the Planet of the Apes

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Andy Serkis, Toby Kebbell, Judy Greer, Steve Zahn, Amiah Miller, Max Lloyd-Jones

Original score composer Michael Giacchino won an Oscar for Best Original Score for the animated film Up in 2010. Giacchino has also composed film music for Ratatouille, Inside Out and Jurassic World among many others. His most recent musical composition is for the Matt Reeves directed War for the Planet of the Apes in which he surely deserves another Oscar nomination.

In this case, brilliant music makes the film. War for the Planet of the Apes on a technical level is a superb film with superior production design by James Chinlund while the sound editing is perfect especially noticeable in the film’s final battle sequence which by all counts is absolutely remarkable.

As a story of survival of one species over another and an allegorical tale about the horrors of colonialism, War for the Planet of the Apes, with an engaging screenplay by Mark Bomback, is a fascinating film examining ethnographically man’s relationship with animals within the context of climate change or scientific experimentation.

At the centre of the narrative about a vicious conflict between men and apes is a towering performance by Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson (No Country for Old Men, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Messenger) as The Colonel In which he draws direct inspiration from Marlon Brando’s performance of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s ground breaking Apocalypse Now.

Andy Serkis in motion capture technology plays Caesar an ape desperately trying to save his clan from being eliminated by the merciless attack of The Colonel’s army.

In a fascinating plot twist, the apes discover a mute young girl, played by Amiah Miller who galvanizes their support to fight on and also provides empathy for a conflict which is far more complex than it appears, brought on by a simian virus which has attacked Earth.

In the final chapter of the Apes Trilogy, War for the Planet of the Apes is technically brilliant, engaging and utterly watchable and director Matt Reeves has proved his worth in a film which is as good as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which also provided the final chapter in a compact trilogy.

Toby Kebbell (Warcraft, Prince of Persia) appears briefly as Koba and Steve Zahn (Dallas Buyers Club) appears as Bad Ape all done in superb motion capture technology but what really elevates War for the Planet of the Apes was the excellent musical score provided by Michael Giacchino for which he should be recognized at the 2018 Oscars.

War for the Planet of the Apes gets a film rating of 8.5 out of 10 and is highly recommended for audiences that enjoyed the first two chapters of the Apes films. Technically this film is extraordinary.

Dallas Buyers Club

Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner, Denis O’Hare, Griffin Dunne, Steve Zahn, Dallas Roberts

The Young Victoria French Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee tackles the AIDS pandemic in the gritty but superbly told critically acclaimed film Dallas Buyers Club.

The film which opens with reckless rodeo hand and electrician Ron Woodruff having a cocaine fuelled orgy in a rodeo pen on the outskirts of Dallas, showing a glimpse of a hard living reckless Texan drifter. The narrative is firmly placed in the summer of 1985, at the height of the pandemic as audiences see an emaciated Woodruff recovering from a binge in his trailer park with a Budweiser as he reads a newspaper article about Hollywood star Rock Hudson collapsing in a Ritz Hotel room in Paris in July 1985 due to an AIDS related illness, shocking the world with a disease that the famous film star took pains to keep hidden – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Hudson.

This is a precursor to Woodroof’s own less glamorous story of a far more determined battle with the disease and the monolithic Federal Drug Administration (FDA) of America, which approved the relevant anti-retro virals (ARV’s), namely AZT first used on unsuspecting HIV patients alternating with a placebo in human drug trials.

Woodroof is  the central character in Dallas Buyers Club, a homophobic, drug addicted hard-partying electrician who bets on the Texas rodeo to maintain a hedonistic lifestyle which abruptly changes after an industrial accident at a Texaco oil field, superbly played by Matthew McConaughey (The Lincoln Lawyer, Magic Mike), who lost 21 kilograms to authenticate the role, which recently earned him the 2014 best actor Oscar. McConaughey is now hot property in the acting stakes after shedding his rom-com image (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days) and taking part in increasingly edgier, morally dubious parts such as in Lee Daniel’s The Paperboy and the recent HBO series True Detective.

In the Dallas Mercy hospital, a severely gaunt looking Woodroof is told that he is HIV positive and only has 30 days to live by Dr Sevard, (Denis O’Hare) and the sympathetic Dr Eve Saks, played by Jennifer Garner. Refusing to accept defeat and not willing to wait for the proposed clinical trials of the newly developed antiretroviral AZT, Woodroof embarks on a mission to source the best possible ARVs to keep him alive. After an initial phase of denial, anger and stigmatisation from fellow co-workers and those he previously cavorted with at the Dallas rodeos, the determined Woodruff embarks on a mission to save his life even if it means illegally.

He embarks on an illicit journey to Mexico where he meets Dr Vass played by Griffin Dunne who supplies him with a regimen of FDA unapproved drugs to sustain his survival. Ever the drifter, Woordoof makes his way back into Texas, ironically dressed as priest with a stash of ARVs which he needs to distribute under the radar to fellow sufferers.

However his pervasive illness lands him back in hospital where he meets the fabulously tragic transsexual Rayon, an utterly breathtaking transformation by Jared Leto (American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Alexander), who also received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at the 2014 Academy Awards. The gorgeous, fatally destructive Rayon is the perfect foil to break down Woodruff’s preconceived notions of homosexuality and homophobia as his biggest clients, the city’s largely excluded homosexual community soon become paying members of the lucrative, yet life saving Dallas Buyers Club.

What director Jean-Marc Vallee does, is never hold these characters in judgement but superbly lifts a mirror up to their desperate and unconventional forms of survival in mid-1980’s America when the knowledge of AIDS and the correct dosage of ARVs was certainly not as advanced as it is today, almost 20 years later.

It is McConaughey and Leto’s staggering transformation with the former losing an incredible amount of weight and really bringing pathos and layers of emotion to a complex role while Leto is simply incredible as the sultry and tragic Rayon who eventually has to forgo the charade and in one touching scene he bravely confronts his sexuality and illness with his conservative Texan father.

Both actors deserved to win these Oscars and while Dallas Buyers Club is heavy on subject matter, it is a supremely balanced account of one man’s incredible and courageous journey of survival both in America and through procuring foreign drugs internationally to prolong his life at a time when advances in medical science were only grappling to come to terms with the scale of a truly worldwide AIDS pandemic.

Powerful, emotional and brilliant, Dallas Buyers Club follows the trials of Woodroof and Rayon as cowboys in the rodeo ring, dodging the inevitability of being thrown off the proverbial bull while the clowns provide a tragic distraction, the film’s poignant central motif.