Film Review: "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (**)

Well, I guess it was a bit silly to get my hopes up for something that is inherently silly in the first place. I should have stuck to my guns from my initial gut impact of the first trailer, because then this film might have been more of a revelation. As it is, I will say that "Evolution becomes Revolution" is an appropriate tagline for the film. After all, it's only truly world-changing in the fact of how much the technology has changed since its inception. It wasn't quite as awful as I had envisioned it to be previously, but the sudden jolt of positive buzz was very misleading heading into it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, whose title is the only one this year that needs to be grossly trimmed (outside Harry Potter perhaps), kicks off by immediately taking you out of the experience. It opens to a shot of the real jungle where the apes live, but the apes are quite obviously fake CG apes. This is perhaps the only moment in the film where you get a complete idea for how fake and silly it is, at least in a literal context. It tends to be less evident in later sequences, but things still remain kind of stupid and obviously fake.

Venice Film Festival: Miral

For once in my life, I find myself in a position to be right. No doubt you've heard that one of the films playing at Venice is Miral, from director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and many have pegged this down as one of the bigger Oscar contenders. Since the trailer came out, I did not share this belief. It just felt an uneven waste of time, and I waited to be proved wrong, as I usually am. However, it turns out that the film is more or less what I expected. To help further my point are reviews from Anne Thompson (Thompson on Hollywood) and Guy Lodge (In Contention).

Lodge writes, "Enlightening neither as emotional essay nor as straight-up history lecture, then, Miral's tricksy oat-bran filmmaking seemingly lands shy of every imaginable target audience: it’s too dry for the middlebrow awards set that might otherwise thrill to its superficially good intentions, too didactic for the highbrow intelligentsia that turned out for the director’s previous outings, and too dull for just about everybody. 'I feel so useless, I really want to do something,' frets Miral midway through the movie; it’s representative of the film’s minimal emotional investment in its protagonist that the reply to this confession is: 'You have beautiful eyes.'"

Thomson has a somewhat more positive outlook on the film, but still states, "This kind of earnest agit-prop material is tough to adapt to the screen; Schnabel needed a more proficient dramatist to pull this off. He’s an elegant, visual director—he and cinematographer Eric Gautier adopt an unusual blurry technique for the more intense scenes—but this movie, while filmed on authentic Jerusalem locations, too often devolves into dull talking heads. It’s possible that the Weinsteins will fan flames of controversy around this film’s highly-charged subject. Nonetheless Miral—which will also play Telluride and Toronto—will likely remain within a narrow art-house niche."

For now, we don't have any reviews from professional critics, but it's safe to say that Miral won't be the Oscar contender everyone was hoping for. Get ready for a lot of films to drop like flies as they are brought to light. As the weather outside gets colder, the competition gets more heated.