Monkey Kingdom
Earth Day rears its smiling, nervously optimistic head once again with Disneynature’s latest eco-doc Monkey Kingdom.
Directors Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill have carved an impressive career of environmental documentaries, for both the large and small screen. Monkey Kingdom boasts the same skillful mixture of environmental grandeur and character-driven intimacy, and the film is as visually glorious as any in this series. Still, you have to wonder how many hours of wildlife footage is accrued before the filmmakers can impose a storyline on the proceedings.
That is not to suggest the tale is entirely make believe. Monkey Kingdom rolls cameras in the jungles of South Asia, capturing the complex social structure of a macaque monkey troop. What unfolds is a kind of Cinderella story of the low-born Maya and her efforts to fend for herself and her newborn.
As we’ve come to expect from Disney’s doc series, Monkey Kingdom sheds light on the intricate social workings of the subject, and macaques turn out to be fascinating creatures with the kind of structured social order that begs for exactly this treatment. At first we watch as lowly Maya sleeps in the cold and eats from the ground while the alpha and other high born monkeys nap in sunlight and feast on the ripe fruit at the top of the tree. Can she ever hope for more? (At least we can rest assured that there’s no make-over coming.)
The intricate pecking order sets the perfect stage for an underdog film full of scrap, perseverance and triumph.
Narrator Tina Fey’s smiling, workaday feminism gives the film personality and relates it to humanity without having to even try.
While the film keeps your attention throughout, Monkey Kingdom lacks some of the punch of other Disney Earth Day flicks. Linfield and Fothergill’s 2012 film Chimpanzee had the 5-year-olds at my screening sobbing breathlessly, whereas Monkey Kingdom might elicit a compassionate frown.
Between the built-in drama of the “overcoming adversity” storyline and the occasional giddy monkey hijinks (the bit where the troop crashes a birthday party is particularly enjoyable), the film compels attention as it shares eco-savvy information kids may even remember.
Documentary purists will balk at the anthropomorphized story, but families will enjoy this thoroughly entertaining film.
True Story
If you see the names James Franco and Jonah Hill together on a marquee and think “comedy,” you’re not alone. But remember, they have Oscar nominations for dramatic turns, and True Story pits them against one another in a deadly serious game of wits.
The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Michael Finkel, a former journalist with the New York Times. After playing loose with some facts in his Times expose on modern day slavery, Finkel was fired in disgrace. After heading back home to Montana and his wife Jill (Felicity Jomes), a strange call from a fellow reporter turned Finkel’s life upside down.
A man named Christian Longo, a fugitive wanted for the murder of his wife and 3 children, was captured in Mexico and found to be using Finkel’s identity.
Finkel follows the story and begins a relationship with the accused killer, each man viewing the other with curiosity and hopes for exploitation. Finkel sees the twist of fate as his ticket back to the big time while Longo wants his new friend to tell his side of the tragic events.
True Story marks the feature debut for director and co-writer Rupert Goold, a veteran of both stage and TV work. He displays a fine sense for big screen visuals, creating effective atmospherics for the frequent jail and courtroom settings, and contrasting them nicely with Finkel’s home base in Montana.
As Longo, Franco gives a finely nuanced performance that keeps you off balance, making it easier to understand how quickly his character forms a bond with Finkel. Hill is not far behind, giving depth to Finkel’s disgrace, and nice subtly to the unintended consequences of his quest for redemption.
Jones is the wild card here. For too long, you’re wondering what her role truly is, and then Jill’s face to face meeting with Longo instantly becomes the film’s emotional high point. The irony is, it is a meeting that didn’t really happen, and that underscores the pesky trouble of True Story.
The film is the sum of interesting parts and often skillfully told, perhaps to its own detriment. The gripping payoff you’re expecting never comes, and you realize sometimes fiction is just more compelling.
Unfriended
Director Levon Gabriadze, with serious help from screenwriter Nelson Greaves, has managed the unmanageable. His entire film Unfriended is seen from a laptop screen, yet never gets visually dull and never feels limited by the gimmick.
More than that, his film is immersed in the digital-native culture without seeming forced or hokey. Without ever feeling like a stunt – a story in service of a device rather than vice versa – Unfriended tells a cautionary tale that’s topical, current and smart.
Five high school friends mindlessly Skype on the anniversary of their friend Laura’s suicide. Laura had been the victim of cyberbullying, and not only is her humiliation still available online, so is her suicide. Such is the horrifyingly public world of today’s teen.
The gang can’t seem to get rid of an anonymous 6th in their hangout, and little by little the presence evolves from annoying to aggravating to terrifying.
Greaves’s script is smart. There are flashes of other films – The Den, Paranormal Activity 4 and others – but Unfriended never feels stale. Greaves’s language is so unsettlingly familiar, and he makes some important points without even approaching a preachy tone.
It’s a set of familiar ideas – vengeance, guilt, betrayal, cowardice – wrapped in a very shiny new package, and it’s the wrapping that could have really gone wrong, but Gabriadze succeeds in filling the screen with enough to look at, enough virtual action to keep your attention, even if it never becomes overly scary.
He builds tensions through a truth or dare style game that provokes the friends to turn on each other, but the film has more empathy for the characters than the run of the mill slasher. The five actors manage to flesh out dimensional characters with the slightest material to work with, and each feels realistically flawed yet sympathetic.
It’s a fascinating choice because the whole film flirts with the ugly “they aren’t bad kids” excuse you hear every time something horrible is filmed or an autistic child’s bullying goes viral.
These five don’t think they’re bad people. They certain seem like nice enough, likeable enough teens – to everyone except that creepy lurker on their screen.
Led Zeppelin Played Here
(Showing this weekend at the Gateway Film Center for “Doc Week”)
So, what’s your I-saw-them-before-they-were-famous concert story?
For me, it was a young INXS opening for Men at Work and blowing them off a stage in Cleveland. Men at Work?? I know, I know, but it was my high school National Honor Society field trip, whataya gonna do?
Some people have a better story than any of us. They will tell you they were one of the 50 or so in attendance when a brand new band called Led Zeppelin played a small suburban rec center in January of 1969.
That’s a great story. It might even be true. Led Zeppelin Played Here is director Jeff Krulik’s entertaining attempt to settle it once and for all.
The small gymnasium/youth center in Wheaton, Maryland actually has a decent history of rock shows, including Iggy and the Stooges (“he smeared peanut butter all over the walls!”) and the Faces with a nearly unknown Rod Stewart. There are old photos and ticket stubs still around from those shows…but for that legendary Zeppelin show?
Nope.
Trying to prove the existence of a rock history Bigfoot is a fun premise, but doesn’t really provide enough material to keep a full length documentary afloat. Krulik shows solid instincts for what makes good filler, taking us back to the early days of rock concert promotion before, as one promoter puts it, “Woodstock turned $5,000 acts into $100,000 acts.”
And, without belaboring the point, there’s an undercurrent in the film about how human nature can play havoc with memory. Are these phantom concert-goers remembering laughter simply because they want to? Could be.
Though there are some classic moments of archival sound and video, the production values in LZPH can be rough. Krulik’s film gets by more on heart than technical expertise, but give him props for tracking down an impossibly polite Jimmy Page and asking about the mysterious concert face to face.
So, did Zeppelin rock Wheaton or not?
I know what I think.
I think Men at Work sucked.
Get more of my reviews at MaddWolf.com!Twitter: @MaddWolf