Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.

This is a mercifully non-mythologizing setup, and while Rise dallies in getting toward any kind of point, the scenes with young Caesar are entertaining for one simple reason: Andy Serkis. Franco portrays the pain of watching his father slip away with all the deep human agony of watching a meter reader assign a parking ticket, but Andy Serkis, rendered by computer animation, creates a broad emotional spectrum for Caesar's development. Though the CG of the ape bodies is noticeably fake —and is it me or has CGI actually gotten worse of late? — Serkis' wonderful captured facial and body progression through childlike wonder to an increasing sense of discomfort and confinement in the cramped San Francisco house is the most thrilling mo-cap performance since, well, Serkis' last one. When Caesar later becomes a revolutionary, Serkis manages to put righteous fury on a chimp's face, even as he never loses that sense of empathy.

In order to transition from this secluded growth to a full-on revolution, however, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver rely on logic gaps and laughable shortcuts. When the situation of raising a hyper-intelligent but confused and powerful chimp inevitably leads to a sour conclusion, Caesar finds himself in a primate shelter under the mistreatment of a one-note slop-slosher (Tom Felton), who pisses Caesar off into leading an insurrection among the captive apes. This personalization of the rebellion lacks the matching social oppression that made Conquest of the Planet of the Apes more plausible, and I wish the filmmakers had taken a more high-minded approach. Perhaps posit the eventual rebellion as a means of asserting a species' dominance, suggesting that a being capable of great intelligence will not merely carve out a place at the top of the food chain but willfully subjugate other species as conquest. This would be in-keeping with the franchise's slyly satiric exploration into mankind's thirst for supremacy, and at the very least it would offer more thematically rich motivation for a full-on war than "Draco Malfoy sprayed me with a hose."

But then, maybe war isn't really what Caesar wants at all, given how the filmmakers soften him for PG-13 purposes. And therein lies the key issue with the film: it does not appear to know what it wants to say, and because of that the plot starts changing on a whim in the film's second half. The greedy CEO of the pharmaceutical firm (David Oyelowo) does a facile reversal on Will's research solely to allow for a stronger version of the "cure" to be manufactured to both heighten the apes' intelligence further and introduce a human side effect that allows the writers to shift blame for the coming apocalypse away from the poor, misunderstood apes. This adds a number of awkward, disconnected lines that no one even tries to coherently bring together at the end, from the unnecessary second batch of test apes to Caesar's forced mercy. The movie performs such an awkward pivot that it recalls the test-audience-generated ending of the aforementioned Conquest, a film that likewise pulled its punches, at least in the theatrical cut.

Nevertheless, director Rupert Wyatt stages some impressive shots that find a richer balance of the gentle and violent than the script, from a shower of leaves falling in ironic beauty as apes swing menacingly through trees to the clever use of San Franciscan fog in the climax on the Golden Gate Bridge. Furthermore, Caesar's interactions with other apes, from his initial suffering for genetic differences to eventual leadership of enhanced primate warriors, are so transfixing that the fluff that fills the second act no longer feels like tedium when the camera stays in the cage with Caesar after dark. The impressive degree of communication exchanged between these mo-capped actors through body language and grunts makes the long stretches of technically wordless sections as gripping as the action setpieces. A late exchange of looks between Caesar and a fallen comrade attains an ephemeral poignancy that will make you mourn the loss of an ape.

These moments, great and small, offer a tantalizing glimpse into a potentially great film, one that unfortunately gets consumed in bet-hedging and plot-convenient rewrites. And if the film ultimately feels pat and trite, it has enough ideas to make the idea of a sequel more appealing than any other franchise-starter this year, save Captain America. Perhaps, like the retrovirus-exposed apes, the intelligence of the writing will have grown exponentially by then to match the potential.

Brian De Palma: Raising Cain

One of the more depressing critical threads that wove its way through the positive reviews of the recent Transformers film was that, for the film's glaring flaws, somehow its garish orgy of grease and gears constituted "pure cinema," as if the form's zenith is achieved solely by throwing money at the screen. By the same token, I would actually somewhat agree with the idea that the most cinematic moments in film tend to be the ones least connected to reality and tethered in some fashion to camp, even trash. The florid visual melodrama of Powell/Pressburger, Nicholas Ray or Martin Scorsese capture, for me, the essence of the artform, usually in the gaudiest, most brazen of moments. But if trash is one aspect of "pure cinema," skill obviously constitutes the X factor that finds the art and beauty within cinema's capacity for otherworldiness.

Going through Brian De Palma's canon has convinced me that, in the modern age, no one is better able to make pure cinema from the unlikeliest and most repellent of sources than De Palma, not even the wonderfully garish Tony Scott. Thus far, my favorites of his films—Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Body Double, etc.—have been the trashiest, transgressing all boundaries of moral and aesthetic taste while still displaying a keen satiric and visual prowess. His late-'80s strain of pure Hollywood features, even the intelligent and affecting Casualties of War, lack the madness De Palma pushes to the brink of abandon, and I found myself wishing for a return to the more gauche side of his filmmaking.

Which brings us to Raising Cain. A kid brother to Body Double's transgressive deconstruction, Cain has the feel of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a broken dreamscape into which its maker can pour all his career frustration. Scorsese got out his humiliation over Last Temptation's first major ordeal, while De Palma had to contend with the tangible commercial and artistic failure of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Cain is a return to form in a literal sense, an explosion of De Palma's voyeuristic, oneiric, insensible horror-comedy (or comic-horror) to remind everyone who he was under the new studio gloss. Its first image is a slow zoom-out on a pixellated image that slowly coalesces into a view of a father tucking his daughter into bed. It's one of De Palma's simpler opens, but also one of the most provoking, the grainy image prompting several questions: Are they on TV? Is someone watching them? Is De Palma, as ever, openly visualizing the falsity of the film from the start?

The answer to all of these is yes, and it is of paramount importance that one truly takes in the full meaning of the last question. Even more so than Body Double, with its sudden dips into lurid subjectivity and shifted perspectives, Raising Cain is a film without a sensible plot; it is wrong even to call it "labyrinthine," for that word connotes at least the possibility of escape. Cain exists within the unnavigable folds of dreamspace, a demented take on Peeping Tom that fractures Powell's dark psychological thriller further. But if this is all a dream, whose is it? Oh, hell if I know: never before has De Palma's ability to move through character perspectives in a single sequence, in a single shot even, been so thoroughly used.

In fairness, the director is kind enough to let us know things will not be as they seem from the start, with child psychologist Carter (John Lithgow) cracking within the first few minutes in the car with a friend and their children. Seeking to take her kid to a strange psychological complex in Norway, Carter suddenly chloroforms her and has a chat with a split personality, a tough, greaser-looking cad named Cain. In the next five minutes of screen time, Carter/Cain takes the car home, remembers that a passed-out woman and crying child are in it and slips away from his wife, Jenny, to go meet his insane, psychiatrist father Dr. Nix (also Lithgow) with the young sacrifice.

The rest of the film is, if you can believe it, even stranger. Scenes shift tone abruptly, going from the merely weird to the unabashedly wild, moving in and out of so many "it was only a dream" reveals that De Palma obliterates what limited meaning that stylistic device still had. In one astonishingly fluid sequence, the film moves from a midnight tryst between Jenny and lover Jack (Steven Bauer)—itself wrapped around an unsettling dream/memory injected into the love scene—into a sudden turn into karmic punishment that awakens a perturbed Jenny, only for the scene to take yet another turn when Carter abruptly asphyxiates her and drives her limp body into a lake. The swirl of guilt and betrayal mingles so strongly that it's nearly impossible to tell when Jenny's dream turns into Carter's, and later matters are complicated more when that which seems a dream becomes more real. But even that is presupposing that anything in this diegetic world actually happens.


Aesthetically, Raising Cain doesn't shatter as many boundaries as Body Double, but in some ways it benefits for its more consistent style. Where De Palma's last great anti-narrative openly took aim at the aesthetic devolution of '80s mass consumerism, Cain exists more as its own fever dream. Accordingly, the breaks are less stylistic, more untraceable. De Palma uses that to his advantage, at once unsettling the audience at all times and inviting them to be lulled into its movement, only to jar them back in a flash. This is best exemplified in a scene where Carter watches his television, dumbed by its calming glow. But when he shuts it off, it goes back to being the monitor he had in his daughter's room, where a water-logged banshee stares furiously into the camera. I nearly leaped out of my skin.

I can't think of many showcases for an actor odder than this: Lithgow is tasked with playing the mild-mannered, loving Carter; the snide, violent Cain; Margo, a matronly figure vile and domineering enough to be the spectral form of Norman Bates' mom latched onto a new host; Josh, a meek child who lives in fear of Margo and Dr. Nix; and Dr. Nix. Lithgow not only has to switch between these personalities but interact with himself, not only with the separate figure of Dr. Nix but of several manifestations of his selves; Lithgow even overdubs his voice onto a child who confronts Cain, sounding like Lucifer on helium when he ominously intones "I know what you're going to do. It's a bad thing, and I'm going to tell." (Or maybe it isn't Lithgow; at the very least, it's clearly an altered voice that's gone from low to high).

Lithgow pulls all this off, however, delivering the finest performance of his career—and easily one of the best to grace De Palma's notoriously spotting acting field—as he manages to switch accents and demeanor without slipping into lazy scenery chewing. Hell, the scenery does a good enough job chewing itself; the movie needs his performance just to maintain any semblance of form. Lithgow recognizes where his character(s) is at any moment and even adds minute detail that show clear forethought: consider the faint girlish squeal he makes when he sneezes in the car with Karen at the start. It undermines the verve of Carter's rising passion as he argues for the possibilities of extreme psychological monitoring of children, every light squeak poking holes in his increasingly disturbing spiel, only for Lithgow to openly lash out moments later.

The camerawork felt like a distraction in Bonfire of the Vanities, but De Palma is back in his element again. He turns the obligatory Psycho-esque psychiatrist explanation into visual extravaganza by putting movement in the scene and crafting an intricate tracking shot that even tilts to move parallel to the doctor and the cops. And the climax is one of the director's best moments, a multi-tiered showdown at a motel with disorienting yet stable and well-timed cross-cutting between Lithgow's fractured state above (as Carter's father) and one floor below as Carter/Cain/Margo. There's a baby carriage, some oranges and a knife to make things all the more bewildering, but a slow-motion shot of a falling child moving through the various levels of perspective clarifies the spatial relations of everything in the shot and makes perfect sense of the scene. I cannot believe I just wrote that.

It's a wild summation of the movie, and the drifting denouément is one last reverie in this demented world. It's also one that lends credence to Eric Henderson's view that the whole thing is in the daughter's head, or at least that the film is her attempt to come to terms with what happened to her at the hands of an abusive parent. But I can't help but feel that he's tackling the issue of the Gordian Knot by cutting the rope; as even Henderson earlier admits, the film has "no forum for this type of psychological exchange because there isn't a rational control group." The final shot, supposedly stolen wholesale from Dario Argento's Tenebre (a film I haven't seen), is one of the most puzzling endings in De Palma's storied career of head-scratching closers. The reveal of Lithgow in gloriously unhinged drag behind Jenny and Amy is the last reminder that nothing in this film can be trusted, that even within the inherent falsity of cinema, this film is a load of crap. Yet it's one of De Palma's most engaging pictures, if just outside his upper echelon of truly magnificent garbage, and a welcome relief from the increasingly starched style of his more glamorous Hollywood pictures. But it would not be until his next film that De Palma would find the balance between those two styles and deliver his finest work.

Brian De Palma: Blow Out

Blow Out represents a breakthrough for Brian De Palma. After farcically and satirically pulling apart the bonds of cinema for nearly two decades, the self-reflexive director at last found a way to incorporate cinema into a narrative without breaking up the movie. There are still jokes in Blow Out, but they tend to be of the cosmic variety; the closest anyone comes to an outright punchline is one character's innocent assertion "I don't watch the news. It's too depressing." Instead, De Palma structures his gags as dark, wordless payoffs, all of them carrying a bitter, emotional irony that feel like punches to the gut, something only rarely felt in De Palma's canon up to this point.

As with Dressed to Kill, De Palma does open his film with an extended gag, in this case a POV shot of a mouth-breathing killer stalking a sorority hall, his magnified breathing and racing heartbeat raising tension as scantily clad coeds fail to notice him. At last, he moves into a Psycho pose in the shower, pulls back the curtain, raises the knife, and the woman lets out the most hysterically fake scream you ever did hear. The camera shifts to tripod-mounted third-person in an editing studio for exploitation features as soundman Jack Terry (John Travolta) chuckles at how bad it is to his teed-off boss. What was I saying about this not being a funny movie?

Tasked with finding new sounds to overcome the stale effects library, Jack heads out to a local park at night to get ambient noise, his microphone resembling a gun or a conductor's baton as he points it at various noises. Suddenly, he hears the tires of a car squealing and turns in time to get crisp audio of a loud bang as the car's front tire blows out and sends the vehicle careening off a bridge into the water below. Jack dives in and saves a woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), but the man inside died on impact. In the hospital, Jack learns that the man was Gov. McRyan, the front-runner against the president in the upcoming election.


An aural riff on the photographic obsession of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Blow Out also incorporates De Palma's usual love of Hitchcock, as well as the political thrillers of Alan J. Pakula. But where Pakula's camera generally remained still, conveying the threat of an overlooking presence so vast it bordered on the gnostic, De Palma's camera is that of a stalking predator, always following but remaining hidden. Pakula's forces create their own shadows; De Palma's must slink around in the system as it is. He uses split diopter lenses to give equality clarity to objects in the foreground and in the distance while still emphasizing the space between the two. At the park, the objects Jack records dominate the foreground as Travolta stands outside of space and time recording them from afar. Later, the sidewinding tracking shots present a growing grace in De Palma's form, less showy and more substantive: Burke (John Lithgow) an assassin tying up loose ends, stalks a woman through a market. De Palma visualizes this through elegant tracking shots that eventually move to settle in a close-up of a fish and a meat thermometer in the foreground in time for a hand to pick up the sharp-needled thermometer.

If the director back-pedals on his usual cheek, he at least retains his penchant for irony, which abounds here. De Palma introduces McRyan by way of a newscast reading out his staggering poll numbers at the beginning as Jack cuts new audio in his apartment, his loop of thunder portentously rumbling underneath the newscaster's discussion of the governor. As the film's plot thickens, red, white and blue dominates the color palettes in falsely patriotic ways; even the slasher in that film-within-a-film at the start wears a red, white and blue jacket. The director even sets the whole film against an anniversary celebration involving the Liberty Bell, but his view of the grimy, neon-streaked streets of Philadelphia robs the patriotic commemoration of all meaning. The only true uses of the Liberty Bell in the film involve Burke's disturbing stab pattern as he invents a serial killer persona to cover his tracks and in a chase at the end wherein Jack spends straight through the anniversary parade without taking a second glance at the proceedings, highlighting the secondary if not tertiary importance of such an event to a post-Nixon America jaded on the supposed greatness of our institutions.


The disregard Jack shows for politics in that early moment of him playing the TV as background noise shifts when he becomes convinced he heard the sound of a gunshot before the tire blew out, and soon he finds himself mired in a political conspiracy. Advised by a McRyan staffer to let the whole thing go and pretend Sally was never there to spare the governor's family embarrassment, Jack suddenly commits himself to getting out the truth.

But who will listen to him? Unlike the crusading journalists of All the President's Men or even the less scrupulous reporters of The Parallax View, De Palma's characters are the refuse of society. Jack records the effects for video nasties; Sally more or less works as a prostitute despite her desperate attempts to demarcate the blackmailing racket she's exploited for from outright whoring. They have no forum, no access, no means of telling people what happened, or any way to confirm anything happened at all.

Deepening Travolta's character is the revelation that he once served as a communications officer in the Army and later helped in a government crackdown on corrupt cops, thus linking him to politics outside these events. In a flashback, we see his failure to look out for an undercover cop who wore a wire to expose his colleague's mob collusion, and De Palma tacitly posits Jack's inability to save the man as the impetus for his going into film, where reality can be shifted at the push of a button and a few judicious uses of a razor blade and glue.

The nature of filmic truth becomes a recurring motif of the film: that jarring gag at the end of the opening segment serves as a breaking of the fourth wall even before the camera pulls back into the studio. It shatters the moment, connoting to the audience that it's not real, even within the film's world. With the flick of a few switches and dials, Jack and the other filmmaker can add or remove sounds, completely altering the tone and perception of the scene. Later, when Jack gets a hold of film a seedy blackmailer took of the "accident," he finds a way to splice in his audio at the right time to find out the truth, his constant replays and rewinds showing him trying to reverse the turn of events.

But, of course, he can't change reality, so the best he can hope for is to get the word out before someone gets to him. Intriguingly, Blow Out readily acknowledges that a conspiracy exists, unlike a number of such thrillers where directors seek to leave open the possibility of overactive paranoia. De Palma, radical leftist whose brazen politics were so visible in his early, underground work, is so cynical that he just knows that people are out to get Jack. What he leaves blank is who wants to cover up the event. Both shady government forces and supporters of McRyan put pressure on the narrative: the opposition wants to cover up involvement in the shooting, while McRyan's people are willing to let a murder go unpunished in order to save face. Even the supposedly noble side combating the president sink into shadow tactics simply to avoid rocking the boat.

Thus, the film lacks even the sliver of hope found in the '70s anti-Nixon movies. Even the bleakest of those movies at least implied that getting a few bad eggs out of the system might right it, even if few of those films ended positively. De Palma grounds this movie in the '60s and '70s, but he lets the influence of Reagan seep into the movie, as if to say that a public that would elect such a figure so overwhelmingly was beyond hope and that nothing would ever fix the machine.

But he also situates Jack, and perhaps even himself, as a product of that machine, at least in terms of the conservative behavior even in these committed do-gooders. Accusations of misogyny have already cropped up in my research of the De Palma films I've seen, and I believe it only gets worse from here. The opening segment of Blow Out hedges too closely to that of Dressed to Kill for me to consider the similarities coincidence or even proof of the director's love of Psycho. Is this, then, De Palma's reckoning with the potential misogyny of his previous feature's opening rape fantasy, a point he underlines by cutting to the studio where two men lackadaisically criticize only the falseness of the woman's scream and not the horrid moral content of this sleazy tripe?

Jack suffers similarly: he becomes so immediately obsessed with the conspiracy that he tries to get Sally to listen to his recording of the event that almost killed her merely a day after they meet. She tries to skip town to avoid trouble, but Jack subtly keeps her from her train just because he needs her help, which he later demands in bullshit moral posturing over her profession. Throughout, he guilts her with reminders of saving her life. A romance develops between Jack and Sally, but it is undermined at all times by the man's exploitation of the woman, a twisted relationship that peaks in the savage, ingenious, heartrending conclusion, in which the abuse goes so far that Jack can now bring back the actual dying screams of a woman to put into the exploitation movie.

Technical (and technological) skill abounds in Blow Out. But De Palma is no longer simply reveling in the artifice of cinema but trying to find reality and a path to changing it through film. After making so many Brechtian films, only now does De Palma truly see the outer edges and limitations of the form. Many people, myself included, routinely argue against that most infuriating and meaningless of critical shorthands, "style over substance," is a weak criticism because style is substance. Blow Out plays as a demonstration of this fact, intricately detailing how the construction of a movie, not only in the ordering of scenes but in the balance of elements within each shot, gives the film content and meaning.

In a sense, this is the most mercilessly comic film De Palma's made to this point, a shaggy dog story leading up to a horrible, revolting punchline, but the sorrow rolling off the film stands in sharp relief to the more sardonic wit found in earlier movies. Obsession and The Fury already contained elements of a more human side to De Palma's postmodernism, but Blow Out emerges as a full-on example of tragic romanticism. Searing as that final shot of Travolta desperately plugging his ears is, just as memorable is the 360-degree dolly track around him and Sally a few minutes earlier, the slow motion taking the jubilant ecstasy out of the concluding circles of Obsession and leaving only heartbreak, the pain only emphasized by the mocking fireworks bursting overhead.

This incorporation and modification of De Palma's other work -- the autocritique of his comic breaking down of Dressed to Kill; the image-centric first-run of the film, Murder à la Mod, playing on Manny's TV; the despairing alteration of De Palma's giddiest moment to date from Obsession; and the broad inversion of his recurring voyeur motif from image to sound -- gives Blow Out a mature take on the director's love of reference. By not simply regurgitating his work but analyzing it and shifting the meanings of previous moments, De Palma finds a way to examine the nature of film without losing sight of his narrative. In fact, he enhances the movie, gives it contours that not only adds different interpretations to the film but deepens the impact of the main story. And I must say, however blunt some may find it, the ending hit me harder than Antonioni's chilled, meditative ambiguity ever will. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking film, and it's one of the finest movies ever made on the subject of film.