Friday new releases: 10 May 2024

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Stewart are in cinemas, Let It Be is streaming on Disney+

Introductions

Greetings to all the new subscribers who have arrived here with encouragement from the lovely David Slack. David said some very nice things about me* in his More Than a Feilding newsletter and it’s no hardship for me to return the favour. He’s an all round good egg.

This newsletter comes out every working day at 3.15 in the afternoon Aotearoa-time. Monday to Thursday I pick a single piece of screen art to recommend. Items that contain mostly recycled material (either from my Capital Times columns or more recently from RNZ) are free to all. If I write something new, some of it is reserved for paid subscribers (who also get access to the complete archive which is paywalled after 30 days).

Every Friday I try and cover as many new releases as possible, depending on access, session times, other work, etc.

Because they are all fresh, the Friday new releases are usually (at least partially) restricted, but because so many of you have just arrived, today’s edition is free to all.

Earlier this week I revisited the most recent instalment in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series, War for … and was once again moved by how good it was. The trilogy that started with Rise (2011), followed by Dawn (2014), is a pretty stupendous achievement in Hollywood franchise terms. Technically, they are amazing, of course, but the characters, stories and themes still manage to resonate.

Since War, 20th Century Fox has been absorbed into the Disney empire (and the Fox name has been retired due to negative political connotations). Seven years on, with the new film leaving director Matt Reeves and star Andy Serkis behind, I wasn’t sure how it would measure up.

I needn’t have worried. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a worthy chapter in its own right (as well as kicking off a new trilogy).

We return to the Planet about 300 years after the death of Caesar in the last film. His name – and message – is only hazily remembered.

Scattered in isolated clans, the apes have developed different cultures and beliefs. Many have never even seen a human – they are known as ‘Echoes’ – and their pre-Caesar history appears to be mostly lost.

We meet Noa (Owen Teague) and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham). Their clan has semi-domesticated eagles and train them to hunt and fish for the village. An important rite of passage is to claim an eagle’s egg from the highest eyrie and to raise the chick themselves.

On an egg-hunting expedition, Noa sees a marauding gang of warlike apes with metal masks. Unable to warn the village in time, he cannot prevent their enslavement and instead has to make the perilous journey across country to find and free them.

En route he meets a wise old orangutang named Raka (Peter Macon), who knows and reveres Caesar’s laws and attempts to pass them along, and a mysterious human female (Freya Allen) who Raka calls Nova. “We call them all Nova,” he says. “I don’t know why.”

What I enjoyed most about this film was genuinely not knowing what was around each corner, so I won’t talk any more about the plot. The characters are all strong and distinct – from each other but also from characters we have seen previously. It feels fresh, even if at this point in the narrative cycle it doesn’t yet have the allegorical or emotional heft that the earlier films managed.

Talking of earlier films, the callbacks to them are judicious and satisfying.

On the bus to the cinema yesterday, I found myself thinking how refreshing it was that the talking apes in these films don’t curse. Well, we can cross that one off the list now.

One final shout out, to Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School graduate Lydia Peckham as the embryonic love interest for Noa – it’s not only a big break for her but coincidentally her surname is also a plot twist.

We now turn to the bad British 1960s teeth section of the newsletter.

Jackie Stewart was a phenomenally successful Scottish racing driver in the 1960s and 70s. One of the highest paid sportsmen of his era, he managed to achieve all of this while successfully hiding the fact that he couldn’t read or write. Back then, dyslexia was barely understood and poor Jackie spent his school days being told that he was lazy, stupid or “thick”.

That humiliation drove him to become the workaholic that he still is today, in his 80s.

The documentary film Stewart is executive produced by his son Mark and therefore has family approval. While Stewart’s struggles with self-confidence and ego are certainly interesting, this is no warts and all portrait.

Formula 1 at the time was notoriously dangerous and at one point in the film Stewart’s wife Helen points out that all five of their closest friends in racing had died on the track. Stewart’s greatest achievement, then, may have been his decision to retire in 1973 at the peak of his powers – as reigning world champion – rather than push on against the odds.

A pleasant bonus from Peter Jackson’s extensive reworking of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s raw Beatles footage from 1969 (the almost eight-hour documentary series The Beatles: Get Back from 2021) is that we now get to see a fully restored version of Lindsay-Hogg’s own movie, Let It Be.

That film was almost instantly suppressed as it came out after the band had broken up and was seen by fans as a record of the Beatles deteriorating, something they didn’t wish to be reminded of.

We can see it differently now. Just a group of old friends casually dropping masterpiece after masterpiece and occasionally disagreeing but without being disagreable.

The film is an excellent companion to Jackson’s epic – there’s not actually that much crossover until the rooftop concert – and Lindsay-Hogg’s film has a playfulness about the sequencing that I really appreciated. The restoration is sensational, as you might expect. It looks and sounds fantastic.

MVP remains road manager Mal Evans, who we got to see a lot of in Get Back, but an argument could easily be made for the red and white tea towel on Ringo’s snare drum, a wonderfully low-tech solution for the biggest band in the world.

(This reminds me that Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 documentary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil, is streaming on DocPlay in New Zealand and Australia. I should probably check that out.)

*I know it sometimes feels like we are all just taking in each other’s washing at times but – the media being in such a parlous state – if we don’t look out for each other, who will?