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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Blu-ray DVD

Set near San Francisco in 2026, eight or ten years after Rise, the world of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes takes place after the majority of humanity has gone extinct due to a Simian flue (which is explained at the beginning in one of its most chilling sequences) and the Apes reign. It starts with a close-up on Caesar’s eyes. He’s wearing war-paint. With the other apes they’re getting ready for a hunt, though they’re using pretty advanced military hunting tactics to catch their prey. During this hunt they end up meeting a small group of humans, who are out in the woods to find a dam to get electricity for their community. Afterwards there is a an attempt at reconciliation, internal conflict, power struggles and humanity pushed to its extreme. For what could have been just another franchise film Dawn is actually a lot closer with its complexity and drama to a William Shakespeare play, which its main character gets his name.

And Dawn ends the same way that it started on Caesar’s eyes, looking out towards a terrible world, where the apes are now forced into an unnecessary war, which he will have to lead. It is this mixture of melancholy and leadership that comes across through Caesar’s gaze that makes the whole enterprise so affective. In the background warships are coming and after the credits there is a pained ape grumbling (could Koba still be alive?). More so than any other fiction film last year, or even any documentaries, Dawn along with Chris Nolan’s Interstellar captures cinema’s imaginary potential of the science-fiction film to put forward humanity’s biggest concerns and its hopefulness.

In anticipation for the third installment, along with re-releases of the whole series and a new book on all of their productions, one of the best new resources is the Blu-ray of Dawn of the Planet of Apes. It’s just packed with special features! There are over two hours of bonus special features, a director audio commentary, and deleted scenes along with other extras. These are great just to see its director Matt Reeves and to hear him talk about his relationship with the franchise, footage of him on set filming, and for his ideas on cinematic storytelling. But it’s also full of great information on the mechanisms of filming these large tent-pole franchises, exciting locations and fascinating sets, and use of technology with performance capture and CGI.

The bonus features, which are between ten to fifteen minutes, include eight featurettes: Journey to Dawn, Andy Serkis: Rediscovering Caesar, Humans and Apes: The Cast of Dawn, The World of Dawn, The Ape Community, Move like an Ape: An Artist’s Medium, Weta and Dawn, and The Fight for a New Dawn. These are like a film school for amateurs. 

The star of these special features is its director, one of the best working ones today, Matt Reeves. You get to see him talking about the film all dressed up in a bow tie, big glasses, and slicked back hair. You get to see him on set directing, wearing a big coat on set, a neckerchief, and a huge black leather cowboy hat. In the studio with an un-tucked schleppy white shirt. You hear his soft, curious, and affirmative voice as he’s commenting over the film. It sounds like he just loves talking about the film, the apes, the different stages of the project, the roots of the film, and he acknowledges the importance of all of his collaborators.

Reeves has been a big fan of the Apes series since he was a kid. His introduction to it was the television series and then that brought him back to the movies, and he would quickly go out and buy all of the dolls and toys. He even says that as a boy he desperately wanted to be an ape and to get a John Chambers prosthetic make-up treatment.

He’s a film geek director, like Guillermo del Toro and Gareth Edwards, who puts his love of cinema into the projects that he decides to make, and someone that takes the idea of horror and science fiction films seriously. The audience already knows how the reboots are going to end, that’s where the Charlton Heston film ended, so Dawn will be more about “how” things got there, what went wrong. Through this the film examines human nature and the nature of violence.

Reeves changed the story as initially it started with the humans, but he wanted it to start with Caesar and the Apes. Point of view is really important for him. This makes the Ape Ceremony and the birth of the new son really important.

Reeves is described as “like an old-fashioned theater director,” as he does a lot of rehearsal with his actors. As like it’s brought up, performance capture doesn’t work if the performances aren’t good. Reeves really trust his actors and gives them his full attention. Having worked with Keri Russell on Felicity, a more intimate show compared to his more recent large-scale productions, working again with the actress, he knows to search for the emotional center of each scene. The ones with the actress especially stand out – she’s the heart of the film. Reeves collaboration here with Russell emerged for a failed project between the two on a wartime photographer film.

Reeves is really hands on director. You get to see him working closely with all of his collaborators, while working on the set, with the technology, and on the fight sequences. You can see him explaining to Andy Serkis that he needs to scramble more on a rooftop and see him making silly noises to get Jason to get him to react before he has to repeat a scene alone for over one-hundred takes. Reeves even gives his friend and composer Michael Giacchino, after completing the score, Caesar’s spear from the film as a gift.

Reeves ideas on filmmaking and his discussion of the film is fascinating. On the beginning of the film he describes it like, “Almost like a silent movie.” There are also a lot of Western, Kurosawa and Kubrick references throughout the film. On the introduction between Malcolm and Caesar, Reeves describes the scene like it’s from a classic Western. Reeves, “It can function like an epic western.” The classic mythic forms of the western genre are compared to the work of John Ford, but with a new photo-realism. Gary Oldman’s first scene is described to be right out of The Searchers. Reeves has been a fan of Oldman since Sid and Nancy. While Jason Clark has been admired by Reeves since Brotherhood and Zero Dark Thirty.

Reeves sees the focus on the apes and Caesar’s story as being Shakespearean, Kurosawa-ian, and similar to The Godfather. When Koba invades the castle it is compared to Kurosawa’s Ran. While the scene of Jason going into the camp to see Caesar is compared to Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now.

Reeves brings up Kubrick a lot in terms of human evolution, from the primitive to Darwinism. On its opening where humanity gets destroyed is like the beginning of 2001, which is accentuated in Dawn with the rise of this new breed of intelligent apes. On getting the movement and gestures for the apes Reeves closely looked at the sad documentary Project Nim.

And the ideas behind the production of Avatar are also present during the production, nonetheless because they were even filming some of the performance capture in James Cameron’s studio where a poster of it hangs high.

It’s surprising that Spielberg is only brought up once. The M11 tank war scene, from Blue Eyes perspective, is compared the loss of innocence during a combat like in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. But there are other scenes that are really Spielbergian too. When Malcolm is going into the rainy forest wearing the classic Indie hat it is pure Jurassic Park. The strong use of warm hues and backlighting recalls the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski. The long-take during a combat of Malcolm returning to the castle to get the backpack recalls Munich. And the whole father and son reconciliation is pure Spielberg! More so then last year’s Godzilla, which seemed to just take Spielberg and copy-and-paste, Reeves organically takes Spielberg’s lessons and makes it think and puts it into practice. (I feel like it being a 20^th Century Fox film is one reason Spielberg is not brought up as much). Reeves has discussed his Spielberg influences elsewhere, for example, working on Let Me In with Kodi Smit-McPhee, Reeves had a conversation with Spielberg about working with children actors. And, of course, there is Cloverfield too.

I could probably go on further at length about the sophistication and pleasures of getting the chance to re-watch Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on home-video and in such high quality image and rich soundtrack. As well these notes just hit the surface of all the great supplementary material on the Blu-ray DVD. It's a must-own film and one of the best DVD releases of 2014.

Matt Reeves Directing

To the Memory of René Vautier

 

+ Mes dates-clés, par René Vautier

+ J’ai Témoigné en Images: René Vautier and Militant Cinema

+ Le cinéaste qui osa filmer l'horreur du colonialisme

+ Hors-champs: René Vautier

+ Caméra au Poing 
+  Caméra citoyenne

A Must-Read: Adam Nayman on Toronto DIY Filmmakers

"In the course on the history of Toronto cinema that I teach at the University of Toronto, I try to place Radwanski’s film in conversation with seminal titles like Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964) and Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, as well as Morley Callaghan’s key Canadian modernist novel Strange Fugitive (1930), with which it shares both a calculatedly hardscrabble aesthetic and a poetically dismal view of its host metropolis."

Follow the link to read a great piece that contextualizes the emerging trend of young Toronto directors within Canadian film history, Friends from the North: Adam Nayman on the Canadian filmmakers in First Look 2015.

Where They're At: Toronto DIY Filmmakers

Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival is now going on from January 2^nd to the 11^th, and as the program highlights some of last year’s best Canadian films, it’s great to see that it include works by some of the prominent emerging Toronto directors like Kazik Radwanski, Albert Shin and Andrew Cividino.

Radwanski’s Cutaway and Cividino’s Sleeping Giant, which are both in the Shorts program that are screening Friday, January 9^th at 9PM, are exceptional works that demonstrate the richness, ambition and creativity of the short-film format in the Canadian film landscape.

Cutaway tells the story of a construction worker who’s confronted with his girlfriend’s aborted pregnancy. It’s minimal style of being shot entirely in close-ups of the young man’s hands (who is played by Radwanski himself), with its conciseness and spirituality, recalls the Robert Bresson of L’Argent and Lancelot du Lac, and its tragic premise and brief running time of seven minutes recalls the Ernest Hemingway’s famous flash fiction story, ‘For Sale: baby shoes, never worn’.

While in Sleeping Giant three boys spend their summer near Lake Superior having fun and causing trouble. It climaxes with a dare between two of them to jump off a very high cliff into the water. Cividino, who is coming from a zombie film We Ate the Children Last (2011), is planning to expand Sleeping Giant into a feature. The short is most affective when it’s capturing coming of age experiences of these youth and its lead’s bourgeoning feelings towards the young girl that’s around.

In Her Place, which is playing on January 6^th at 8:45PM and the 8^th at 3PM, is Albert Shin’s second feature after Point Traverse (2010). The film tells the story of an affluent couple from Seoul who goes to a South Korean countryside farm, and where the wife will stay, as their expecting to adopt a paid for baby from a mother and her pregnant teenage daughter. The filming style of In Her Place recalls the poetic-realism of Lee Chang-dong and the social criticism and (at times) dream-like nature of Luis Buñuel. It’s polished and accomplished. 

On the subject of these young independent Toronto directors, with the start of 2015 here, it’s worth checking up on them to see where they are. Since my last survey (cf. Toronto DIY Cinema) the bulk of these directors have had major screenings and are in the process of making new works. There has also been a great essay on the subject at Toronto Film Scene by Trista Devries who in the piece The New Toronto New Wave, with the help of interviewee Steve Gravestock, provides an impressive lists of the major directors and trends of this movement, especially in regards to the opportunities that arose due to the accessibility of digital video.

MDFF seems to be at the forefront of this movement. The production company, which are now also running one of the city’s best independent film series, includes Radwanski, Dan Montgomery and Antoine Bourges. They closed 2014 with a special screening of Cutaway paired with Denis Côté’s Joy of Man’s Desiring in one of their most attended event at the AGO’s Jackman Hall. Radwanski in an interview with Angelo Muredda for the Torontoist speaks about Côté that, “Denis is a hero to us. Carcasses is one of our favorite Canadian films.” On the Toronto filmmaking scene, Radwanski talks about how Olivier Père called them the ‘Canadian cousins’ of the new generation of American independent filmmakers. And New York City is also taking notice. The Museum of the Moving Image, coming up in mid-January, will have one of the first programs that will be featuring this group in their First Look series. They’ll be spotlighting Radwanski (Cutaway, Green Crayons), Bourges (Woman Waiting, and the exciting new William in White Shirt), and Sofia Bohdanowicz (the trilogy of Modlitwa, Wieczór and Dalsza Modlitwa). The directors will be in attendance for a question and answer period, which will be moderated by Adam Nayman. A must for anyone in that city.

The announcement of Bourges’s William in White Shirt is the big discovery of the series. Since East Hastings Pharmacy in 2012, and with Bourges move from Vancouver to Toronto, everyone was wondering what Bourges would do next? How will he evolve artistically? Apparently he’s now working on a new script and project. But just the fact that he had a short film that has never been screened and that it’s now becoming available is a real revelation. William in White Shirt continues Bourges’s project of Woman Waiting and East Hastings of that of a humanizing social ethnography. What Bourges brings to his portrait of those that are outcasted in society is a mise en égalité without any stereotyping whether they are poor and homeless, criminals or drug addicts. As he says to Ezra Winton in A Conceptual Intervention in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: An Interview with Antoine Bourges (Screening Truth to Power), “I am always more attracted to films where characters are not treated in a negative way, where you try to see people as they are and not keep them marginalized.

The other current projects by these directors are vast. Some of the following are confirmed, and others are hearsay, things that I gleaned from conversation with some of the directors or acquaintances. If there are any mistakes or wrong facts, it's all my fault (and please correct me).

The director Pavan Moondi and his producer Brian Robertson will have their new film Diamond Tongues, which stars Leah Fay from the band July Talk, premiere at Slamdance. While Christopher Heron, also from The Seventh Art, made a new video-essay, The Style of Xavier Dolan, which will screen before Mommy as part of CTT. Calvin Thomas, Yonah and Lev Lewis are still in post-production on their new film, whose title I think is, Spice It Up!, which is about a young group of women who have a crazy summer after high school before they join the military. As well I hear their getting ready for a new project. Matt Johnson and his crew are making a period film set in the Fifties in the same way they made The Dirties. I hear the trailer for it is supposed really cool. Igor Drljača, at Time Lapse Pictures with Shin, is following up on Krivina with Tabija, a project that was awarded support from the Hubert Bals Fund, and The Waiting Room which will now follow Drago (Jasmin Geljo), but in a more fantasy dark-humor direction, which seems like it hawks back to his The Battery-Powered Duckling. Nadia Litz is working on a new project The People Garden with the help of Telefilm and with the actresses Liane Balaban and Pamela Anderson. And she also just starred in Jefferson Moneo’s Big Muddy. Lina Rodriguez is back in Columbia to make her second film after the successful Señoritas. On Blake Williams, Darren Hughes's consideration at Senses of Cinema is especially insightful, “Many a Swan, which screened at Wavelengths in 2012, treats the found, two-dimensional images as pieces of paper, folding and bending them like origami. In Baby Blue (2013), he experiments – in the true sense of the word – with parallax, exploring the 3D effects that result when objects move horizontally through the frame at various speeds and at various depths of field. Red Capriccio continues this inquiry into the fundamental components of anaglyph 3D by focusing on blue-red separation.” I think Simon Ennis is working on a new project (something Noir related?) after having shot some of the footage in Ron Mann's great new Altman documentary. Daniel Cockburn is finishing a new screenplay, and with its intellectual puzzles it seems like it will be similar to You Are Here. Leslie Supnet is working on a found-footage apocalypse film. And Meelad Moaphi is trying to get more screenings for his great new short-film Every Monday.

Our voices are growing.

Feet and Hands