Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is purportedly the first in another trilogy of films that will show the evolution of ape society from its current hunter-gatherer phase and develop the character of Noa. As such, director Wes Ball – anticipating a few years’ lucrative employment – has taken his time laying the foundations in that deliberate manner familiar from other Hollywood franchises. This makes Kingdom a slightly ponderous proposition that may satisfy fans who have dutifully followed the previous films, but will do little for those seeking mind-numbing entertainment on a Friday night.

Those areas where the films keep advancing are costume, make-up and special effects, which have rendered the ape impersonation almost perfect. This extends to skillful mimickry of the way various apes move. It’s only when we get up close that we catch a glimpse of the actor behind the elaborate façade. Yet this degree of perfection only tends to throw the leaden nature of the narrative into sharper relief. As the story dragged on and on, I began to feel nostalgic for those days when the movies would just put a guy in a gorilla suit and tell him to start beating his chest.

Monster

Although Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set to be a blockbuster, Monster is one of those critically acclaimed films that can expect to enjoy a modest success at the box office.

Director Hirokazu Koreeda is celebrated for his portrayals of families – big, small, sometimes barely recognisable as such. This time, he focuses on a family that consists of only a single mother, Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), and her 11-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), living in a provincial Japanese city. As they sit together, talking to a photograph of Minato’s dead father, we can see how closely they are bonded. They watch from their apartment window as a downtown building that contains a nightclub goes up in flames.

“If a pig’s brain is put into a human head,” Minato asks his mother, “is that person a human or an animal?” It sounds silly, but this “pig brain” proposition will recur throughout the film, attributed to several different characters.

The mother-son relationship develops cracks when Minato starts acting strangely, snipping away at his own hair, coming home from school with only one shoe. One evening he doesn’t come home at all, being eventually located in an old train tunnel hidden in the nearby woods. When he sustains an injury to his ear, Saori heads to his school to see what’s going on. Minato has laid the blame on his teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama), who has also allegedly accused the boy of having a pig’s brain.

When Saori confronts the teachers, especially the principal, Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), they become a caricature of Japanese shame and conformity, bowing deeply, apologising and promising to do better. Saori is rightly incensed by this behaviour, which does nothing to solve the mystery of her son’s strange behaviour or confirm that the awkward Mr Hori did the things he was accused of doing. The principal, who has recently lost her grandson in a terrible accident, seems almost catatonic. The teachers apologise reflexively, with no explanations. We feel as bewildered as Saori, especially when it seems Mr Hori is continuing to teach as usual, with no action being taken.

Koreeda resolves the mystery by degrees, jumping back and forth in time to show us the origins of the things we can’t explain. These jumps are handled so seamlessly it takes a few seconds each time for us to realise where we are. In this film, nothing is quite what it seems. The crucial figure may not be Mr Hori, but Minato’s classmate, Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), a small boy who is disliked by most of the class because of his eccentric behaviour. It’s Yori who claims constantly that he has a pig’s brain, and who leads Minato to the tunnel in the woods, where he has a hideout in an old train carriage. Yori is unhappy at home, being raised by a beer-swilling father who is usually at work or in a bar.

It begins to seem as if angelic-looking Yori is a classic bad seed, and for Minato, a bad influence. Yori keeps confessing that he’s a monster. As he carries a stove lighting device with him and roams around at night, it seems likely he had a hand in the fire that burned the hostess club his father frequented. Look closely and one can see the club was called Gilles de Rais, named after an infamous French child murderer of the Middle Ages.

While we are trying to understand the relationship between Minato and Yori, Mr Hori is being persecuted by reporters and slowly driven mad. As we flash back and forth between past and present, Hori’s true role in the story begins to emerge.

Koreeda keeps us wondering about who, if anyone, is the monster. With each part of the puzzle falling into place, the picture keeps changing. It’s not even clear what being a “monster” might mean.

One noteworthy aspect of the film is the music, which was the final score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023), best known for his haunting themes in Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). It’s a typically subtle score, hardly more than a few touches of the piano where a scene requires a little emphasis.

Monster won the Queer Palm, at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is a somewhat dubious honour in that it narrows the way we read the relationship between two 11-year-old boys. Minato and Yori are only on the cusp of puberty and whatever the nature of their friendship, it would be ridiculous to label it “queer”, in the way that word is now used to denote self-conscious gender non-conformity. Surely, it’s not unusual for children of that age to become passionately attached to their friends, often at the expense of their families. Are they considered “monsters” because of the closeness of a relationship that even makes Minato feel uncomfortable?

Koreeda makes no moral pronouncements, showing huge sympathy for all his characters, from the boys to Saori, Hori and the principal. Everyone has a hard time in this story, but they are given ample opportunity to declare their innocence to the audience, and the ending is not at all what one might expect. Perhaps the monster is no more than a red herring.

“No admissions in schools without money”

Gaurav is an independent filmmaker, a graduate in Film Direction & Screenplay Writing from the prestigious Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, India. His films, fiction, documentary and experimental, have been screened at various national and international film festivals. He has been a producer/member of a film collective, Lightcube, acclaimed as one of the leading resources for research and presentation of image-forms. His interests lie in audio-visual forms that intersect various folk-indigenous and modern-technological rationalities of storytelling. “Abridged” won the Golden Royal Bengal Tiger for Best National Documentary.

The film begins with the images of a construction site, while a voice from the news talks about the partial collapse of Majerhat Bridge in South Kolkata, and the disaster the event caused. Images of various parts of the city intermingle with each other, some of them somewhat artistic some of them more documentary-like, as the director seems to catch daily life in the area from the very early morning. Newspaper distributing, people sleeping on the street under bridges, trains passing under bridges and passerby all become part of the narrative.

As the film description states, “In recent years, Kolkata has witnessed the collapse of bridges Majerhat being the most recent. Set in the context of rapid urbanization, the film, titled “Abridged” examines the lives of various bridges, both over and under–how lives are organized around the bridge as a public space”. As such, the focus of the movie is on exactly that, describing everyday life in the city, and particularly the part of it that takes place under bridges.

It is impressive to watch people having set up shops under the constructions for example, as a shoe salesman highlights quite eloquently, while a number of them, seem to actually live beneath them. Schoolgirls playing with a dog, a mother combing her children’s hair, a chicken jumping in front of a motorcycle, cars parking are just some of the things that happen under bridges, in a testament on how life can take place anywhere, particularly in such crowded places as Kolkata.

The construction of bridges is also highlighted, through some very intriguing frames and close ups, with Puri and his cinematographer Sukhan Saar evidently being able to find beauty in the most surprising moments, not omitting however, to show that reality is also ugly, as the garbage and the corrosion of the constructions highlights. A man talking about how without money, people cannot even attend school adds a social comment in the narrative as does the aforementioned salesman who talks about how the government wants them to leave, but they have nowhere to go. In that same fashion, the signs on the street that state ‘buy less, built more” appear as rather ironic, also in a testament to the meaningful editing here by Pritam Mandal.

A song heard in the background as the night falls once more, while the bridge builders keep working, a couple of voyeuristic scenes, a child looking at the camera, a man setting up his “bed”, a woman who sheds light on the reasons people end up living under bridges, and a man with his goat herd passing the street, conclude the movie.

Gaurav Puri follows an observational approach, in a documentary though, that is exceptionally shot, with the documentation of reality moving hand to hand with visual beauty. This combination, and the presentation of a life that is very seldom depicted on cinema deems “Abridged” as an exquisite film, a testament to the prowess of all people involved in it.

We Grown Now, 2023.

Written and Directed by Minhal Baig.
Starring Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, S. Epatha Merkerson, Lil Rel Howery, Jurnee Smollett, Ora Jones, Giovani Chambers, and Avery Holliday.

SYNOPSIS:

Two young boys, best friends Malik and Eric, discover the joys and hardships of growing up in the sprawling Cabrini-Green public housing complex in 1992 Chicago.

Writer/director Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now is a moving tale of a tested childhood friendship during the ups and downs of Cabrini-Green life. Minhal Baig has pulled together various stories of what it is like to grow up and live in the Chicago housing complex, setting the story here in 1992, mostly focused on Malik (Blake Cameron James), who believes that there are no rules here and that the only thing that matters is seeing how high you can jump.

This is, obviously, a film with sincere affection for a specific place in time, but also not one that lets periods spent allowing viewers to observe the housing complex hallways and homes (whether it be from the boys here dragging mattresses down multiple floors or stairs since the elevator is busted, or gentle camera movements taking us from one floor, above to the next) to get in the way of drawing these characters and telling an authentically engaging story about the trials and tribulations of raising a family in Cabrini Green, ensuring that the children are safe, and of course, the joys of living there as an innocent child assuming that just because one young boy has been shot and murdered, they will be safe.

Malik and his best friend Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) play outside, discuss what they want from the future, and also debate about Chicago-specific arguments, such as whether Michael Jordan needed Scottie Pippen or not to lead the Chicago Bulls to NBA championships. The film was wise enough not to overly romanticize life here, which was increasingly weighed down upon by oppressive local law enforcement insisting that due to the recent shootings, everyone (including the children) requires a keycard to enter their homes. Cinematographer Pat Scola is also fittingly instructed not to photograph these policemen’s faces during some scenes, keeping the vantage point from the low perspective of the children and often sticking with their reactions.

Meanwhile, Malik’s mother, Dolores (a winning performance from Jurnee Smollett), is a woman uncertain of how to continue making ends meet while putting up with the unfortunate failings of the housing complex. She is a family woman close to her mother (S. Epatha Merkerson) and isn’t so much still grieving the loss of her father but still paying tribute to him at dinner as a means to instill the importance of family onto Malik. On the same floor, Eric struggles with his education as his single father, Jason (a delightful dramatic turn from the reliably hysterical Lil Rel Howery), does his best to tutor the boy while managing the funds for his older daughter’s upcoming high school graduation.

Once it becomes clear that one of these families is contemplating making a drastic change to their lives, a rift emerges in the friendship between Malik and Eric, which is believably heartbreaking but threatens to become overwritten in the film’s third act. Thankfully, the script pulls away from that and returns to the initial theme of jumping and what it means to soar. Similarly, We Grown Now is a sweet and charming tale of friendship set inside a specific setting, with that combination of romanticism and honesty allowing it to fly.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

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