estella warren – Podcasting Them Softly

What can I say about Kangaroo Jack. It’s… a movie. Someone was on something at the board meeting where this thing was greenlit, and it somehow got made. It’s one of the most oddly conceived, shit-tastic, bizarre comedies to have ever been produced, and it’s a wonder some of the actors held it together with a modicum of a straight face. I expect this kind of thing from silly people like Anthony Anderson and Jerry O’Connell, but…. Michael Shannon? Christopher Walken? Really?! Weirder still is that this wanton pile of dung topped the box office charts for a few weeks. I guess moviegoers were on the same stuff as the guy in that board meeting. O’Connell and Anderson play two childish idiots who travel to Australia to deliver some mob cash after a run in with freaky gangster Walken and his freakier henchman Shannon, both looking like they’d rather eat tide pods than have their names in the credits. En route, the film takes a nosedive into Wtf-ville as a terribly CGI’d kangaroo steals their money (coz that’s what kangaroos do) and starts fucking with them and holds up their task at every turn. What a random idea for a movie. The script has the attention span of a Looney Toons yarn, the special effects are so bad they’d make 90’s era Crash Bandicoot cringe, and the humour is… well, you get the idea. There’s usually some morbid merit to films as bad as this, like watching someone get hit by a car and being unable to look away through sheer fascination, but this one can’t even muster up a self aware thrill or two of that ilk. Oh, and it suffers from Snow Dogs syndrome too: trailers showed a sentient kangaroo talking, but that only happens in one brief, super lame dream sequence. If Steve Irwin’s ghost had a kid with Mel Brooks and that kid had a nightmare, it might look something like this, but a lot less awesome than that would have you think. This kangaroo should be put down.

-Nate Hill

I’m going to catch some heat for this, but I’ve found Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes to be a far better film than any of the three recent versions. I can’t explain it, but there’s something so otherworldly and exotic about the production design, makeup and effects, a true storyteller’s touch used, resulting in a piece with elements of fantasy and world building brought lushly to the forefront, whereas the newer films just felt somewhat clinical and sterile, going through minimalist motions without any real sense of wonder applied. Oh and another thing: real, tactile makeup on actual human actors, which will win against motion capture/cgi any day. There’s also an old world, medieval feel to this planet, as the ‘humans being subservient to apes’ dynamic has already been in full swing for generations, as opposed to a lengthy origin story that takes up most of the newer trilogy. No build up here, just Marky Mark getting marooned on a distant world dominated by simians, fighting his way through their ranks, sort of falling in love with one (Helena Bonham Carter as a monkey=kinky) and attempting to find a way back to earth. There’s various apes of all shapes and sizes at war, the most memorable of which is a sleek, snarling Tim Roth as Thade, a volatile warlord who despises humans. Michael Clarke Duncan towers over everyone as Attar, his cohort and fellow soldier, and seeing already be-jowelled Paul Giamatti as a cumbersome orangutan is priceless. The human faction is led by weathered Kris Kristofferson and his daughter (Estella Warren, quite possibly the most beautiful girl on the planet), leading the dregs of humanity as they exist in hiding and fight for their lives. No expense was spared in filling every frame of this planet with lived-in splendour and atmospheric decoration, from suits of armour and architecture to the overgrown thickets of mountainous vegetation that grow on this world. As for the apes themselves, it’s terrific how real they feel. It’s the same thing that happened with Lord Of The Rings vs. The Hobbit, and the switch from practical Orc effects to the overblown cgi madness of the goblins in the later films. The human eye is inherently adept at deciphering what is real and what is not, and the effects of the later Ape films with Andy Serkis just felt lifeless and orchestrated, whereas here the makeup prosthetics are organic, authentic and wonderful to look at. Don’t even get me started on the ending either, it’s completely brilliant and will leaving you in cold isolation as the credits roll, a perfect gut punch to a film that could have easily turned sappy in the eleventh hour. So that’s my two cents. Bring on the backlash.