Film The Legend of Tarzan
THIS HIGH-ENERGY, big-budget new spin on the old Tarzan story is fun to watch if you take it as throwaway kitsch. It imagines Viscount Greystoke (Alexander Skarsgård), best known as chest- beater Tarzan, all grown-up and civilised after a childhood in the jungle raised by apes. It’s the 1880s and Greystoke is back in the African Congo as a trade emissary for the British government and facing down colonial skullduggery. The film plays as an old-school
action adventure, with lots of animal attacks and chases and plenty of distracting flashbacks to answer questions about Tarzan’s backstory. Still, it might leave you scratching your head with a few questions of your own. Like: where does Greystoke buy his shaving razors in the wild? And, more importantly, which jungle gym does he visit to work on those freakishly sculpted and very twenty- first-century abs? (Not that fans of Skarsgård will worry too much about that.) Directed by Harry Potter stalwart David Yates, this ‘Tarzan’ tries
The Neon Demon
DANISH FILMMAKER NicolasWinding Refn (‘Only God Forgives’, ‘Drive’) likes to bypass real emotion in favour of actors floating through his films like zombified ‘Thunderbirds’ puppets. Now he’s found a subject to fit his style: fashion. Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a fresh-faced teenage
ingénue on LA’s fashion scene who signs to a top agent (Christina Hendricks) and is soon walking the catwalks. Her new friends, a make-up artist (Jena Malone) and two slightly older models either fancy her, envy her or want her dead. Gorgeous, vapid, beautiful, a bit boring. You
could say all those things about the fashion world. So perhaps it’s only right that this film feels exactly the same. Refn being Refn (a shock- merchant who’s a dab hand at beautiful imagery) weaves a story of bloodthirsty narcissism, cannibalism and necrophilia. There are scenes of a model being forced to swallow a knife and a woman having sex with a dead body. You don’t get that in an Armani ad. But for all its visual wizardry, the film’s long
scenes of near-silence and snatches of stilted dialogue are hard to bear. There’s little humour and what it has to say about fashion has been said a thousand times before. Still, there’s a mesmerising strangeness to Refn’s vision that can’t be denied, and Fanning does a good job of portraying innocence lost.■Dave Calhoun
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WHAT IS IT… A self-indulgent send-up of the fashion world.
WHY GO… Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t make boring films. (This one has regurgitated eyeballs!)
à Director Nicolas Winding Refn (18) 117 mins.
WHAT IS IT… A new take on the aristo tree-swinger.
WHY GO… Alexander Skarsgård’s abs are a wonder of the natural world.
à Director David Yates (15) 110 mins.
hard to be more than a creaky adventure story. It gives Tarzan’s other half Jane (Margot Robbie) the voice of a twentieth-century feminist – not exactly credible but very welcome – and pays some attention to the exploitation of indigenous peoples and the pilfering of natural resources. The most lively performances come from Christoph Waltz, preening and over-cooked as a colonial villain (an envoy of the Belgian King Leopold) and Samuel L Jackson as George Washington Williams, a real-life critic of Belgian imperialism in the Congo, who is awkwardly shoe-horned into this movie’s comic-book plot. Skarsgård himself is fairly bland
as Greystoke, delivering a po-faced Byronic spin on the character, all velvet coats and dreamy romantic gazing at his belle while sitting barefooted in the boughs of trees. But at least the animals are memorable – best of all is a pack of scene-stopping silverback gorillas digitally created for the movie. This Tarzan isn’t quite the jungle VIP – but it’s got a little swing. ■ Dave Calhoun
Nicolas Winding Refn TIME OUT MEETS
The director of ‘The Neon Demon’ talks controversy and violence.
Have you seen the article onMail Online calling ‘The Neon Demon’ ‘depraved’ and for it to be banned? ‘No! Fucking A! Come on!’
Like your last film, ‘Only God Forgives’, it’s gory and violent. Where do you draw the line? ‘I only draw the line on what would I like to see. I can only use myself as the audience. If I want to see it, I’m cool with it. If I don’t want to see it I wouldn’t do it.’
So you don’t care about negative reactions to your films? ‘Do you expect me to cry? The attacks on me – that’s the whole point of it. If you don’t react to what I do, why would you want to spend two hours with me? Why not just stay home and watch television? People were extremely negative about “Only God Forgives”, but the young at heart got it.’
Ju 5 – 11 0 6 Ju y5ly 5 y 5 – 1 2016 11 201 Timime Out London
You said you made ‘The Neon Demon’ because there’s a 16-year-old girl in every man. What did you mean? ‘My films are just my fantasies, whether it’s of masculinity, with Ryan Gosling in “Drive”, or if it’s the girliness of Elle Fanning in this one. I wasn’t born beautiful, but I wonder what it’s like.’■ Tom Huddleston
NICHOLAS WINDING REFN: KIA HARTELIUS
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