The Media Tourist

Daisy Ridley swims into sports history in high-spirited period-piece biopic

Young Woman and the Sea
Starring Daisy Ridley
Directed by Joachim RØnning
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, May 31

You probably don’t know (or don’t know much) about the first woman to swim the English Channel. So let this high-spirited, warm-hearted biopic introduce you to Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, who in 1926 made a big splash by doing something that only five other people—all men—had done, completing what was thought to be “the hardest test in all of sports.”

And beating the boys at their own game.

Daisy Ridley, the British actress best known for playing the Jedi Rey in four Star Wars flicks, is Trudy, the headstrong youngest daughter of a family of German working-class immigrants in New York City. After nearly dying from measles as a child—and hearing of an onboard ship tragedy in which hundreds of women died because they didn’t know how to swim—she’s determined to conquer the water. But in 1920s America, swimming was primarily for boys and men due to societal prohibitions about women showing too much skin.

Based on a 2009 book of the same name, Young Woman and the Sea follows mostly standard biopic beats showing how Trudy grows up to defy her grumpy father (Kim Bodina), bond with her older sister (Tilda Cobham-Harvey) and align with her supportive, strong-willed mother (Jeanette Hain). The movie also offers some playful situational humor, as when Trudy annoys her father into agreeing to let her join a swim class, or later, when her measles-related hearing loss comes in handy by muffling a dissonant drone of bagpipes.  

Eventually Trudy starts winning competitions and getting medals, and she’s invited to represent the United States in the 1924 Paris Olympics. But as female swimmers make modest strides into the mainstream, Trudy sets her eyes on something bigger—breaking into, and breaking through, the boys-club claim on the most dangerous swim in the world, one that no woman had ever undertaken.

It’s hard not to be inspired by this true-story tale as she overcomes the norms of the times and prepares to swim across the treacherous, 21-mile stretch of waterway between England and France. She’s warned of the icy, 20-degree water, schools of jellyfish, occasional sharks and even some unexploded mines left over from World War I. She’s saddled with a coach (Christopher Eccleston) who gets seasick—and spitefully jealous of what she’s trying to do. She also gets help and tips from a colorfully boisterous Brit, Bill Burgess (Stephan Graham), one of the handful of men who traversed the Channel before her. And speaking of showing skin, Burgess likes to wear skimpy bathing trunks and sometimes swim in the buff. Cover your eyes, girls!

Norwegian director Joachim RØnning has a keen eye for the many in-the-water sequences, and an attention to period detail that enhances the mood and feel of the times, from huffing steamships, clacking telegraphs and flapping carrier pigeons to families glued to their radios to get the news. We get a glimpse of Tarzan-to-be Johnny Weissmuller, who was himself an Olympic-champion swimmer before Hollywood called. The popular ‘20s foxtrot tune “Ain’t We Got Fun” becomes Trudy’s musical mantra.

It’s a Disney movie, yes, but instead of cartoon animals and evil stepmothers, it’s a rousing tale of real-life feminism in the water and a young woman who was dubbed by the press as the “Queen of the Waves.” When she comes home victorious—and beating the men’s best Channel-crossing time by nearly two hours—New York City throws her the biggest ticker-tape parade ever, with even the New York Yankees (and Babe Ruth!) cheering from the packed sidelines.

The title might make you think of a fem-centric, youthful spin on another sea tale, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Or perhaps Nyad, the recent Netflix film about Diana Nyad, in her mid-sixties when she swam from Cuba to Florida. Young Woman in the Water is an engaging look at the OG of female swimmers, a girl barely into her twenties when she made waves that rocked the world, who saw something she wanted, jumped in and went for it, stroking and kicking her way into sports history.

And yes, even swimming through a school of jellyfish. Ow!

—Neil Pond

Ferociously entertaining reboot shines with dazzling effects, action and emotion

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Starring Owen Teague, Freyda Allan & Kevin Durand
Directed by Wes Ball
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 10

In the newest installment of the durable film franchise about a world in which apes and humans coexist, a young chimpanzee squares off with a fearsome bonobo leader as all civilization hangs precariously in the balance. It’s a rip-roaring dystopian survival tale, a heroic journey, a parable about caring for our planet and an emotionally resonant tale about families, friends and the future.

But Curious George Goes to the Zoo, it isn’t. There’s some seriously muscular monkeyshine going on in this depiction of what happens when our young protagonist chimpanzee, Noa, sets out on a journey to find his clan, which has been subjugated into slavery by a cruel alpha-ape tyrant who calls himself Proximus Caesar. (All you Latin scholars will know that proximus means “next” or “nearest,” which is this monstrous monkey’s only relation to the late, great benevolent ape leader Caesar, who died at the end of the previous movie, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes.) And Noa soon finds out just how the new Caesar is totally, despotically different from the old Caesar.

The new movie—the ninth in the canon—plunks us again down on Earth hundreds of years from now when apes have supplanted humans. We learn that the cause was a mutated virus with a world-changing side effect: It led apes to become fluent in speech (we know they know at least one common curse word!) and civilized, and dethroned humans into bands of feral, mute scavenging pests. The apes call humans echoes, suggesting their distant, faint resemblance to mankind of yore.  

As you might suppose, most of the characters here are apes, played and voiced by actors underneath deep layers of motion-capture effects and CGI. Owen Teague is Noa, Kevin Durand is Proxiumus, and Peter Macon is Raga, a sagacious old orangutan. There’s also a host of talent behind the performances of Noa’s ape clan, Caesar’s merciless foot soldiers, and hundreds of supporting simians. There are only a couple of non-monkeys in the mix—William H. Macy is a human now ill-advisedly serving as a lackey for Proximus, and The Witcher’s Freyda Allan plays Mae, an uneasy female echo who becomes an ally of Noa and Raga—but with an agenda of her own that is revealed later.

It’s an ape-tastic epic, action-packed and full of feels that will touch your (human) heart, tapping back into the sci-fi soul of the original Planet of the Apes in 1968. (There’s a scene with apes on horseback, snatching up men and women with nets, that will definitely give you Charlton Heston vibes.) The tech is nothing short of amazing, showing just how much SFX has evolved and progressed—to make ape characters look, move and behave like apes, instead of human actors in monkey suits and prosthetics. With fully emotive CGI faces and bodies, these apes feel like they’re on the vanguard of the next movie-effects breakthrough, the same way Avatar set a new motion-capture standard more than a decade ago.   

A couple of vertiginous “climbing” sequences, with the apes swinging like trapeze artists from mountainous peaks and scaling a sheer rock coastal cliff, will really get your blood pumping. The ape-on-ape fighting scenes have a fierce intensity that “human” actors can’t realistically match, with teeth-baring, chest-thumping, body-slamming brawls that might leave you feeling a bit bruised yourself.

In addition to allusions to politics, Roman history and power run amok, there are other touchstones. Monstrously menacing apes snarl like mini Kongs, ruling a brutish “kingdom” that resembles Col. Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse Now.  Even little Curious George gets a wink-wink shoutout, in a children’s book found by the apes. Some of the apes-on-horseback scenes, clopping along with conversational banter, reminded me of Butch Cassidy and the Sunday Kid. The abandoned shells of human civilization—from rusted ship hulls to hollowed-out shopping malls and observatories overtaken by ivy—are stark suggestions about where humanity might end up someday, marked by decayed relics of long-forgotten science, advancement and history.

This ferociously entertaining franchise reboot (from director Wes Ball, who also directed The Maze Runner trilogy) lets us revisit a planet still evolving, a place where apes and humans still haven’t fully worked things out. Will they ever, or will one or the other always get the upper hand? In a closing scene as humans and apes both look above, gazing at the same stars in the same night sky, we’re left to wonder what they’re thinking—and wait, perhaps, for the next return to the Planet of the Apes.

—Neil Pond

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt put the heart in this slam-bang salute to Hollywood’s unsung heroes

The Fall Guy
Starring Ryan Gosling & Emily Blunt
Directed by David Leitch
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 3

Stunt professionals “take it on the chin” in nearly every movie, getting punched and pummeled, tumbling out of cars, plummeting off buildings and doing everything else deemed too dangerous for the stars. They’re the “fall guys,” like Colt Severs (Ryan Gosling), who’s found a steady gig as the slam-bang stunt double for a world-famous action hero, Tom Ryder (Alex Taylor Johnson).

But Colt’s career is interrupted when a stunt for Tom goes catastrophically wrong. Months later, when he’s recovered and returned to work, he’s reunited on another film with Ryder—and finds himself in the middle of a missing-person mystery and a conspiracy to connect him to a crime he didn’t commit. Will Colt “take the fall” in more ways than one?

It’s a lively, wildly entertaining ride into behind-the-scenes Hollywood, full of surprises, twists and turns, super-sized action, wink-wink comedy, hissable villains and standup good guys, and an eye-popping, ever-escalating cascade of sheer cinematic chutzpah. And there’s a soft, cuddly heart in the middle of all the explosions, car crashes and fisticuffs as Colt rekindles his old flame with a camera operator turned director (Emily Blunt) struggling to finish her first movie—a sprawling post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic—on location in Australia.

The many meta references to other movies and the film’s detailed immersion into the realm of professional stunt work comes from director David Leitch, himself a stunt performer before moving behind the camera for action-packed movies like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train and the Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw. Stay for the credits and you’ll get a look at the stunt pros who stepped in for popcorn-jostling scenes in which Reynold’s character dangles from a helicopter, gets set on fire (repeatedly), is thrown through a windshield and pilots a speedboat with his hands literally tied behind his back. (It’s a handy skill that Colt, we find out, learned to do in his first stunt job, for TV’s Miami Vice.

There are also knowing nods to the new, modern era of movie AI deepfake effects—at the roots of Hollywood’s recent acting strike—as well as prop guns (Alec Baldwin, anyone?) and the TV show on which the movie’s loosely based, the early ‘80s series starring Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. (Again, stay for the credits—where you’ll also hear the theme song to the TV series, performed anew by country star Blake Shelton, and see a couple of surprise appearances.) The name of another recognizable actor pops up on a random Post-It note before the star himself later pops up on screen. Or is he a deepfake?

Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham plays a pitbullish producer, Ben Knight is a bruising bad guy, and The Black Panther’s Winston Duke is one of Cole’s stunt colleagues. You’ll see the heavily tattooed Aussie actor Matuse Paz (he’s in the nightclub scene) again in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Gosling and Blunt make a wonderfully matched movie couple, firing up some feisty, old-school Hollywood romcom chemistry and cheeky quippery. The music is on point too, from the recurring theme (Yungblud’s cover of KISS’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”) to a karaoke version of Phil Collin’s “Against All Odds,” delightfully used as a backdrop for a bruising brawl in the back of a garbage truck careening crazily out of control. You’ll love how Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” brings Colt to tears.

As things zip and zing along, you’ll see how unicorns, prosthetic alien hands, space cowboys and a dead body in a bathtub all fit into things. I love the attack dog that only takes commands in French, and there’s more than one reference to another Tom, a real-life action superstar who—like Tom Ryder—likes to boast about how he does so many of his own stunts.          

It’s an adroitly clever and finely crafted cinematic ode to the rough-and-tumble world of the “unsung heroes” who make action look so easy—and get consistently overlooked by the Oscars, as Colt dryly notes.   

If you’re looking for a gonzo good time, crackling with star charisma, spinning around a sweetly romantic core and driven by a genuine love for what makes movies tick, buckle up for The Fall Guy. And hold onto your popcorn!

—Neil Pond