The Real Rise of the Apes.

Film: Project Nim
Year: 2011
Director: James Marsh
Starring: Nim Chimpsky, Renne Falitz, Bob Ingersoll, Stephanie LaFarge, Jenny Lee, James Mahoney, Laura-Ann Petitto, Herbert Terrace, Bill Tynan.
Running time: 93 min.

As I sit down to tap away at this review of Project Nim, an excellent documentary about a chimp named Nim, I am faced with one considerable dilemma: I don't really know how to review a documentary. This is entirely due to the fact that I don't generally watch documentaries. I could probably count the amount of documentaries I've seen on one set of fingers. I'm not nearly well versed enough to know the ins and outs of documentary making, so I don't know how I'm supposed to critique that. I also don't know how you 'dislike' a documentary. Aside from the fact that all of the documentaries I've seen have been great (and Senna is a big advocate for that), I can easily get involved in things that I had no interest in beforehand. Mainly because documentaries usually tell stories that actually happened, so how am I supposed to critique that? I'll probably just get interested anyway. Such is the case with Project Nim, so don't laugh at me when I can't give you a review filled with technical terms and passages about lighting. But hey, that's not what I do anyway.

Evil Lives Here.

Film: Red Riding Trilogy (In the Year of Our Lord 1974; 1980; 1983)
Year: 2009
Director: Julian Jarrold (1974), James Marsh (1980), Anand Tucker (1983)
Written by: Tony Grisoni
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Hall, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine, Robert Sheehan, Peter Mullan, Warren Clarke, Jim Carter, Eddie Marsan, Sean Harris, Maxine Peake, Sean Bean.
Running time: 295 min.

I've always somewhat disliked television, but what I dislike even more are made-for-TV films. They usually don't have much going for them, have no stylistic intentions whatsoever and employ a who's who of B-grade actors. All too often have I likened completely average movies with a huge amount of potential to the made-for-TV area, or used it as a whipping stick of some sort. However, there was a trilogy of movies made for British televisions in 2009 which was good enough to get a theatrical release in America in 2010. It was also good enough to change my attitude towards the television movies I so disliked before. The Red Riding trilogy, based upon David Peace's quartet of books looking at a series of murder and crime in Yorkshire, is one heck of a trilogy, ranking up there with the best. In fact, you wouldn't even be able to tell that this started out as a television project, because of the high-calibre of actors and well-informed production and stylistic values.