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It takes an event of seismic importance to make my sister leave work “early”—in quotes because she prepared for it by putting in 13 hours at the office the previous day. The event is Alexander Skarsgaard in The Legend of Tarzan, the upteenth retelling of Tarzan.

I have been watching Tarzan in one form or another all my life, beginning with the ancient Tarzan reruns starring Johnny Weismuller which aired Sundays on Channel 13, then the version staring Christopher Lambert whose forehead proclaimed him Greystoke, Lord of the Neanderthals, all the way to the Starzan parodies in which the late Rene Requiestas played Cheeta-eh (ganda lalake). As far as I am concerned there is no reason to film Tarzan ever again, unless it is to show us a spectacularly ripped handsome man swinging from vines in a loincloth. Skarsgaard fulfills most of the criteria: he has IMAX-sized shoulders and pectorals, is a Nordic god and swings from vines. . .but wait! He’s wearing khaki pants. Stretch khaki pants which never rip despite his exertions, including wrestling a great ape.

In this movie the villains are King Leopold and the Belgians, who run up a tremendous debt while ruling the Congo and try to pay for it by selling the Congolese into slavery and raping their diamond mines. Tarzan is now John Clayton III, Earl of Greystoke, married to the feisty American Jane (Margot Robbie). Their love story, along with Tarzan’s origins, unfolds in flashbacks. Leopold’s stooge Rom (Christoph Waltz) promises to deliver Tarzan to the angry tribal chieftain Djimon Honsou, who hates Tarzan for some reason, but not because he’s a white man who presumes to lord over the African jungle. No matter how you frame the story it’s still going to be about a white man who comes to save the Africans and the damsel in distress. The movie knows this, which is why Samuel L. Jackson turns up as Tarzan’s new ally Dr. George Washington Williams. Samuel L. Jackson isn’t fooling us: ever since Pulp Fiction, he’s been playing Jules. Here he gets to make funny comments along the lines of “There are snakes in the motherfucking trees.”

The movie is entertaining, but perhaps not in the way the filmmakers envisioned it to be. The vine-swinging scenes are exciting but there’s not enough of them, and the acting skills of the apes are not up to Andy Serkis level. Then the movie rushes to the end and the two big action set pieces feel like an afterthought. Director David Yates is going for the sense of wonder at nature’s magnificence etc, but all I could think of was, “Will I miss anything if I run to the snack bar for some chips?”

I’m not going to stop you from watching this Tarzan, but there’s very little you can get from it that you can’t get from a video of Alex running shirtless.

from Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

The annual festival is where we first saw Renoir’s Grand Illusion for the first time and became a fan of Eric Rohmer via The Baker Girl of Monceau and Summer’s Tale. Last year they had a fine selection of recent movies. Watch as many movies as you can, even the ones you know nothing about. Especially the ones you know nothing about, and allow yourself to be surprised. (In this year’s slate I’ve only seen Toute Premiere Fois. It’s hysterical!)