Little Things Mean a Lot

I'm not sure if I'm old enough to be a Curmudgeon yet, but I enjoy practicing. I have full plans to continue on to Geezer, but I haven't decided if from there I want to go on to Cranky Old Man or Crazy Old Coot. I'm hoping I still have a year or two before I have to make that choice.

So my rant today is about the use of turn signals. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. It's such a simple, small thing, and yet it infuriates me. It bothers me because it is deliberate. You know you are going to change lanes. You know you are going to make a turn. These are decisions you have made. Then you decided not to signal. Why isn't it automatically part of the action?

It's not as though it's a difficult maneuver. It takes less effort than changing the station on the radio. It's so simple. You can keep your hand closed around the steering wheel and just extend your middle finger to flick a little lever. As a friendly reminder, I often show this to people on the road as I pass them by.

I had a co-worker once say to me, "Signalling is a sign of weakness." Just as in war or poker, you never want to tip your hand and give your opponent an edge. I can almost understand how on our crazy Houston highways, an Offensive Driving stance might seem a viable option. Only the strong survive.

But if we're going to adopt that attitude, I want my paint gun. Gallagher had a bit about a gun that shot suction-cup "Stupid" flags at other cars. After half a dozen or so had accumulated, "the cops could pull you over just for being an asshole." Great idea! But those suction cups are so unreliable, especially when I'm trying to text about how great the burger I'm having is while going 80 miles per hour through a school zone. No, I need something simpler. Paint guns. Faster, more accurate, more shots, easier to reload, and the added bonus of potentially painting the driver. "Thanks for cutting me off, jerk!" poff, poff, poff.

If it really caught on, maybe we could adapt outside of the driving environment. "Hey lady, the express lane says '10 Items or Less'!" poff, poff, poff. Oh yeah. I really think I'm onto something now.

Ape-ril Ape-recap, with Ape-ricots!

Whew! I did it. I survived watching all the Planet of the Apes movies back to hairy back. It was a task I wouldn't recommend to anyone, really, but I did have a fair amount of fun with it. Still, I'm glad it's over. And no, there is no way I am going to watch either the TV series or the animated series.

So what did I gain from this experience? What did I learn? Not a whole lot, really. I learned that even bad sci-fi from the '70's can be better than the bad sci-fantasy we have these days. I learned that George Lucas did not invent the bad, nonsensical, series-ruining prequel.

I gained a lot of respect for Roddy McDowall as an actor. Yes, these are silly roles in cheesy movies, but he put real effort into each film he was in. Underneath all of that make-up, facial expressions were pretty much non-existent. So he improvised. He worked his nose to make the Ape-nose appear to be sniffing; exaggerated his eyebrow movement to get some action in the prosthetic forehead; blew out air to "puff out" the mouthpieces in anger. He clearly experimented with finding new ways to emote from behind that mask, and I really admired the work that took.

I also learned, just after beginning my marathon, that there is yet another Planet of the Apes movie coming out. I discovered this on my own by accident, but it was also brought to my attention by several friends through email and Facebook. It's called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and stars James Franco (!?). I admit, the trailer does look interesting. Clearly, it won't tie in to any of the "official" movies or timeline, but they did name the head Ape "Caesar," which is a nice touch.

Here's the link to the trailer, since when I embed video it doesn't normally follow when this post gets re-posted on Facebook: Apes Will Rise.

Planet of the Apes

Three-letter word review: Yes!
One sentence summary: Astronaut Taylor crashes on an alien world where Apes are dominant and men are barbaric, mute animals.
Strange '60's quote/reference: Taylor: "That's right, Lucius. Never trust anyone over 30."
Watchability: High. I would even rate this one a must-see. But if you're with kids or even adults who haven't seen it, do your best to hide the DVD case and the surprise ending.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Three-letter word review: Wow.
One sentence summary: Is it possible? Astronaut Brent searches for Taylor, crashes on an alien world where Apes are dominant, and finds him in an underground New York in the Forbidden Zone where telepathic mutant humans worship an atomic bomb.
Strange '70's quote/reference: Ursus: "The only good human... is a dead human."
Watchability: Strange. It's not really bad so much as it is a mess. There's a lot going on here, so for just plain craziness I would actually recommend it.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes

Three-letter word review: Hmm.
One sentence summary: Ape-ronauts (yes, they actually call them that in the film) Cornelus & Zira flee their planet in Taylor's crashed ship, only to crash themselves on Earth in the 1970's.
Strange '70's quote/reference: Dr. Zira: "A marriage bed is made for two. But every damn morning, it's the woman who has to make it. We have heads as well as hands. I call upon men to let us use them!"
Watchability: Medium. The first half is quite silly and strange, but it becomes rather dramatic by the end.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

Three-letter word review: Grr.
One sentence summary: Caesar, Ape-child of Cornelius & Zira, grows up in a world of Ape slavery and eventually leads a revolution.
Strange '70's quote/reference: Woman smoking cigarette: "Funny, now that I know these things won't kill me, I don't enjoy them."
Watchability: Low. The plot is very thin and the outcome pre-determined. Why bother?

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Three-letter word review: Ugh.
One sentence summary: Ape leader Caesar leads a group of Apes and humans after a global apocalypse, only to be attacked by irradiated human holdouts.
Strange '70's quote/reference: I'm sure there was one, but I can't remember.
Watchability: Very low. Don't waste your time. Seriously.

Planet of the Apes (2001)

Three-letter word review: Boo!
One sentence summary: Astronaut Davidson crashes on an alien world where Apes are dominant and men are their barbaric-ish slaves.
Strange '60's quote/reference: Attar: "Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!"
Watchability: Unbearable.

Planet of the Apes (2001)

Boo!

I hated this movie when I was dragged to see it in the theater, and I really didn't want to revisit the experience. However, I am a bit of a completist, so here is Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.

What kind of movie is this? Tim Burton claimed it was a "re-imagining," not a remake. That's good, I guess, since it gives us a little more distance from the original. Really, it's a testament to what happened to science fiction in the 30+ years between the two. It's more visual than cerebral, and it's more fighty than thinky. Basically, the original lamented the destruction and devolution of mankind, while the remake celebrated it.

We begin on a space station orbiting a planet with rings. Saturn, maybe? Not important. Look, pretty! The year is 2029 (which is pretty optimistic, even in 2001). Our hero, Leo Davidson, trains chimpanzees to fly spacecraft. Why they don't just use computers or remote pilots is never explained. Although they do claim that the monkey is sort of an early warning system, like a canary in a coal mine. So basically, they're spending a lot of money to train apes to fly expensive spacecraft on doomed missions into unknown phenomena. Okay. Hee hee! Look, a monkey in a spacesuit!

Conveniently, an unknown phenomenon appears not far from the station. And it's early enough in the movie that we don't have time to reflect on the nonsense we've heard so far. They send a chimpanzee to investigate the scary space storm, and he goes missing. Leo jumps into another craft and chases after him, and he goes missing as well. A few flashes of light, and suddenly Leo crash lands on some distant alien planet (which has between two and four moons, depending on when you look at it).

Almost immediately, he's swept up in the rush of humans fleeing Apes. These Apes are not hunting for sport, but rather capturing slaves. And the humans are not mute; they speak rather well, actually, especially considering their preference for loincloths. But no time to think about that now; look at the cool Ape make-up!

Leo is captured. Leo befriends Ari, an Ape who supports human rights. Leo escapes, brings some human and Ape friends. He's chased by the bad guys: Thade, the military leader Ape who hates humans and seems to have a secret, and Attar, the military second-in-command who hates humans and doesn't have a secret.

Leo makes it back to his crashed spaceship and retrieves a homing signal and a handgun, two things no space traveler should ever be without. The homing signal tells him that his space station has come to find him, so he's just got to follow the signal to reach it. Of course, it's in the Forbidden Zone, and Attar has an army blocking the way.

They make it past the army and discover the space station: crashed! And old! And isn't it weird how it has decayed to look like the spikes on the crown of the Statue of Liberty? Yep, it turns out that all of these Apes are descended from the monkeys he used to train on the station, which somehow crashed on this same planet thousands of years before. What a drag. But hey, at least the power still works. Science! It's fun!

There's a fight or something. Attar's Ape army attacks, adamantly. Apes and humans fight and die. Suddenly, a space craft appears. It's the chimpanzee Leo chased after at the beginning! This plus the crashed space station is a revelation to all except Thade, who knew it all along. Attar doesn't like that, so they fight and he kills him. Humans and Apes will play nice together now! "Welp," says Leo, "My work here is done. Time to be headin' home." He hops into the newly arrived spaceship and does just that. Science! It's convenient!

Just one quick hop into the scary space storm, and Leo is heading to good ole' Earth. He makes radio contact, but is forced to crash land on the Washington Mall. He exits his little pod on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as police arrive. He climbs the steps, looks up, and... OMIGOSH! It's not Lincoln! It's Thade! He turns around to see all the police are also Apes, pointing their guns at him. Roll credits. What a twist!

Of course, that twist is completely out of line with everything that happened in the movie. It's as if at the end of Titanic the deep sea divers discovered that the iceberg was actually artificial and piloted by cyborgs. But who cares? Gotcha!

This was just awful on so many levels, I don't even want to talk/write about it. It had boring and predictable allusions to the first film, but more for camp than out of respect. Actually, it had little references to pretty much all of the first five films, but none of them are worth calling attention to here. The Ape make-up was good, I'll give it that. Well, except for Helena Bonham-Carter. She looked like a cross between Michael Jackson and a gelfling. Why don't I just end this with that disturbing image.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Ugh.

When we left our Ape friends in Conquest, they had just revolted against their human masters. Caesar was the leader of this new race of Apes, and the course of the future seemed set. But again, to unnecessarily fill in that gap, Hollywood brought us Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

The movie is book-ended with scenes of John Huston (!?) as the Lawgiver, the prophet of the Apes (now *that* would be a great movie title), teaching children their past. The opening title tells us it is "North America, 2970," which is approximately 1,000 years since Cornelius & Zira came to Earth. This scene is very brief, and just leads us into the tale of Caesar and the Apes after the revolution.

We're not given the exact date, but based on the age of Caesar's son, Cornelius, I would guess it is anywhere from 10 to 15 years since the revolution. The Apes live in a primitive village of treehouses away from the cities, which were apparently destroyed by humans in a nuclear war. They kind of gloss over the details, but the city is now a twisted heap of metal, and human civilization is close to non-existent.

Caesar's goal is for Apes and humans to co-exist peacefully. Unfortunately, a new general, Aldo, doesn't share that dream. They both seem to have no problem enslaving humans, however.

Caesar leads an expedition into the devastated city to access the archives. He wants to view recordings of his parents, so he can finally get to know them. While there, they attract the attention of the few remaining humans still living in the underground of the city. They are irradiated badly, and I assume they are the progenitors of the mutants we see in Beneath.

The city humans decide to attack the country Apes, and while Caesar was gone General Aldo convinced the country Apes to attack all humans. Caesar's son overhears Aldo's plot to take over and is attacked. Eventually he dies, and Caesar takes out his rage first on the attacking humans, and then on the Ape responsible.

The "battle" scene is pretty awful. It lasts for about 30 minutes, but this is no epic war production. Seriously, it looked like a bunch of LARPers out in a park on a Saturday afternoon. I had that exact thought while watching it, and then I later learned in the trivia on IMDb that indeed, that location became Malibu State Park.

Eventually, the Apes win. Ceasar causes the death of Aldo, and all is right with the world. We return to the Lawgiver finishing his lecture. As the camera pans to his audience, we see it is comprised of both Apes and humans, living in harmony. We continue the pan to a statue of Caesar. With a close-up on his stone face, we see a single tear form, then roll credits with funky music. No dramatic fade to black with eerie sound effects fading to silence for this film.

This chapter was a complete waste of time and my least favorite of the series. It had a weak premise going in, just because it was a story that didn't need to be told. In addition, the script was lame, there were almost no interesting ideas, and it just ended up being very bland.

I will give them some credit for the ending and the double-meaning of the title, similar to Escape. The obvious reference is to the physical battle between the Apes and the city under-dwelling humans to see who will rule the state park world. But the other reference is to Caesar's desire to change the future, so that Ape and man can live in peace.

It's a theme that is brought up in several of the sequels: can we change the future? The coda at the end of the movie suggests that Caesar was successful, and that humans and Apes are co-existing with neither in a position of power. This is significant because it means that the Apes saga managed to dodge what would otherwise be a giant, five movie, time paradox causality loop.

-Taylor leaves Earth, goes to future, finds Apearth.
-Taylor discovers atomic bomb, destroys Apearth.
-Cornelius & Zira escape Apearth, go to past.
-In the past, Cornelius & Zira have Milo/Caesar.
-Caesar grows up, leads Ape revolution.
And right here, we could go straight into the original film. It would all fit, yet somehow the future Apes have caused their own existence through Caesar. Instead, Battle steps in and alters that future, so that Caesar actually prevents it from coming to pass.

In both Escape and Battle, different characters talk about the nature of time, using the same metaphor. They describe time as a wide highway with many lanes. Even though the highway is all going the same direction, each lane leads to a different destination. The question posed is: is it possible to change lanes? It's kind of a weird metaphor, but I will give the writers credit for sticking to it for the last three films.

Technically, I should be done with my Ape-ril Madness Marathon, but I decided to go ahead and watch Tim Burton's remake. So, one more review to go before my series recap.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

Grr.

The end of Escape from PotA was the kind of great ending that can never be left alone. It was an open ending, with the child of Cornelius & Zira living in secrecy, but we the audience could use our imaginations to fill in the gaps from that innocent child to the planet of Apes that Taylor arrives on. Of course, there's nothing Hollywood hates more than for an audience to use its imagination, and so we have Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

The movie starts by jumping right in. There's no opening sequence, unlike the other films (I've since learned it was edited out to receive a lesser rating), we just start with Apes. There's a title card telling us "North America, 1991" and then the credits roll.

In this "future" 1991, Apes are domesticated pets. Well, actually, they're slaves. They started out as pets in 1983 when a terrible virus wiped out all cats and dogs. People needed companions, so they turned to apes. As they became more domesticated (and perhaps as a side-effect of surviving the virus), they grew in size and intelligence until they resemble what the audience recognizes as capital-A Apes. Except they still can't talk.

During these opening credits, we see hundreds of Apes being herded, trained, and domesticated. Some are already serving as assistants, janitors, and waiters. It's pretty intense. Amusingly, they even have human protesters who protest not the enslavement of apes, but the loss of their waitstaff and janitorial jobs.

Fortunately, the masks are much better looking than the ones seen in Beneath, though the really good make-up is saved for the characters with close-ups. They organize the Apes by species into colored uniforms: red for gorilla, yellow for orangutan, and green for chimpanzee. That's a nice little touch that ties it into the future classes and colorings of the original film.

Another thing about the future: everyone wears black and the architecture is smooth, angular concrete without any ornamentation. This is just and FYI, in case you need to blend in, in the year 1991.

After we're shown what the world has become, we're re-introduced to our heroes. Armando (Ricardo Montalban!) the circus owner tours the city with Milo, who is all grown up (and played by Roddy McDowell- Cornelius from the previous films). Only now his name is Caesar, not Milo. I guess it sounded better. There's a scene where he gets to pick his name out of a dictionary, so I thought maybe he chose to change it. But no, Armando clearly calls him Caesar in the early scenes. Oh well. Continuity has never been a high priority for these films.

Caesar is the only Ape who can talk, of course, so he must hide. Armando is captured by the bad guy of the film, Governor Breck. Breck seems to be evil just to be evil. He immediately suspects Armando of having a talking Ape, and tortures him to find it. His motivation isn't as clear as Hasslein's from the previous film. He talks about how he fears an Ape uprising, but it seems to me that would be inevitable. The way he treats Apes, they don't need Caesar to be angry.

Meanwhile, Caesar hides among the incoming Ape shipment, and so we get a thorough education of how badly Apes are treated. Slavery is cruel and evil. Got it.

Eventually, Caesar starts to organize the Apes, although this is never really explained. He goes to various places, hides in the shadows, then gives a fellow Ape "the look." Somehow, they all know what that means. They steal cutlery from the kitchen, steak knives when polishing, butane torches when welding beams. Eventually, they feel the time is right to riot.

The riot scenes are pretty frightening. At night, hundreds of angry Apes in red jumpsuits do not exactly put one at ease. The military is called, but there are just too many of them. They swarm the squads, take the base, and capture the governor. Caesar gives a rousing speech about how the humans will pay for the debasement of the Apes. He claims that Apes can communicate over vast distances, and that tomorrow this riotous scene will be duplicated around the world. Standing tall, leading his fellow Apes against a backdrop of burning buildings against the night sky, Caesar gives the order to destroy Governor Breck, and the gorillas use their guns to beat him to death. The end. Fade to black.

Or not. That ending seemed too pessimistic, and might have also given it a more restrictive rating, so they tacked on a few more minutes. At the very moment I describe above where it should have ended, a female chimpanzee struggles to utter the word, "No." Caesar hears it and changes his mind. He appends his speech with an extra paragraph about how instead, the Apes will be more "humane" than the humans. Rather than shoot new footage, they use close-ups of his eyes, and roll the film backwards to show the gorillas withdrawing their rifle butts. All the Apes still go crazy, the buildings still burn in the night, and the fade to black is accompanied by their screams as the credits roll until they fade to silence.

The one, three-letter word I've been using to start all these reviews is very appropriate here. Not only is this the most angry and aggressive of the Ape movies I've seen so far, but that's exactly how I feel about the edits. I realize that most people don't take the Ape movies seriously, but it would be nice if the filmmakers did. This movie is pretty one-note, talking about the horrors of slavery. Why soften it? The Apes are abused and oppressed, but when they get their just revolution, their violence is restricted. That double-standard bothered me.

I thought the movie was okay, but it didn't try to be very much. As I said at the beginning, it's just filling in the gaps our imaginations had already filled. There were no twists or reversals or reveals. Everything went along pretty much as we knew it would, so therefore it wasn't very surprising. But that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't entertaining. It could have been much better if it had stuck to its ideals and been horrific not just for the slaves, but also the overturned masters.