planet of the apes - tim burton

okay, let's get a few facts straight. planet of the apes, starring charlton heston, was not a good movie by any stretch. the sequels were severely ungood. i suspect that the 'apes' meme has become a haven for the callowly hip belies the fact that they haven't watched it. so here we have a film by an increasingly shitty director that will cash in on the following demographics:

- the few deluded souls who still think tim burton has it in him to make another decent film
- the few deluded souls who still think tim roth will star in another decent film
- the craven kitscheteers who realize that all things monkey are big-big cultural currency. MONKEY = MONEY. MONKEY = MONEY.
- people who want to know what the fuss is about but don't want to see a movie from 1968, jesus would you look at that chest hair?

so why did i go to see this?

because i belong squarely in the first two categories. suckers.

so i'm going to try not to fling poo at the third and fourth groups. they need to live and c'mon, it's not like they'll even find a webpage with (as of this writing) six very self-indulgent reviews of wilfully obscure bands, much less care about it. let's focus momentarily instead upon the seediest, most insidious commodity we have to sell (besides authenticity) to anyone who's buying, irony.

watchdog philologists, pedants and other degenerates would prolly rush to correct my usage of this word, pointing instead to other, lower terms like cheese or even sarcasm. they'd be correct, i think, since irony usually entails engagement or having something meaningful to say.

make no mistake, planet of the apes has nothing to say, at least not connotatively. but irony's what they're calling it these days. so we'll call it (ahem) "irony", in the sense described by chuck klosterman in the akron beacon journal -

....And a movie like Scream 3 is only about other movies -- it's a series of cliches that are done on purpose. That's probably the best definition of irony there is (although Ethan Hawke's character from Reality Bites would certainly disagree).

there's even a token nod to the racial conflict dialogue initiated by eric greene in his planet of the apes as american myth: race, politics and popular culture, when an unscrupulous slave-trader ape whines, 'can't we all just get along?'

well, there's not much i can really say to that. i don't think i have the communicative faculties to express just how bad the film was at that point, and i'm still not really sure that that was the film's nadir.

see, there's also the matter of the female human with blowjob lips and no lines. she gets more screentime and fewer lines than your average extra, existing as a sort of fallback love interest should the possibilities of a marky-mark and helena bonham carter (ape lady) interspecial coupling turn creepy. but that's about it, really. did i mention the blowjob lips? why is she in this movie?

i'm still working out whether the writers of this abomination hold their characters or their audience in greater contempt.

o, yeah. the film stuff.

acting - mediocre to sucky. well, marky wahlberg came out pretty clean, as did bonham-carter. you know they just had shit to work with, like. tim roth as the king bad guy was... well, he was a little over the top. but it's tim roth. of course i'll watch it.

pacing - sucked.

editing - sucked.

music - surprisingly good. i never thought i'd like a danny elfman score, but he got the formula down for this film. good for you, danny. you glorious, lame music making bastard.

yeah, the film stuff is pretty reductionist, but there's a reason half the oscars are given away a week before the big event, untelevised. no one cares.
in an orwellian nutshell, planet of the apes is DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD.