You finally made a monkey out of me!

But: “They’re not monkeys! They’re apes!” So spoketh the chimp wrangler in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I thought was pretty damn entertaining. My review will be in print next Thursday, but here it is, early:

If your jaw dropped at how realistic, how life-like and creepy Gollum was when you first saw him in The Fellowship of the Ring ten years ago, it will fall open again and your mouth will dry out when you see Caesar, the super smart chimpanzee at the center of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The rise of CGI (computer generated imagery) has been derided as much as it has been hailed; the detractors need only point to Green Lantern or The Last Airbender or any original film on SyFy, while the supporters have Jurassic Park and all three films in The Lord of the Rings. And now the CGI cheerleaders have Rise, which I think is a new benchmark in the use of computers to create non-human characters who are not just believable, but whose digital origins become forgettable seconds after first view. Caesar’s movements are performed by Andy Serkis; the motions are captured on camera and then technicians use them around which to draw and animate a chimpanzee. Caesar’s acting, then, is a collaboration between Sirkis, who voiced and moved Gollum, and the effects team put together by director Rupert Wyatt.  Too bad you can’t give a Best Actor Oscar to four dozen people.

Planet of the Apes, to which Rise is the ninth film sequel or remake (there was also a TV series), was groundbreaking in 1968 because of its special effects, in particular the costumes and make-up for the super smart simians who lorded over mute humans in the distant future. None of the films that followed were remotely as well-made, neither technically nor in their stories, and some were just terrible, even though they have their camp appeal. Tim Burton’s remake of the first film ten years ago wasn’t even campy, just a mess of terrible acting, a dumb-downed screenplay, and weak effects – though the ape costumes weren’t that bad. Rise’s special effects alone make it probably the best since the first film, and it’s definitely the most entertaining, despite its faults.

One of the reasons gay audiences might be drawn to the movie is James Franco, who plays the present-day scientist responsible for making Caesar, and by extension, every other ape, way too smart. Franco loves to play gay or gay-ish (Milk, Pineapple Express) and is strikingly handsome, and he can be an intensely great actor, as he was in 127 Hours and James Dean. But he has been known to phone it in, becoming wooden and distracted. See, for instance, his bizarrely unfocused and terrible hosting of the last Acadamy Awards show. And in Rise, while he’s believable, he’s much less intense – he’s almost lazy – than I would expect from his character.

Franco plays Will Rodman, a brilliant scientist trying to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s, which his father (John Lithgow) suffers from. Testing the cure on chimps, one of them becomes smarter, showing that the drug is working. But she goes berserk, and is killed, and the study is shut down. It turns out it wasn’t the drug making her crazy; she was just protecting her baby. This baby is Caesar, who Will takes in, raises, and discovers to be even smarter than a human. But Caesar still has some wild animal in him, and after he attacks a man threatening Lithgow, he’s sent to a primate sanctuary, which is really a prison for problematic apes. The rest of the film is a prison break revenge story crossed with a “Don’t play God!” cautionary tale. Science doesn’t end up looking too hot by the end.

And science is represented by a cartoonishly evil drug company exec (David Oyelowo), a dull Franco, and Frieda Pinto, who has the thankless role of Will’s veterinarian girlfriend and voice of reason. I was thrilled when the humans were off-screen, because Caesar and his fellow apes, communicating almost entirely in grunts and body language, starred in scenes as fascinating, entertaining, suspenseful, and action-packed as the human scenes were dreary. By the end, as Caesar and his pals are marauding through San Francisco, you cheer for their dominance. These computer-generated apes just seem so much more alive.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Directed by Rupert Wyatt
Written by Rick Jaffe and Amanda Silver
Starring James Franco, Andy Serkis, and John Lithgow
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

Oh, and the title of this post is from the musical Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off! which was depicted in the episode “A Fish Called Selma” of The Simpsons. Ha.


Watch Planet of the Apes, The Musical in Comedy  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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I meant to post these reviews, but I forgot.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spaced on posting my movie review here, even though I’d been writing them and they kept appearing in print. In reverse chronological order of the movies that haven’t been blogged.

I really wanted to like Cowboys & Aliens. Oh, well.

When I first saw the poster for Cowboys & Aliens,I got excited. These are two great tastes that haven’t yet gone together, but should. Five years ago, that’s what I said about chocolate and bacon. Now you can buy bacon chocolate bars everywhere. (Well, maybe not everywhere. But soon, I hope.)

Two of the great American film genres, the Western and the sci-fi action film, seem incongruous, even odd together, but they have a great deal in common. Both the Western and the sci-fi action film are, often, about honorable underdogs who must fight evil in the form of the corrupt (evil cattle barons or the Galactic Empire), the criminal (bank robbers or super-corporations of the future) or the racial other (Indians or green reptilian monsters from a distant solar system). Mixing the two genres would give the filmmakers all sorts of interesting material to work with, crazy juxtapositions and surprising plot twists. Or not. [Read the rest here.]

I was dumbfounded by how much I loved — by how good — Captain America was.

Captain America: The First Avengerdebuted in San Diego last week at a screening full of both comic book geeks here for Comic-Con and local soldiers, sailors and pilots in fatigues and pressed blues. Both groups were thrilled when a troupe of dancing girls decked out like Rockettes from the 1940s performed at the front of the theater; they got a lot more cheers than Chris Evans, who plays the Captain and who showed up to tell everyone how much he loves the movie.

With that much fanfare, anything less than an exciting, enjoyable, morally simple and beautifully shot action film would have been a disappointment. No one was disappointed; I certainly wasn’t. [Read the rest here.]

Tabloid really disturbed me, and I’m one of the maybe three people who had a lot of issues with the movie.

Tabloid, the latest documentary from Oscar-winner Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line), couldn’t have arrived at a more appropriate moment. While Britain is immersed in an epic scandal involving the relentless, creepy and illegal overreach of its most popular tabloid newspaper The News of theWorld,Morris’ film showcases a sex scandal that provided cannon fodder for Britain’s tabloid wars almost 35 years ago.

The unintentional irony of Morris’ film is that he focuses on the tabloidy, if amazing and hilarious, aspects of the story – its protagonist’s delusions, the almost impossible-to-believe details and the sex, sex, sex – while glossing over the enormously shady ways that the tabloids used and abused the people involved in the scandal. Joyce McKinney, the colorful, charismatic, sexy and maybe a little crazy center of it all, ends up as fodder for Morris, too. As she was in 1977, McKinney is an expendable casualty in the service of a story told for profit. [Read the rest here.]

Transformers: Dark of the Moon was ridiculous.

I’m not sure why anyone needs to watch, let along make, 157 minutes of a third movie based on Hasbro’s popular toys known as Transformers. But Transformers: Dark of the Moon,the latest in the series of action movies about morphing robots from outer space, is more than two and a half hours long. With a reported budget of $195 million, director Michael Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg have spent $805,000 for each minute of computer generated robots attacking each other, chunks of the Chicago skyline and the various humans unlucky or dumb enough to get in the way.

If you are the kind of moviegoer who is happy, even gleeful, about paying $16 to see Michael Bay’s special effects bonanzas in 3-D, then you will need to see, and may love, Dark of the Moon. It is by far the best of the three movies, and yes, that is damning it with faint praise. If you don’t compare it to other Bay movies, but rather to the work of his genre-mates like James Cameron, Peter Jackson and Spielberg, Dark of the Moon is a bombastic, occasionally fun to look at, but still craven piece of schlock. [Read the rest here.]

The next movie review post will be early…

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My review of Horrible Bosses is mostly about how annoying Ramin Setoodeh is

Well, the title of this post pretty much says it all. I liked Horrible Bosses, despite everything. I’ve posted the beginning below, and you can read the whole review here.

Last week, gay Newsweek senior writer Ramin Setoodeh tried to rustle up some controversy around Horrible Bosses by writing an article about how Jennifer Aniston’s sociopathic sexual harasser character calls Charlie Day’s character “a little faggot” when he tries to explain all of the ways she’s inappropriate. Setoodeh became infamous after writing in one article that out gay actors can’t convincingly play straight and in another that Glee’s Kurt is so queeny he hurts the gay cause.

He makes the screenwriters defend the use of the word, and then asked various out Hollywood types about whether the use of the word could hurt Aniston’s career. (It won’t. At all.) Setoodeh’s implication is as clear as it is insipid: any use of the word “faggot” is cause for concern…

Setoodeh is awful.

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Bad Teacher wasn’t so bad

Bad Teacher was exactly what I thought it would be. Filthy and funny and not too good. My review got cut weirdly, so here’s the uncut version. (The LGBT Weekly version is here.)

Bad Teacher
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg
Starring Cameron Diaz, Lucy Punch, Justin Timberlake, and Jason Segal
Very Rated R
At your local multiplex

I had one wildly incompetent social studies teacher, a woman who didn’t feel the need to put any effort into her work beyond what was necessary not to get fired. I had a math teacher who got high at lunch every day and then sprayed her room with strawberry air freshener to mask the smell. And I had a professor whose excuses for not returning papers became more preposterous as the papers got later and later. But Elizabeth Halsey, who Cameron Diaz plays in Bad Teacher, is not just lazy, dishonest, and prone to being inebriated at work. She’s also a thief, a tease, and a bully, and she has the mouth of a particularly dirty sailor. She’s also stop-dead-in-your-tracks-to-look hot.

Diaz is stunning, as beautiful and sexy as she is aware of how to use her looks. One of the reasons that is Diaz is inarguably one of the great comedic actresses of her generation is that she uses her beauty, and her body, as either a distraction, a prop, or a foil. When Elizabeth walks down the hallway of John Adams Middle School in heels and a mini skirt, she’s tartly elegant, just exaggerated and inappropriate to get a few giggles. But when she puts on a movie for her students, and then wraps herself in her coat and curls into an awkward, misshapen ball on her chair, her willingness to look ridiculous, even ugly, pulls out the audience’s laughter.

Unfortunately, Diaz’s almost effortless comic skill is not matched by the film surrounding it. Elizabeth is only teaching, or “teaching,” as way to pay the bills while she tries to score a rich husband. She thinks that she needs a breast enlargement to do this, and to raise the $10,000 she needs, she does increasingly bad things. One potential husband is a new substitute, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), who is also pursued by Elizabeth’s absurdly perky nemesis Amy Squirrel (the hilarious, slightly insane Lucy Punch). Meanwhile, the gym teacher Russell Gattis (Jason Segal), is pursuing Elizabeth, who responds to his invitation to a date with, “Are you still a gym teacher? Then no.”

While the screenplay, by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, crackles with pointed, often filthy one-liners and tart, loony exchanges (particularly between Lucy and Elizabeth), director Jake Kasdan doesn’t seem to have much control of the actors’ timing. So, too often the scenes fall flat, especially when the actors aren’t as experienced or instinctual as Diaz or Segal. As adorable as Justin Timberlake is, and as lucky as he was to have been in last year’s best film, The Social Network, he’s not much of an actor, and in his scenes with his ex Cameron Diaz, he was out-classed and out-acted. A few times, he was used as a sight-gag; when he dances badly and sings badly, the audience’s laughs are based on its previous knowledge of his better work, not about the character he’s supposed to be playing.

That said, I laughed out loud several times while watching Bad Teacher, even during some of Timberlake’s scenes. The younger men in the audience when I saw the movie were particularly enamored with the movie, especially when the issue of breasts was first and foremost. While Bad Teacher is a female-driven comedy, unlike Bridesmaids, it is not a depiction of a remotely realistic female; Elizabeth is a male fantasy, a hot and dirty, bawdy and easy cartoon. She’s a like a Will Farrell character in the body of Victoria’s Secret model. Which is a pretty funny thing.

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It’s not easy being green

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLvPeHUwF0k]As you can tell by this gratuitous shirtless-and-wet scene from Amityville Horror, Ryan Reynolds sure has a cray cray good body. Sadly, his Green Lantern wasn’t cray cray good. Here’s the LGBT Weekly link.

Green Lantern
Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively and Peter Sarsgaard
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

Last week, NPR posted on their Web site a superhero movie bingo card. To play, you place your chip over squares for such things as “Training montage,” “Christ allegory,” “Acclaimed British actor looking mortified,” “Homoeroticism,” “Daddy issues,” and “Secret identity … revealed!” Get five in a row, and you win. (I don’t suggest yelling “Bingo!” in the theater.) While watching Green Lantern, the latest in the string of summer superhero movies, I could have won three times.

While it’s an enjoyable escape, DC Comics’ only film this summer – as all of the other movies are based on Marvel characters – is somewhat underwhelming and as clichéd as this review’s headline.

Green Lantern is one of the key characters in the DC universe also populated by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. (Spider-Man, The X-Men and Iron Man exist in the Marvel universe.) One of 3,600 super space cops in the Green Lantern Corps, he wears a ring that gives him the nearly unlimited power of green energy, harnessed from the most potent force in the universe: will. The ring allows its wearer to construct anything his or her mind wants, things like green swords, green helicopters or giant green fists.

The Green Lantern Corps has protected the universe from evil for millennia, and this summer’s movie is about the first human to be deemed worthy of the ring and its accompanying skintight green suit. Hal Jordan is chosen by the ring, since will is apparently sentient, after Earth’s sector’s protector, Abin Sur, is killed by the worst threat to the universe ever, Parallax, who is powered and corrupted by the only force that can rival will: fear. Keeping things clear, will is green and fear is yellow.

I never thought of Hal Jordan as a particularly comedic superhero, but by casting Ryan Reynolds in the role and writing to his strengths, the army of credited screenwriters – four, count ’em! – have turned Green Lantern into a wise-cracking frat boy who can fly and conjure up green Gatling guns. Reynolds, who has a baby face and the body of an Olympic athlete, is best known for his romantic comedies, which he excels at, and he’s convincing as a doubt-wracked lothario suddenly given cosmic responsibility. But his acting is not as subtle, deep or explosive as either Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man) or Toby Maguire (Spider-Man), so Reynolds’ superhero is, well, a bit cartoonish, if fun to look at.

Peter Sarsgaard, who plays a scientist infected by Parallax, is covered with hideous prosthetics for most of the film, but his quips and whines are more resonant than the close-ups of Reynolds’ face as he attempts to look pained when he thinks about his dead father.

Meanwhile, Blake Lively, who proved her mettle in last year’s The Town, doesn’t have enough to do; she’s as pretty and tough as action film love interests are supposed to be, but her Carol Ferris is no Lois Lane.

I saw Green Lantern in 3-D, and it was one of the better uses of the technology of the last several years. Still, the colors were muddied, and the visual trickery seemed superfluous. Director Martin Campbell, who so smartly rebooted James Bond with the almost all-analog Casino Royale, was not suited for the almost entirely CGI-ed action sequences. They lacked danger, intensity or art, all of which would have made the film clichés less glaring.

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