A strong finish to this year’s Ape-ril. So strong it could rip your jaw off, play with it for a bit, and then politely try to put it back on like nothing happened. I sat down to watch Johannes Roberts’s tight 89-minute ape-fueled gore-a-rama the other night with a gummy and half a pint of Chunky Monkey, and let me tell ya, it was hittin’. Almost as hard as Ben the chimp. Apes are strong, in case you haven’t picked up on that by now.
Did you know right now there’s a chimp civil war happening in Uganda? The once-strong Ngogo chimpanzee community in Kibale National Park, one of the largest ever studied, with around 200 apes at its peak, has splintered over the past several years in a bloody power struggle for ape supremacy. It’s wild, because it sounds like a story ripped straight from a Michael Crichton novel.
Like Brian De Palma, Aussie director Richard Franklin was very much a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, Franklin was such a devotee that, while attending USC, he was determined to get Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) screened on campus. This effort led to Hitchcock personally calling the school, and Franklin inviting him to give a lecture, which he did. The two struck up a friendship, and years later, in 1983, Franklin would go on to direct Psycho II.
A glance at Franklin’s filmography paints the picture of a true genre filmmaker. The guy loved horror and suspense, high-concept ideas that practically pitch themselves. Movies that feel Hitchcockian, but updated for modern audiences. Like in 1979, when Franklin landed on the idea: “What if someone made Jaws… but with chimps?”
Not since the dawn of man (around 2014) have I dedicated an entire month to ape cinema, but I’m back, and this time it’s personal! After listening to every album by Gorillaz and finishing Donkey Kong Bananza a few months ago, my body is ready. *Starts beating chest. This month I’m gonna live like an Apeman. Hey, you gonna eat that nanner over there?
Last time, I reviewed the OG Planet of the Apes films, but this time I’m tackling KILLER ape movies. “Oh sweet, like Shakma and Monkey Shines?” NO! WRONG! Those are monkeys. I’m talking about apes, which turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated if the goal was to watch GOOD movies.
This month, Gorillaz released their ninth album, The Mountain to glowing reviews, the band is already in midst of a world tour, and a few weeks ago made their first ever appearance on SNL. Not bad for a band that sort of doesn’t exist.
What you might not know is that today, yes TODAY marks the 25th Anniversary of the band’s debut self-titled album. Twenty-five years. Christ. It feels like yesterday I was watching the “Clint Eastwood” video on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block. But no, that was the Summer of 2001. Now I’m an old-ass man. The future is comin’ on.
60th Academy Awards (1988)
Nominations: 9
Wins: 9
A month ago, I posted a list of my “Top Ten Horny Movies” where I crowned Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers as my number one. The film has become such a favorite of mine I had to see what else Bertolucci had to offer. Which is tough, because his two biggest movies are 1) A movie no one likes to talk about anymore because of a a sex scene that traumatized its female star and 2) A film about the life of China’s last monarch of the Qing Dynasty, which sounds like a movie I’d watch stretched over a week in school.
Not to mention The Last Emperor is an ’80s Oscar movie. I wrote in my review of Ordinary People last year that I believe the 1980s weren’t just a boring decade for the Oscars, but a boring decade for cinema in general. Now hold on, there’s no need to run me down in your DeLorean just yet. Yes, of course there were good movies in the ’80s, lots of them, but the center of gravity in Hollywood had shifted.
The risky, director-driven “New Hollywood” of the ’70s had been replaced by a more corporate, risk-averse system. Studios had learned the lesson of the blockbuster and weren’t eager to bankroll messy, morally ambiguous adult dramas anymore. Instead, they gravitated toward high-concept hits, sequels, and polished prestige pictures, the kind of films that looked expensive, respectable, and safe chillin’ on an awards ballot.
The Last Emperor is interesting because on one hand it does feel like your typical award-season pabulum. It’s a biopic, it’s long, it’s expensive, but it also did something no Western film had done since 1949. It was shot entirely in China, including extensive scenes inside Beijing’s Forbidden City. That alone was a gamble. The production depended entirely on the cooperation of the Chinese government, which meant the film could have collapsed at any moment if political winds shifted. For a massive international epic, building the entire production around that uncertainty was a risk in itself.
But is it any good?
47th Academy Awards (1975)
Nominations: 3
Wins: 0
A few days ago I finished Mark Seal’s 2021 book Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, about the making of The Godfather. I imagine The Godfather is on a lot of people’s minds after the untimely passing of Robert Duvall.
Before reading this book, I always thought Coppola’s 1974 neo-noir thriller The Conversation was a style exercise for Coppola, a brief interlude between epics, a palate cleanser, if you will. It may have been those things, but I didn’t know until reading Mark Seal’s book that Coppola wanted to make The Conversation before The Godfather. The Conversation was his passion; The Godfather was just a gig, before it grew into something bigger than a cheap adaptation of a pulp crime novel.
