Rise of the Planet of the Apes

You should not trust me. I will lie to you about apes.
I do not mean to. But in my boyhood heart, the only movie that may be greater than Star Wars is the Planet of the Apes movie series.  Once a year, Channel 7 had “Ape Week” for its 4:30 movie, and showed all five movies, and my best friend Bryan and I always watched them together. Planet of the Apes was the first movie I recall seeing with not just one unhappy ending, but a slew of them; Colonel Taylor discovering it was Earth all along, Colonel Taylor detonating the super-nuclear bomb that blows up the world, Zira and Cornelius being shot as they try to protect their baby.
It’s no lie to say that the Planet of the Apes series taught me the meaning of the word “tragedy.”  It’s one of those film series that is in my DNA.  And so I am incapable of bringing you an honest review, because Rise of the Planet of the Apes was made by fanboys, for fanboys.
It is the perfect movie if you loved the original series.  (And no, I’ve never seen the Tim Burton version; when I heard what he did to the ending, I lost all interest.)
But let me take my pre-adolescent blinders off and tell you what Rise of the Planet of the Apes is: the best B-movie we’ve had in years.
The plot of Rise is simple: a kindly scientist, in his quest to cure his father of Alzheimer’s, infects a baby chimpanzee with a virus that boosts his intelligence.  The chimp, called Caesar, is in danger of being put down; as any good person would, the scientist smuggles him home and raises him as his own son.  But sad to say, the world is not quite ready to accept a super-intelligent chimpanzee.
…or at least this world.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a comic book movie, set in the kind of comic book world where everyone who are not the good guys exists for the sole purpose of oppressing them. The job is evil, the neighbor is evil, the primate refuge is evil.  Literally everyone who isn’t the hero of the movie goes out of their way to be a complete and utter bastard to the noble handful of men at the heart of this film, often for no good reason.
(Ironically, it’s erroneous on every level to say “noble handful of men,” because there’s one woman and one chimpanzee.  Such are the vagaries of language.  Let us continue.)
In a lesser movie (or for those who can’t appreciate the starkness of a comic-book world), this might be ham-handed – but the goodness of Rise is that the kindly scientist and poor, clever Caesar are so sympathetic, so trying to be good, that all the meanness does is make them shine brighter.  Andy Serkis’ performance as Caesar is brilliant, since Caesar has only three lines of dialogue in the whole film – and yet he is the protagonist, on-screen for long periods of time.  It is a special form of physical acting where emotions can be conveyed so perfectly with a body movement that we feel Caesar’s betrayal at the world he was born into, burn with his desire to be free.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a perfect example of what happens if you do the two things that are important in a movie: give us characters we can root for, and give them an emotional arc we believe in.  We utterly believe that Caesar wants to be treated with dignity, understand why he becomes a leader, understand his motivations for ultimately leading (spoilers!) an ape rebellion against humanity.  We utterly believe that the human scientist, so bland he barely deserves a name, wants to do the right thing in both curing Alzheimer’s and in protecting his friend Caesar. Their reasons for acting are clear, their goodness manifest.
This emotional truth salvages the monstrous plot holes in the movie.  This is a comic book movie with a soap opera timeframe, and we have such corkers as:

• A chimpanzee in a testing facility can not only arrive pregnant, but give birth without anyone noticing it in the slightest.
• A man accidentally exposed to an experimental virus in full view of his co-workers, boss, and the CEO of his company, is allowed to go home without being tested. Furthermore, when he disappears from work for a week without calling in sick, not one person thinks to check in on and him and see if anything might have gone awry.
• There is a home for wayward primates in California (not the zoo, which is a separate place) that is a) large enough to hold about fifty various primates, b) is run by people whose sole job seems to be to torture monkeys, c) is under government control but run by a father-son team where the father seemingly expects this to be a family business, and d) actually has accumulated fifty monkeys, orangutans, and silverbacked apes.  How many random monkeys are running around in California, anyway?
• Despite the fact that the Evil Corporation of Evil supposedly discontinued all development of the Mystery Drug three years ago, said corporation still has pallets of professionally-packaged ampules of the Mystery Drug being ferried about conveniently in plain view for the good doctor to steal.  And nobody seems to notice these drugs going missing.  Ever.

But you know what?  You can pick holes in this film all day long, but the truth is that it’s no less enjoyable for having them.  The film is not necessarily about the intellectual journey, but the emotional one, and Caesar’s journey from helpless baby to chimp commander is what rings true.  The heart of Planet of the Apes has always been that monkey or man, what makes someone a thinking being is the heart – and Caesar has heart.   It’s not a great film, but it’s a wondrous good film.
And it’s an even better film if you love the original movie, since there are all sorts of callouts to the original – yes, someone says, “Take your damn hands off of me, you damn dirty ape” and someone says “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” – but there are subtler tributes, such as a chimp being called “Bright Eyes” and Caesar playing with a model of the Statue of Liberty.
These in-jokes and tributes render me blind.  It’s a movie that fits perfectly into canon – so perfectly, in fact, that if it didn’t negate the beautifully tragic time-loop of Zera and Cornelius, I’d cheerfully jettison all past history and slot it into 1968 canon.  As it is, I don’t know which I prefer more, but I know this: it’s a good film.  It’s worthy of the Apes franchise.
Then again, I might be lying. Don’t mean to.  But you know, you should beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s spawn.  A wise person once said it, and it never rings truer than when I am discussing apes.

One Last Shill For The Clarion Blog-A-Thon

Today’s the last day of the Blog-A-Thon, and I’ll be posting the climactic chapter of my novel-in-progress today for all you lovely $10 donators.  If you want to win prizes by Neil Gaiman and Catherynne M. Valente, today’s your last chance to donate!
But wait.  You don’t like my prizes?  Why not check out Victoria Griesdoorn, who’s also got some amazing prizes, also for the lowly donation of $5?  She’s got a lot of prizes from stellar authors like Ellen Datlow, Ellen Kushner, Scott Edelman, writer-blogger-he-man Chuck Wendig, and more  – and more impressively, she has five copies of Scrivener, the writers’ word processor of choice, ready to go!
She’s done a hell of a lot of work, and she wants to get to $1k in donations.  Check out what she has – it’s a hell of a lot of work she’s done, getting them all in line – and if you like it, donate.

In Which I Predict The Future of FOX

The good news is that after a tense negotiation that felt more like cops trying to talk a hostage out of a cheap motel than, you know, government workings, we finally got the debt ceiling raised to prevent financial meltdown!  That’s good, right?
Well, as it turns out, Standard and Poor still downgraded America’s credit.  What did they say?

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues.

I’ve heard a lot of liberals saying, “That’s it.  This lays the problems with America’s finances, as seen by one of the top financial companies in the world, at the Tea Party’s feet.  Now they have to own it!”
Not so fast, folks.  I will now put on my Amazing Kreskin hat and tell you what the conservatives will say!

• The problem is that we didn’t cut enough.  This only shaved about $2 trillion off a projected $28-trillion deficit (or whatever the actual numbers are)!  If we had managed to reduce our spending to the bone, we’d get America’s house in order!
• Besides, Standard and Poor is just one financial company out of three.  The other two didn’t downgrade America.  So what’s wrong with Standard and Poor, huh?  Why do they hate America?  Let’s look at their history and find out all their scandals!
• They’ll hammer on this quote: the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability. Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a ‘AAA’ rating.

You kidding? An approach that involves cutting spending and raising takes on the super-wealthy?  That’s crazy.  They’ve got so much spin, you’d think they were a washing machine.
In other news, I agree wholeheartedly with this article, “The Real Confidence Crisis,” which includes the following money quote:

The real confidence crisis doesn’t lie with corporate America. It belongs to the Democrats. They are the party of government, and they should face it, and boldly advocate to use government to solve our problems. Instead, ever since the chaos of the ’60s and ’70s they’ve tried to insist they don’t like government any more than the Republicans do — and no one believes them. Maybe the dishonesty about their core values contributes to Americans’ lack of trust.
Democrats have helped Americans live in a dream world where their success is their own: Real Americans don’t get government help. This is a lie. The activities of government, going back to the days when it “purchased” North American land from other European powers and/or cleared it of its original inhabitants, created the conditions for American prosperity. In our own time, the invisible hand of government created the great middle class. The government has made all kinds of things possible through the tax code: the home mortgage deduction, for instance, isn’t in the Constitution, and only two other countries have it. Our supposedly “private” system of healthcare, pensions and 401Ks was likewise created by government, again allowing companies and individuals to avoid paying taxes on those employer “benefits.”

An Iron Stomach, Or No?

I have a doctor friend of mine who occasionally tells the story of the time I walked around for three days with a burst appendix.  She tells it to other doctors.  The punchline is, “…and he lived!”
So yeah.  Should be dead right now, but the burst appendix was a window opened for me to look at my rather freakish physiology, which I’ve always taken for granted – but apparently, I have a ridiculously high pain tolerance and an iron stomach that can devour just about anything and not get sick.  In fact, I hate it when I get the flu, because I’m always stuck for hours in that horrific position where the body tells me, Everyone else is firmly in favor of ejecting all the food in your body, except for the stomach.  He is the lone holdout.  Talk to him, sir, we’re all suffering here.
So I’ve been slowly learning that not everyone else does things.  This morning was another, and so I ask:
Occasionally, if I don’t finish a glass of milk at night, and accidentally leave it out, I’ll drink the leftovers the next morning.  Waste not, want not, say I.  It’s a little warm, but tastes fine otherwise – I’m not crazy enough to drink sour milk.
My wife, however, thinks this is just another symptom of my freakish immune system.  If she did that, she’d get ill.  I assure her it doesn’t taste bad, but that’s not the point – it’d still give her food poisoning.  I point out that people on the frontier had to drink warm milk and they didn’t die, and she in return points out that we’re not really living on the plains of Kansas.  Point.
So I ask you folks: could you drink a swallow or two of milk that smells fine that’s been left out overnight?  Would you?  Am I just sufficiently able to shrug off such stuff that I’ve never noted the weaknesses before, or is it something that’s normal (if not, you know, polite) and most people’s systems can handle it?  I’m curious.

Running Low On Time

Between my bees and my writing and my Blog-A-Thonning, I am absolutely swamped today.  I was hoping to dash off a quick entry on Why Science Fiction Is Harder To Read Than Fantasy, inspired by some early critique on The Novel of Doom, my early reaction to China Mieville’s Embassytown, and the three attempts it took me before I could get through the first four chapters of Dune, but…. it shall have to wait.
However, as the Clarion Blog-A-Thon ends tomorrow, I’d like to remind you about it.  I got about $200 in donations yesterday (thanks in part to the new fabulous prize offered up by Ms. Valente), but that still leaves me with about $300 to go to get to my donation goal of $2,000 – which is about what it takes to send a single person to Clarion.  I now have six professional sales under my belt, a status I could have only dreamed of four years ago – really, Clarion changed my life in a lot of ways, showing me that really, hard work can turn a fairly average fiction writer into someone publishable.
I want others to continue to have that experience.
So if you can, please donate.  There are prizes from Neil Gaiman and Catherynne M. Valente, and access to a novel-in-progress.  You will be doing a good thing, and I’m doing what I can to make it worth your while.  Even a couple of bucks will help.
Thanks so much, either way.  I know the journal tends to become the Blog-A-Thon Central during these six weeks; I appreciate your patience and care.  But, you know, it’s even better if you donate!
In a non-Clarion brief note, holy shit is the soundtrack to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson a work of brilliance.  President Andrew Jackson re-envisioned as an emo rock star, with all the soap opera bits taken straight from real life?  I can’t stop listening to this damn thing.  Highly recommended.