PlanetOfTheApes Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Apocalypse you say? Then armageddon outta here. Whether it's war, pestilence or one of the other Four Horsemen, the end of civilization as we know it has been a recurring theme since the beginning of science fiction cinema. This Friday sees the release of Knowing, a film in which a looming global cataclysm plays a major role -- so let's take a look back at seven films with different versions of how it will all end.

I Am Legend (2007)
Let's start with one that's still fresh in everyone's mind. In this film based on the Richard Matheson novel, Will Smith plays Robert Neville who, at the start of the film anyway, appears to be the last man on Earth thanks to his immunity to the virus that has stricken everyone else. The majority of the population has died from the disease, while the remainder have been mutated into animalistic rage-driven creatures who fear the daylight. Neville is a virologist and spends his days looking for a cure and his nights locked away in the safety of his Manhattan home.

It's interesting that this is one of the few such films where the end of civilization is not brought on by an act of aggression, but by a noble cause: a man-made virus intended to cure cancer that goes horribly wrong. The film is entertaining, but personally I find the CGI Darkseekers distractingly unconvincing. They leap around as if they have no weight and when they shriek their jaws distend like an anaconda swallowing a pig. Also, the film's original ending, which you can see on the DVD, made a lot more sense to me. Of the previous adaptations of the novel, The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price remains my favorite. Charlton Heston's The Omega Man has its moments but hasn't aged well and starts to run out of steam early on.

With this weekend's The Day the Earth Stood Still, Hollywood continues its attempt to remake every remotely viable classic property it can get its hands on. (It also conjures up the perfect role for Keanu Reeves, but that's another post.) The science-fiction genre has been a particularly inviting target, which makes sense since the ability to use modern effects makes filmmakers think that they are improving on their source material regardless of whether that's actually true. But it hasn't been all bad. Hollywood still churns out some good sci-fi from time to time, and some of the remakes have hit their mark. Here's a list of seven that worked for me -- though I warn you that my tastes in genre films are somewhat idiosyncratic. I'm fond of some black sheep.

1. War of the Worlds (2005) - Some of you may want to get off the train right here. But I saw Spielberg's War of the Worlds before the bad buzz, and I found the first ninety minutes just ridiculously intense -- the realest alien invasion ever put on screen. This was Spielberg the wizard, the technician, in top form. Sure, he chose to play out his daddy issues instead of giving us a believable ending; everyone is right about that. But to me, that's barely a smudge on this movie's accomplishments.

A few months back I was discussing Fantastic Fest with Sir Devin Faraci, and he professed to me that one of the films he was most looking forward to -- was something 25 years old! Yes, Devin is a HUGE Planet of the Apes fan, so he was elated to see the "unseen cut" of J. Lee Thompson's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Mega-geeked, in fact.

So when it comes to new info on this long-running franchise, I put much stock in Faraci's ravings. Here's the short version: It looks like there will be an Apes prequel that starts off before the original film. And by "original film," I assume they mean the 1968 one. And then we hear from Cinema Blend (who got it from Production Weekly) that not only is the prequel a go, but also that Fox has hired a director. Namely, Scott Frank, who wrote Get Shorty and Minority Report before hitting the director's chair on The Lookout. The movie will cover the pre-Apes tale of how the primates overtook the planet. So this isn't only a prequel, it's a sort of a Conquest remake, too. Geez, this is getting confusing.

More on this project as it arises, but please do share your thoughts. Like ... do we really NEED a new version of this oft-exhumed tale? Frankly no. But given Mr. Frank's track record, I find myself feeling a little more optimistic than usual.

UPDATE: Mr. Faraci has spoken with Scott Frank, who has cleared up the fact that he's not remaking Conquest. From CHUD: "[Frank's] film will not feature talking monkeys, and it will not end with chimpanzees running wild in the streets, taking over the world. But it isn't entirely divorced from the world of Planet of the Apes, either. In fact, Frank sees his movie as the opening chapter in a saga that could span the thousand years between today and a world where apes rule."

Clockwise from top left: Get Smart, Transsiberian, Kung Fu Panda, Budd Boetticher Box Set, Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Collection.

Welcome to this week's edition of Spin-ematical, chock full of alternatives to election coverage!

Kung Fu Panda
Though some of the celebrity voices were useless, Jack Black is great, and the film itself is pleasant, good-natured, and respectful of Asian culture. Available in at least seven editions, including widescreen, full-screen, Spanish, a Christmas gift set, with and without Secrets of the Furious Five (a 20-minute short), and on Blu-ray; oddly, this doesn't release until Sunday. Buy it.

Transsiberian
Traveling by train in the dead of winter from Beijing to Moscow should be much more restful than what happens to Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer in this adventure / suspense / thriller; Ben Kingsley plays a menacing Russian detective. I'm recommending this one sight unseen because Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist) directed. Includes a 34-minute "making of"; also available on Blu-ray. Replays are inevitable. Buy it.

Get Smart
The bumbling Maxwell Smart as a generic action hero? (*sigh*) Steve Carell makes the character his own by repeating the old catchphrases without enthusiasm and proving to be far too adept for his own -- or the movie's -- good. Anne Hathaway is a very sexy spy, but Dwayne Johnson is miscast and even Alan Arkin struggles. The TV series never took itself too seriously; if only the movie had done the same. Available in widescreen and full-screen editions, as well as a two-disk version and on Blu-ray; a plethora of bonus scenes are included, notably a 5-minute "vomit reel." Ugh. Skip it.

After the jump ... Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray debuts, and Collector's Corner.

In a world where every franchise is getting "rebooted," it should come as no surprise that someone in Hollywood wants to revisit Planet of the Apes. After all, Tim Burton's attempt was unsatisfying, and what do you do when your remake failed to launch a franchise?

Devin Faraci of CHUD has the scoop on a Apes script that has been kicking around Fox for the last year. It's not a sequel of Burton's film, and it's not another remake of the original Planet, but it is a remake all the same: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. It will, thankfully, have a smoother title: Genesis: Apes.

For those unfamiliar with the original, Conquest is a prequel. It's the story of Caesar,
the first talking ape, who led the revolution that caused apes to be the masters of human savages. And honestly, the new script is pretty intriguing and edgy. Set in modern day, Caesar is a genetic experiment gone cuddly. When the God-playing scientist discovers his intelligence and talent for speech, he takes him home to his wife, and they raise him as their child. Things go well until Caesar sees his mother attacked, and when he kills her attacker, he lands at an Ape Conservatory, where he's tortured by humans and rejected by his own kind. But he slowly wins over the latter, and you can guess where it goes from there. It's worth noting that Faraci really digs the politically-charged script, and argues that it's a perfect way to restart the series.

Frankly, Apes is a series I never warmed to -- and there's too many sci-fi stories I'd love to see on the big screen before bringing back an old one. But I don't want to be answering for the rest of you. Do you want an Apes origin story, and a whole new franchise?

Kids rule the multiplex. That's why they're the most targeted audience and the most targeted consumers as far as Hollywood and concession suppliers are respectively concerned. But where would the kids be without their parents? Perhaps they'd still be watching movies, but maybe not at the cinema. To see a movie at the multiplex, they need a ride from their mom, or they require the companionship of their blockbuster-loving dad. Sure, things may be a little different today, but my experience of being a moviegoing child entailed a lot of assistance and encouragement from my mom and dad.

It's hard to decide which parent had greater influence on my cinephilia, especially since I only recently recognized my mother's contributions. My father was the one who usually took my brothers and me to the movies every other weekend, and each time we stayed with him we seemed to rent more videos than could be watched in a 48-hour period. Meanwhile my mother let us watch cable, including as much R-rated fare as HBO would broadcast. At a very, very young age I was already familiar with a lot of horror, violence, swearing, nudity and other "restricted" content that the MPAA was only OK with me seeing if it was OK with my "accompanying parent or adult guardian."

• Leonard Rosenman (1924-2008) - Oscar-winning composer of the scores for Barry Lyndon and Bound for Glory. He also received nominations for his scores for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Cross Creek. Other scores he composed include those for East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, RoboCop 2, Fantastic Voyage, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Race with the Devil, Hell is for Heroes, Hellfighters, A Man Called Horse, The Car, the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer and the 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. He died of a heart attack March 4, in Woodland Hills, California. (Variety)

• Carole Barnes (1944-2008) - British television newsreader who appears as herself in Shaun of the Dead. She died following a stroke March 8, in Brighton, England. (The Guardian)
• Sidney Beckerman (1920-2008) - Producer of Marathon Man, Kelly's Heroes, Joe Kidd, Red Dawn and Inchon. He also was president of Allied Artists, where he oversaw the production of Cabaret, and he was executive producer of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and The Sicilian. He died of cancer February 25, in Los Angeles. (Variety)
• John Bliss (1930-2008) - Actor who appears in A Face in the Crowd, Intolerable Cruelty, The Miracle Worker, The Thing with Two Heads, Imaginary Heroes and Art School Confidential. He died of complications related to an abdominal aneurysm February 28, in Los Angeles. (Variety)

I love reading about who was supposed to be in roles, especially those roles where you can't imagine any other actor doing it justice. Sometimes the casting changes are a positive change, and sometimes they're just teamed with actor's wrong choices. This story is one of the latter. While talking to MTV, Tim Roth discussed how he was tapped to play Professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, the role that became famous because of Alan Rickman. Why didn't he take the role? He wanted to be in Planet of the Apes. Ouch. Bad choice!

Roth said: "I was going to do both films. We rigged it so that I could fly back and forth. They figured out the schedule, but it just got to be overwhelming in my mind. my kids really liked the books. They were really into me doing it, but the idea of being an ape with Tim was too good." I wonder what his kids think about this decision, or if he regrets it at all, but isn't admitting it. If he had taken the role, he'd be closer to Snape's age in the books, which was late-30s. Instead, they went the Interview with the Vampire route (the super-old Armand) and got Rickman, who is currently 61.

Roth says he would have made his Snape "a very different guy." For sure! Can you imagine Roth as Snape? Would he have done an ever better job, or was the scheduling conflict a great gift to the series?

Over at Cracked.com, they've made a list of the top ten worst twist endings of all time. Obviously that list has a lot of spoilers, but I'm going to attempt to write this post without revealing any of them. Why? To make sure you go over there, of course. So, if you're not worried about ruining the endings to some movies you probably shouldn't see anyway, then head over and read the hilariously confusing explanations, or attempts at explanations, and/or how some endings don't make enough sense to bother with explanations. I will let you in on the titles of the movies, just in case you are interested in seeing any of them in the future and would like to go in spoiler free. The ten, in order from "least asinine" to "most asinine", are: Stay (2005); High Tension (2003); Signs (2002); Hide and Seek (2005) and Secret Window (2004), which tie for #7, because they're considered the exact same plot (is that spoiling it for you guys? probably -- oh well, I tried); The Forgotten (2004); Basic (2003); Perfect Stranger (2007); The Number 23 (2007); Planet of the Apes (2001); and The Life of David Gale (2003).

I haven't seen the number one movie, but I can't imagine it's worse than the others that I have seen, especially Planet of the Apes. Basically, I think Cracked.com considers it the worst because it stars Kevin Spacey, who also starred in The Usual Suspects, which pretty much, along with The Sixth Sense, obviously, got Hollywood on this crappy twist kick to begin with (He was also in Se7en, which had another so-so twist ending). Look at those films; they all came out between 2001 and 2007. And what was the most common twist? The main character did it. Either he or she has a split personality, or amnesia, or suffers from some other psychological ailment. Other idiotic yet easily written twists include: aliens did it; it's all a dream (as if you need to steal from Bob Newhart, come on!); and, in the fashion of Suspects, it's all just made-up stories. Personally, I'm upset to not see my least favorite twist ending. It involved a whole crop of great actors who just so happened to be explained as existing inside the imagination of some mental patient. That one had the split personality plus the dream plus the Suspects idea that none of what we watched is real. Can you name it?