Some Quality Time with John Waters.

John. Waters. Christmas. Interview.

At the movies: Rise of The Planet of The Apes.

It's rather vindicating when a good movie becomes a big hit. Especially during the summer. So here, then, are my abbreviated thoughts on the newest entry in the Planet of the Apes saga.

Also, as a special bonus, here's the abandoned beginning for the piece, which isn't even really about Rise..., but rather the thing about the Burton PotA that I don't think anyone has really addressed. But check it out, because without your unspoken validation, I am nothing.


The thing nobody remembers about Tim Burton's maligned 2001 remake of Planet of The Apes is that it was the last time he stayed true to his original mission statement as a filmmaker- embracing the strange and unusual. The beauty of its shocker ending wasn't its supposedly clever tweak of the original's shocking reveal, but rather that it punished the Artist formerly known as Marky Mark's character because of his unwillingess to expand his horizons. He could have lived a weird and extraordinary new life on the planet of the apes, and instead he went heroing it back across space to earth because it was safe and it was where all his stuff and ideology was. Well, joke's on you, you can't have that earth back...

Unfortunately, when society as a whole rejected the film (in spite of shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in tickets), it must have flipped a switch in Burton's brain, because next came Big Fish and that was it. A career built on embracing the strange and unusual now decided it was time to forgive Daddy and coast on the goodwill people had for Johnny Depp. With the exception of Sweeney Todd, it's been a dire spiral.

All of that comes into play in the way that Rupert Wyatt's Rise of The Planet of The Apes defiantly embraces the strange and unusual at every step of the way. Our perspectives are linked with the apes from the beginning of the film, and when humans become part of the story, it is as adjuncts to where the real deal is happening.

At the movies: Pineapple Express

Director David Gordon Green has been making great films since his 2000 debut George Washington, and he’s been crafting a thoughtful and distinctive career making smaller, contemplative films about American lives that we don’t often see. So it’s intriguing to see what happens when he, having already hewn out a distinctive approach to character and visual mood, joins forces with the armies of current comedy godhead Judd Apatow. The end result is a scruffy and beautiful stoner amble through genres past, capable of combining bleary-eyed 70s guffaws with car-chasing, property-exploding 80s-styled thrills.

It’s a remarkable achievement as a film, if for nothing else than letting James Franco be funny again. Everything since Freaks and Geeks has found our man James stuck in brooding mode (one of the pleasures of the overly-maligned Spiderman 3 being Franco’s turn during Harry Osborne’s goofy amnesiac scenes), so to find him let loose with comedic gold like drug dealer/future civil engineer Saul Silver is pure pleasure. Star Seth Rogen gets to work his flusterable everydude thing, and that’s all well and good, but the film belongs to Franco and costar Danny McBride. As Red, a middleman who ties Saul to shot caller/murderer Ted Jones (Gary Cole, looking like he’s ready to file some TPS reports on the world’s ass), McBride hearkens back to his bigscreen debut (as Bust-Ass in Green’s 2001 masterpiece All The Real Girls) and banishes all memory of his near-unwatchable ‘comedy’ The Foot Fist Way from earlier this summer.


Pineapple Express is literally the specific strain of marijuana that ties process server Dale Denton (Rogen) to the scene of a murder. The plot, courtesy of Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg (who wrote last year’s Superbad) is a meandering thing that spans seventy or so years, a lazy-assed conspiracy, and a small-scale drug war, but one that nevertheless ranks with 2003’s Shaun of the Dead in its insights into the vicissitudes of male friendships. The ace in the hole with this film, though, is the visual grace that Green and his ace cinematographer Tim Orr bring to the proceedings- this is easily the best-looking film that has ever emerged from Apatow Productions. Here’s to more fruitful collaborations along this line, and much respect to all involved parties for maintaining their respective integrities.