Ape Lincoln: The Beauty and Terror of Planet of the Apes (2001)
As Palpatine would say: long have I waited to discuss this film! A film reviled for its infamously confusing ending, its gleeful presentation of punk apes and other humanistic ape-eries, and its attempt to convince us that Mark Wahlberg earned his way onto an expensive Air Force ape research space station while still getting away with calling apes monkeys every ten seconds. A film that shockingly made a decent chunk of change and almost got a sequel. It’s Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001)! Call it a remake or a reboot or a reinterpretation, Planet of the Apes has rightly earned its place as one part visual marvel and one part disastrous narrative — beauty and terror fused into one glorious package. Its position in the Planet of the Apes oeuvre has, alas, earned it additional and unfavorable comparisons to its more successful and narratively compelling predecessor and successor. Have the twenty years since this film’s release helped its perception?
Nostalgic Paris: Misery, Imagination, and Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris
Perhaps the most potent problem of our modern era is its obsession with nostalgia. In its least malignant form, nostalgia becomes an excessive love of art and fashion playfully removed from the socio-political conditions of its creation. In its most malignant form, nostalgia turns people into cult-like fascists who desire a return to a time that never really existed. Most nostalgia travelers rest somewhere between: fantasizing about going back to something that felt more familiar, even at the expense of the present. And then there’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which seems to relish in misery, imagination, and nostalgia at varying points and for varying purposes. What ultimately does the film say about nostalgia, then?
How to Be a Conservative Rabbit Tale: On Polly Horvath’s Mr. and Mrs. Bunny–Detectives Extraordinaire
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I requested a review copy of Polly Horvath’s then-new children’s novel, Mr and Mrs. Bunny–Detectives Extraordinaire (2012). The quirky premise — a pair of rabbits taking on the role of detectives (duh) — gave me some strong The Rescuers vibes, and being a bit of a closet animal fantasy nerd, I figured it was up my alley. And then I promptly forgot about it until now. You’re free to call me a monster. The story splits its time between Madeline, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, and the Grand Poobah, who is mostly there to be the menacing villain. For Madeline, island life with her extreme hippy parents, Mildred and Flo, is no picnic, especially when it comes to her education and desire to fit in with “normal society.” But when her parents are kidnapped by what appears to be a car full of foxes and she discovers a note demanding to know the whereabouts of her code-breaking uncle, she must set out to save them. Enter Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, a couple of country bunnies who move to a more bustling bunny valley and decide to try their hand at being detectives, which they do by simply wearing fedoras. When they stumble upon Madeline, who can curiously understand them, they set out in their clunky way to help her find her parents and put an end to whatever the foxes are really planning. And meanwhile still, the Grand Poobah, the leader of the foxes, just wants someone to decode a set of coded recipe cards so he can make bank in his rabbit and rabbit by-products facctory. Hi-jinks ensue.
Book Review: The Witches by Roald Dahl
If Dahl were alive today, he might be particularly bothered by the fact that the 1990 adaptation of his 1983 novel, The Witches, has had the same (or, more probably, slightly more) cultural staying power than the novel it loosely adapts. Indeed, Dahl is on record as having called the adaptation “utterly appalling,” yet for a disturbing interpretation to his work, the film remains a cultural touchstone. Until now, my only knowledge of The Witches was my early experiences with the film, a product more deeply terrifying than its quirky and twisted literary predecessor. And, so, like many readers of Dahl’s works, I have a different experience of this particular work, moving backwards from adaptation to the original with a clear sense of bias towards the former. The Witches is a curious work, both quirky and a tad twisted. The novel follows an unnamed English boy who falls under the care of his Norwegian grandmother after the untimely death of his parents. The grandmother regales her newfound charge with all sorts of tales, the favorite of which are her stories about being a retired witch hunter. When his grandmother falls ill, they vacation in a fancy hotel in Southern England to promote her recovery, which turns out to be the location for the annual meeting of witches. The boy, naturally, stumbles upon the witches, discovers their dastardly plot to rid England of all the pesky children, and suffers a tragic fate that drags his grandmother out of retirement. It’s a story of evil witches and myth, children turned into mice, and the unwavering stupidity of English high society.
A Tale of First Series: Heroism and Binaries in Record of Lodoss War
Heroism is something I find myself coming back to a lot in these especially trying times. After all, we hear about heroes from time to time, and yet so few of the stories we see are about heroic people. The hopelessness of that reality is hard to fathom even as I sit here contemplating a TV show that has little interest either in the ambiguous and oft-hidden heroisms of reality or the gritty heroisms of fantasy. Record of Lodoss War just isn’t that kind of show. For those that don’t know, the 13-episode OVA (original video animation) Record of Lodoss War (1990-1991) is the first anime adaptation of Ryo Mizuno’s novels of the same name, themselves based on transcripts (or “replays”) of RPG sessions created by the Japanese gaming company, Group SNE (co-founded by Mizuno). This particular anime production generally follows the plot of the first novel and loosely borrows elements from several others (primarily in its final five episodes). A later anime series (subtitled as Chronicles of the Heroic Knight) ran for double the first series’ length and attempted to retell the story through a more faithful adaptation. This background should give you an idea of the kind of story you’re walking into when you pop in those delicious RLW DVDs (or VHS tapes, if you’re so lucky to own them).
The A-Z Book Survey: Or, Now You’ll Know My Secrets
The blog adventure continues. Today, I’m taking on the A-Z Book Survey, which I found on The Perpetual Page-Turner blog (run by Jamie!). It’s an oldie, but since it appears on the Blog Challenge Project masterlist, I figured fun should override currency. Below, you shall find some vaguely amusing insights into my reading interests and habits. You may use this information for nefarious purposes if you so choose. Here goes: