Are the various apes CGI and voiced by actors?
It took me awhile to remember the connection to Nova in the 1968 movie.
I have no idea why the apes call humans echo. I haven’t seen the other movies.
They are all performed and voiced by actors and mime artists. They digitally track their movements and facial expressions with cameras and computers so that the performances you see by the CGI versions are very close to what they did on the film set.
I was scrolling through Prime Video today and ran across When We Went MAD!, a documentary on the history of MAD Magazine.
Not terribly earth-shattering or anything, but definitely a fun stroll down memory lane, featuring interviews with quite a few of the usual gang of idiots.
Recommended for those of a certain age (I know there are plenty of us here) who grew up with Alfred E. Neumann.
Thank you. I noticed the facial expressions were very life like.
Dawn of Planet Apes is also on Max. I’ll watch it soon. I’m watching out of order, but it really doesn’t matter.
I remember seeing ads and previews of the older films as they were released. I’m aware of the story arc.
Movies I’ve seen in the past few weeks:
- Frankenstein
- Nouvelle Vague
- Train Dreams
- Bugonia
- It Was Just an Accident
- The Mastermind
- A House of Dynamite
My favorite of these, by far, is It Was Just an Accident. It’s an Iranian film about a group of former political prisoners who are trying to decide what to do with the man who abused them while they were in captivity. I found it riveting from beginning to end. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in the last couple of years.
My second-favorite is Nouvelle Vague. It’s about the making of the French new wave film Breathless. I hadn’t seen Breathless in years, so I re-watched it before going to see Nouvelle Vague, and it really helped me understand the new movie. I went with a friend, and we both found Nouvelle Vague to be very funny in spots, though the rest of the audience didn’t laugh the way we did.
There’s a thread about Frankenstein, so I won’t go into detail here. Many people love the film, but I found it to be overwrought and sentimental (though I’ll give it credit for sticking fairly close to the original story by Mary Shelley).
I liked Bugonia for the most part, but it has a plot twist that, to me, feels like director Yorgos Lanthimos was playing a joke on the audience.
The plot summary I read about Train Dreams made it sound like a story about a man trying to make his fortune in the railroad business. That’s not what it’s about. It’s a study of a man living a hard life. The cinematography was beautiful, and I liked the acting and characters. I didn’t like the use of narration by a voice not belonging to any character in the film, as if someone were reading a book passage telling us what the protagonist was feeling.
The Mastermind is about a ne’er-do-well who organizes the theft of paintings from a museum. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that the title is ironic. I thought the movie was pretty good, but it’s slow-moving and ends without resolving anything. There’s a big gap between critical and audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes: critics love it, and audiences hate it. The pacing and lack of resolution are probably the reason.
I watched A House of Dynamite on Netflix (I saw all the others in the theater). It’s about events leading to a likely nuclear war. I thought it was OK, but it doesn’t break any new ground.
Nice write-up, thank you.
It’s been a couple weeks for me and I never even think about this movie. It’s a neat little experience, but not great and does not hold up long-term.
More interesting might have been, you know, starting with America’s missile missing its target, the rogue bomb/missile hitting Chicago, and how the USA responded.
This was like a prequel we didn’t ask for…to a movie that doesn’t exist.
Nobody 2 - 2025
Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Loyd
On Peacock
It is ok. I like the first movie better. I found Odenkirk’s character more obnoxious in the sequel. He has a big chip on his shoulder.
Sharon Stone plays the big bad villain and is way, way over acting. I can only hope it’s because of the director and script.
The big fight at the end has a satisfying pay off. Don’t fuck with a moma bear
Anyway, Nobody 2 is a silly bit of fun. There’s worse ways to spend a couple hours battling insomnia.
Drive Away Dolls had energy at the start, then it drifted into something less focused. Some movies work better as a tight idea than a full script. At least this one didn’t drag on forever, which makes it easier to shrug off and move on to the next pick.
I’ve watched most of Frankenstein but the wife decided she didn’t want to watch something gory and switched over to watch < checks notes > Narcos. 
Trying to slog through Deep Impact. Between Duvall’s smirking, and Tea Leone’s usual terrible acting, this thing is a snooze fest. The only person even trying is Morgan Freeman. Time to cut the cord.
Eddington. I have questions.
Imagine being the “lesser” giant asteroid flick of 1998 - with the better one being frickin’ Armageddon.
I didn’t like Frankenstein as much as I hoped to. We watched Last Train to Busan on a dare. Typical zombie fare until the last quarter. Then it gets touching.
All I took out of that film was some good comet smash special effects, and the opinion that, if we ever face a potential world-ending event, I want Morgan Freeman as our president.
I watched the 2021 West Side Story. I loved the sets, loved the cinematography, not so sure of the unsubtitled Spanish dialog. I understand the reasons, but…I don’t speak Spanish. So all that (I assume) clever dialog is wasted for me.
I have seen the 1961 version a couple times, but this one seemed like a whole different movie. There were whole sections that didn’t look familiar at all. The fact that it wasn’t, and actually followed the original film fairly closely, I guess means it just isn’t that memorable (to me).
I think I prefer the 1961 version.
And it’s odd: even watching the 1961 version, the visuals of tough street gangs dancing in unison doesn’t look wrong, but it does in the 2021 version. Not sure why.
Tonight’s Tuesday Night Classic in Phoenix was The Wizard of Oz. It holds up very well. There were many kids there. I wonder if any of them were seeing it for the first time. That would be cool, pass on the experience to the next generations.
I do, too. Even though it was filmed a bit more naturalistically, the earlier version seemed more real to me. The new version seemed more artificial somehow. Didn’t work for me.
I actually wondered if the cityscapes were all cgi.
It did have that feel…even if it wasn’t.
FreeForm had a Disney marathon, and we got to watch “Soul”- which is quite good, and “Strange World’ which is wonderfully imaginative and two weirdly wonderful “worlds”, but the theme is kinda meh.