Why Planet of the apes is horrifying and excellent.

So I'm excited for Rise, if you're a true Planet of the Apes fan, that's all you call it, Rise. This movie will fall in the continuity of the other five movies and depict the initial beginning of the super intelligent apes.

A friend of my father's said that Planet of the Apes was popular when he was a kid because it was one of the only sci-fi things they had, but I beg to differ. Planet of the Apes was and is popular because it horrifies and intrigues due to cultural establishments.

To understand why Planet of the Apes is popular, we need to go back to the late 1400's. Why are the late 1400's important to Planet of the Apes? I'm getting to it. The grinding stone and the printing press were both invented in that period, and that's important because then serfs didn't have to work as hard, because the grinding stone did their work for them, so many of them ran away and eventually became the middle class. With the printing press, they could formulate and spread their ideas. In other words, a group of people was created that had nothing better to do than learn about and criticize the world around them. This is what the layman calls the Renaissance.

During the Renaissance, four values arose among western civilization, the most important one was humanism. Humanism, put simply is the belief that humans are the cat's pajama's and the bee's knees and anything that says otherwise gets made into coats and furniture.

Whether you know it or not, humanism and the other Renaissance values still have an astronomical effect on modern culture, so people still think that nothing can beat them. A perfect example of humanism in culture is Independence Day.

So when Planet of the Apes came out, suddenly people were exposed to humans being turned in to slaves and pets, and apes, a species we thought we had mastered, dominate them. People, thinking this was impossible, were intrigued by the concept, went to the movie, then were horrified by the startling possibility.

So there you have it, we have Guttenburg and Martin Luther to thank for Planet of the Apes.

The Fretless Bass Reviews: Captain America: The First Avenger

Let's start this review by saying this is my 50th post on my blog! (party horn noise) This is exciting, but there's really no way to make the review more exciting except mentioning that in the beginning.

Captain America is the last Marvel installment before the Avengers movie in 2012 (appocageddon can wait until after that and the Dark Knight Rises.) Needless to say, it had to be darn good to build up psych. It pulled it off fabulously.

The story is set in the final years of World War Two, Democracy was on the way up, Hitler had a fire under his ass, and more Americans were enlisting than ever; except Steve Rogers, who's five feet tall, and has breathing issues. A German-American doctor gives him a chance to enlist and makes him the first test subject of the super soldier serum, which grants him peak physical and mental ability.

As far as story goes, it's above par for the super hero course. After his injection of the serum, you would think they would send Cap right to Adolph Hitler's front door to roundhouse kick his face with the power of democracy. Instead, they make him a show-boy that sells war bonds, until he disobeys orders so that he might free P.O.W's. The best thing I have to say for this movie is that it pulls off a full blown musical number in the war bond selling scene. That's right, a superhero movie had a musical number.

The real gem in the movie is all the easter eggs they throw in to appease the fans like me and my dad. It would be too difficult to name them all, but if you read Cap's wiki before watching, it would make watching more entertaining.

The other interesting thing they did was how they handled Buckey. In the comics, he was Cap's pre-teen sidekick, but that wouldn't fly in the gritty realism of spandex/leather clad World War Two, so they made him Rogers' best friend who was, until the experiment, always tougher and stronger than Steve. Throughout the movie, an envious dynamic develops between the characters, which I'm sure will come back to haunt Cap when Buckey returns as Winter Soldier (LOOK IT UP!).

I would like to take this time to talk about how the movie is in 3D. You will recall from previous posts that I think 3D is unnecessary to make movies good, and Captain America proves it. This movie would have been unaffected by being in 2D, I stopped noticing the 3D after a while, and it added nothing to the experience. Maybe 3D draws in a specific crowd, but if I were marketing movies, that's the crowd I would want to keep as far away from my movies as possible, mostly because of the smell and noise because that crowd is made up of ten year old children, and Avatar fans.

At the end of the day, (literally, I'm writing this at 9:40) Captain America is worth seeing, and worth buying on DVD, and that's just about the highest praise you can give a movie.