Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Are we humans really humans or are we monkeys?

I've written about all the Planet of the Apes movies and I even named the 1968 original number 6 on my list of all-time favorite films. What is it that draws me to these films? 

For one, they have virtually all been really well done, with the Mark Wahlberg/Tim Burton 2001 edition being the only non-essential addition. CGI dehumanizes most movies that use it, but the Apes never lose their heart and their ability to overwhelm our senses.

The other thing is that apes and monkeys are just awesome. They obviously aren't humans but their similarities to humans is always present. Just about any story that places monkeys on or around the same level as humans has a good shot at gripping me. The premise - which some think is goofy -remains quite probably my favorite one in all of movie and pop-culture history.

But it's not just the premise. The big-budget, action-adventure parts wouldn't work nearly so well if there weren't exceptional characters and big sociological issues being dealt with. All the latest in the remarkably long-running series are prequels to the 1968 original, so we know somehow that humans will find a way to survive, if only in small pockets where they can escape the potential wrath of the apes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) set the scene: humans developed an Alzheimer's cure that leaked from the lab and made most humans dumber but somehow made apes smarter.

As for the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I loved it and the suspense and questions it asks at the end are a monumental setup for the inevitable collision course with the original's Charleton Heston-led storyline. 

Taking place several generations after War, a Coastal-dwelling and fierce clan of apes have twisted the meanings of the former great leader Caesar, who had dictated peace among the apes ("ape not kill ape") and also between the apes and humans. Nearly all apes have forgotten or never known about Caesar by this point. So the evil and power-hungry apes are exploiting that lack of historical knowledge and are now on a rampage to enslave any apes and humans who don't bow to their commands. 

However, there is one bird-loving, talented-climbing community of chimpanzees that, along the way, discover the true teachings of Caesar, and provide a formidable foe to the bad guys. Humans don't even appear in the film's first half, and when they do, we see they are witless packs who roam to survive and run from the occasional ape encounter. Monkeys have no reason to believe any of them can think let alone talk. But then along comes Nova (different from the Nova of the 1968 film, but apes have taken to calling many or all humans by that name), played by Freya Allan, who teams with the peaceful, bird-loving monkeys to not only outwit the evil apes but (hopefully?) revive humanity. Raka, an orangutan, is also key in relocating this bridge between humans and Caesar's apes.

In many ways, the chronology of the Apes movies doesn't much matter. It feels like humans (and apes) will keep repeating the failures and mistakes of our past, into time immemorial. We will keep fighting other tribes. We will keep believing unfactual things. We will keep getting diseases that some make it difficult to remedy. I think humanity's own current foibles is why the Planet of the Apes continues to be so awe-inspiring.

5 out of 5 stars

Why E.T. always makes me cry

I would probably be considered an R.E.M. Relatively emotional male. I've known this since at least 1982, when I first saw E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. This movie - my fourth favorite of all time - has consistently made me heavily cry each of the 15 to 20 times I've seen it.

The stretch from when the "man on the moon" arrives at Elliot's house - in hazmat suits - through until the end of the film pretty much has me in a mess. And it did again this week, when I watched it with my kids.

Digging deep to try to understand myself, here are some of the spots in E.T. that seem to dig themselves into my heartstrings:

• From the very start, E.T. is lost in a faraway land. He's scared and he's harmless. But people don't know that he's harmless, with even Elliot letting out a few good screams into the alien's face before becoming incredibly confortable with him. As we get to know E.T., we see his longing and pain to get reunited with his space buddies.
• I could also relate to Elliot's world. He was the kid brother like myself who not only had to deal with his older brother but with his dad having run away to Mexico with his new girlfriend. My parents also got divorced when I was about the same age as Elliot. Director Steven Spielberg too says he created the movie based on the imaginary friend he had after his own parents' divorce.
• The friendship between E.T. and Elliot is definitely heartwarming in and of itself, especially seeing how Elliot doesn't seem to have much of a network of friends for support like his older brother does.
• E.T.'s growing ability to speak and communicate with Elliot and his brother and sister is part of it, and when the alien begins to rapidly blurt out phrases like "E.T. phone home," it's a mixture of hilarious and heartwarming.
• It's odd that the government agents would contribute to my emotions, but they do add a layer of "bad guy" and some scariness to the story, as we have no idea what they might do to semi-defenseless little E.T.
• Of course, in the scenes when we know Elliot must let go of his new friendship, it is probably the hardest to take, even if we know deep down that their relationship has to end somehow.
• It can't be forgotten that all the bike riding by the kids harkens back to serious memories of childhood. Like the characters in the Valley outside Los Angeles, I rode everywhere around my town outside of St. Louis to get everywhere.
• Finally, the music by John Williams is big, awesome symphonic stuff similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars, and I connected it a lot with the music in Alfred Hitchcock films, many of which are my very favorites in cinemal history.

There now, I've said it. Want to make me cry? E.T.'s got all the ingredients necessary.

In Expanded Universe, Robert A. Heinlein is at his best when focused on sci-fi

Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is my 10th favorite novel (as of 2014) and possibly my favorite sci-fi novel. I haven’t actually read much else by him, although his novels The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers are high on my list. In the sci-fi genre especially, short stories are a great way to go because the premise is often the best thing about them, and that premise can sometimes ware thin over the course of a novel. Heinlein’s stories are surprisingly not presented in a lot of different ways. The Past Through Tomorrow is supposed to be a good collection. The only one I could find readily available online is Expanded Universe, available for free on the Hoopla library app. It includes short stories, essays, and novelettes.

Here are my summaries and reviews of only the five short stories from the collection:

"Life-Line" (1939): One Dr. Hugo Pinero gets invited by an associated insurance salesman to present information at the Academy of Science. Amidst jeers, he announces that he has discovered how to tell exactly how long each person will live. He proposes to a disbelieving group that he can figure out which one in the room will die soonest. He is forcibly removed, but several journalists f9low him and he invites them to come see his apparatus. He gets all the birth dates correct for the reporters. Then one named Luke asks him to predict a death. The doctor does the experiment but doesn’t want to say the results. Once it’s finally coaxed out of him, he reports Luke will die before tomorrow! A sign falls on him on Broadway while he’s headed back to the office to file his story. The story gets big and before we know it, Dr. Pinero is appearing in court, standing accused of being a common fortune teller by a life-insurance company that doesn’t like what he might do to its business. He convinces the court to let h8m carry out his experiments on a group from the Academy and the judge accepts. Back at his office, Pinero accepts a young couple planning to start a family and hoping to make the right decision. After testing them, he says his machine appears to not be working properly and detains them when they say they need to hurry to their next appointment. Eventually he can’t detain them any longer and he witnesses them getting run over by a speeding police car out his window. The Academy prepares to open the envelopes when they get news that Pinero has been murdered in his home and his machine destroyed at his office. They remember Pinero’s own envelope in in the batch, they open it, and it tells the exact correct time of his death. The Academy members then throw all their envelopes into a burning wastebasket, with the last words spoken being a concern that the tabletop has burned a bit. This is a fascinating take on the battle between powerful corporate interests and the unwanted truths that the scientific method can offer. 5 out of 5 stars.

"Successful Operation" (1940): This is an odd, very short story about a leader of the Nazis needing an operation. Nobody could perform it successfully other than a Dr. Lans. He and his family are imprisoned in the leader’s concentration camp. The doctor barters a deal of freedom and payment for doing the procedure. The leader finally agrees. The transplant patient is a young man from the camp. He thinks he will be awarded freedom somehow but ends up be8ng sent back to the camp. The doctor and his family survive. So too does the Nazi. But one of the stipulations is that the operation take place outside of the country. The doctor’s family is placed in a luxury hotel. Then several people of the unnamed country enter and kill the Nazi. I like the sentiment, but it is a pretty minor story, albeit clever. 4 out of 5 stars.

"Searchlight" (1962): This is another minor and very short piece “Blind Betsy, child genius of the piano,” getting lost in her ship while doing a USO tour of the Moon. The lunar command will do anything to find her, knowing it doesn’t have much time, so it turns a laser beam into sounds so Betsy can pinpoint which note she hears as they scan it over her location. She is discovered and rescued at the end, in this story Heinlein wrote to appear alongside a Hoffman Electronics ad in Scientific American and other magazines of the time. 3 out of 5 stars.

"A Bathroom of Her Own" (1980): This is more politics than the regular Heinlein sci fi. The war has ended and there’s a significant housing shortage. A woman decides to run for the local council because she’s sick of sharing one bathroom with a large house of family. A man running against her discovers she’s a real threat - even though she’s a one-issue candidate - because she’s backed by the local machine. The man is losing but the woman has been disillusioned, realizing she really is backed by the corrupt machine. The man decides he’s going to drop out and help her run for office without the machine. She wins and he becomes her field secretary. She gets married and moves out of the full house into one with two bathrooms. They unavoidably are the new machine in town. It may be accurate as to how politics works, and it may be correctly cynical on the topic, but the story isn’t very exciting. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

"On the Slopes of Vesuvius" (1980): This is a tidy little tale about a few scientists who walk into a bar in Manhattan. It is somewhat predictable but still left my jaw dropped at the end. [Spoiler alert] The men start talking about the atom bomb and it's revealed that one of them works on the bomb. Even though many years have passed since the Cold War began in earnest, it's still an issue, and these men tell the bartender that the bomb is very easy for any number of actors to launch, if they so choose. He sort of nervously laughs them off, as they talk about how easy New York City is as a target, but then leaves the bar suddenly and takes a train out of the city. He begins to think about how his ill cat needs to be fed and other everyday tasks that he needs to perform back at home and exits the train to head back, thinking that he has acted irrationally. As he starts to head back, a mushroom cloud blasts upward from where NYC used to be. 4 out of 5 stars.

M3GAN mostly succeeds at being creepy and fantastical, with a little horror and suspense sprinkled in

M3GAN, which stands for Model 3 generative android, was probably the top horror movie on my list to watch over the past several months. And while it's an interesting sci-fi tale, with several gory scenes, it's pretty tame in terms of horror. That said, while a little creepy, it's a movie I think most people would enjoy checking out on Amazon Prime.

Here are some interesting things about the production:

1. I was wondering if the doll was an actual actor or CGI. But M3GAN was played by two actors: Amie Donald, who provided the doll's body movements, and Jenna Davis, who provided the doll's voice. 
2. Donald is a 12-year-old professional dancer who represented New Zealand at the Dance World Cup in 2019. This explains some of the wild dance and gymnastic-like moves by the doll.
3. M3GAN continues a nice turn for Girls' actor Allison Williams, known as the daughter of former NBC News anchor Brian Williams and who previously starred in Get Out, another movie that dabbles in horror but leans more towards making a statement on the human condition, in ways very similar to M3GAN actually. 
4. The movie was filmed in Auckland, New Zealand. The producers wanted to go there because of the tax breaks, the government support, the highly qualified film crew in place there, the beautiful scenery, and also becuase the producers admired the country's excellent COVID-19 response.
5. The filmmakers definitely have powerhouse resumes.
1. Director Gerard Johnstone is known for his work on the horror comedies Housebound, which looks like it's worth watching, and What We Do in the Shadows (I thought the TV show was pretty good but haven't seen the movie; incidentally, I's currently watching season 1 of True Blood, which is goofy great, but I may only have the headspace for one form of vampire entertainment at the moment).
2. Producer Jason Blum is the founder of Blumhouse Productions, which is known for producing really good horror movies such as the before-mentioned Get Out and The Babadook.
3. The script was written by James Wan and Ingrid Bisu. Wan is a well-known horror director who has directed movies such as Saw and The Conjuring. Bisu is an actress who has appeared in movies such as The Quiet Place Part II and Malignant.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Jurassic Park, Ethan Canin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald Present 3 Can't-Miss Stories

I've been doing a good job of getting back to reading novels lately after a few pretty sparse years in which raising two young kids has tested my ability to keep two eyes open for too long on the written page.

Before I dig into an epic I've been trying to get at for many years, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, I've recently finished West of Sunset, Jurassic Park, and A Doubter's Almanac.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is obviously the most classic of these. Somewhere between horror and science fiction, the book is a page turner that is better than any of the four films in the series, all of which I've since watched with my 8-year-old Jackson, who loves them. The book has more detail about the dinosaurs and several scenes that are left out of the movie, like at the start when a little girl gets pecked apart by mini reptiles on the mainland of Costa Rica away from the island where the human-created creatures are supposed to be contained.
5 out of 5 stars

My favorite contemporary author is the Iowa- and Michigan-based Ethan Canin, and his novel For Kings and Planets is still my favorite book of the past 20 years. His new one, A Doubter's Almanac, is an epic and every bit as much of a page-turner as Jurassic Park. But it's gripping because it explores the dynamics of a family over generations that has a gift (or is it?) for mathematics. Nobody is better at nuanced characterization than Canin, and this touching story about how we never truly know all that much about our parents' lives is no exception. Not as great as For Kings and Planets, but as good as his most recent, America America, and a must-read.
5 out of 5 stars

Keeping the string of winners going is West of Sunset. I've always struggled to read The Crack Up and anything else at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life, but Stewart O'Nan makes it easy to dig into and transplant ourselves into the final days of Fitzgerald, which is a fascinating and sad place to be. Still devoted to his wife Zelda and daughter Scottie but separated by the country, the author hunkers down in Los Angles to reap increasingly disappointing returns on his movie scriptwriting. His health is failing as famous characters like Ernest Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart drift in and out of his life. This is impossible-to-put-down fictional history.
4.5 out of 5 stars

Mad Max defies the odds to become a classic

For one, it's pretty crazy to think Star Wars: The Force Awakens won't even be considered the best sci-fi movie of 2015.

That much can be surmised by last week's bounty brought in by Mad Mad: Fury Road at the Academy Awards.

I wasn't excited to see Mad Max, but people kept talking it up so I watched it on the small screen. Even though it was billed as one long chase scene (and those are usually the least interesting parts of any movie too me, even if a bunch of cool stuff does happen), this is no doubt a stone-cold classic.

The cinematography from the deserts of Namibia, the amazing makeup of the unbelievably creative characters, and the action are all jaw droppingly entertaining. Even the story takes shape in what would seem like a lost cause of a film for plotting.

Mad Mad: Fury Road is like one of my favorite movies from the 1970s, The Warriors, in that the main gang tries to make it past a series of meaner and badder gangs on a path to survival. For a film that took Director George Miller (of Happy Feet fame, go figure) nearly a decade-and-a-half to complete, which is usually a very bad sign, this one defies all.

5 out of 5 stars

Gravity is Surprisingly Good, Like a Better, Modern 2001: A Space Odyssey

The benefit of having a 103-degree fever this week was that I had the time while lying in bed to watch Gravity, which turned into an unexpected treat.

It's as if 2001: A Space Odyssey all of a sudden had interesting, deep characters in the form of the almost-always-great Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. They get caught up in a debris cloud that results from Russian missile strikes on a satellite and their NASA Explorer mission in space goes horribly wrong.

The film is absolutely captivating. It should have beat American Hustle for best picture of 2013. but at least Alfonso Cuoron claimed best director. (12 Years a Slave maybe should have been them both.)

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Sinatra: All or Nothing At All are also two HBO documentaries worth watching. The Scientology movie seems like it could have been a little better, but the weird cult-like sect remains riveting as always (**** out of ***** stars). The Sinatra flick is best when it covers the Reprise and Rat Pack years (**** out of ***** stars).

Going to Space With Dogs and Robber Barons

Robert A. Heinlein is one of my favorite authors, based pretty much solely on Stranger in a Strange Land (#10 on my top novels of all time list) and to a lesser extent Starship Troopers.

So it was finally time to delve into his shorter works, published in book form for the first time in 1992 in a collection of short stories, novellas, speeches, and tributes entitled Requiem and Tributes to the Grand Master.

The short story Requiem leads off the book and is the sequel to Heinlein's novel The Man Who Sold the Moon. It is the story of businessman Delos David Harriman, who is obsessed with being the first man on the moon. And further, he wants to own it. Published in 1951, Heinlein wasn't too far off from what panned out in real history in that Harriman's company succeeds in getting the first rocket to the moon in 1978. But he himself is not part of the first colonizing effort.

That is where Requiem takes over the story. The "tycoon and latter-day robber baron" is now very old and nearing death, and has still not personally reached the moon because his business partners always insisted they needed him on Earth. Once his business contract expires, he is no longer fit enough to pass the health tests required to travel to the Moon, so he enlists some junk spacemen at a carnival in Kansas City to illegally rocket him there. Harriman reaches the Moon and quickly dies on it.

Requiem is surely a satisfying end of the story for those who have read The Man Who Sold the Moon, but it is a fairly minor piece otherwise.

Where this collection picks up is with the novella Tenderfoot in Space. Charlie is a Boy Scout who loves his dog Nixie more than anything in the world. He even works hard to get the pooch some status in his troop.

The story opens as the boy is being questioned by a policeman who knows he is running away because he is unhappy that his family is preparing to leave on a colonization ship to Venus. And the family doesn't have enough money to pay Nixie's passenger fee.

Charlie returns home and, after much family drama, it's agreed that Nixie will be flash frozen, which greatly reduces his chances of surviving the nearly year-long rocket ride to Venus, but it's enough of a plan to satisfy Charlie. Nixie ends up surviving after they resuscitate him on Venus. He thrives there and even gets accepted as an honorary Scout in Charlie's new Earth-like troop.

Heinlein's setting description is exceptionally fictional, as the real Venus is filled with clouds, deserts, and volcanoes. The Venus described in the story contains a blanket of forests that often threaten to swallow up the colony of Earthlings.

Charlie becomes friends with a fellow Scout who was born on Venus and knows his way around. Towards the end of the story, the two boys and Nixie get disoriented in the vast forest. Nixie helps them find their way out, and the heroism he is awarded for at the end of the tale goes to show that Charlie's dad had been wrong in being so difficult about agreeing to bring the dog into space in the first place.

Requiem: ***1/2 out of ***** stars

Tenderfoot in Space: ****1/2 out of ***** stars

Guardians of the Galaxy Forgets to Be as Awesome as It Should Be

I miss a lot of superhero movies these days. How could you possibly not? But I was genuinely excited about the offbeat and obscure Guardians of the Galaxy.

Unfortunately, it ends up mostly being a cheap knock-off of Star Wars (which is certainly better than a cheap knock-off of most things). Root is a mix of Chewbacca and C3PO. Peter Quill aka Star-Lord is a mix of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Zamora is Princess Leia. I don't know what the raccoon Rocket is. And Drax is the Thing meets Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Quill (played by the always-likable Chris Pratt) is the only one who really gets a backstory. His mother dies back on Earth and he didn't give her a proper goodbye. After aliens abduct him, the only thing he has to hold on to his Earth family with is a Walkman with the songs of the 70s that his mom loved, like "Hooked On a Feeling" and "Come and Get Your Love." The soundtrack, needless to say, is one of the best things about the film.

The humor works most of the time and the bad guys are also a hoot to watch, especially the Star Wars-like Ronan and blue-skinned Yondu. The backstory on the characters and the plot of everyone chasing a silly little orb around the galaxy are where Guardians falters. By the second half, the story really drags down the entire production.

A few seemingly easy fixes and this one could have been a classic.

*** out of ***** stars

"Harry Potter for Grown-Ups" Successfully Explores Characters Amidst Magic

Where I was frequently a little bored recently reading the first Harry Potter book, The Magicians is, as the New York Times put it, "crudely labelled as Harry Potter for adults." As a result, I liked this tale of kids at magician school quite a bit more.

Authored by Lev Grossman and set to become a series on SyFy, it's about Quentin Coldwater, a young man in Brooklyn who is about to go to college when he is swept up to attend Brakebills, a school for magicians in Upstate New York.

The best part of the novel is Quentin's relationships with his friends in Brooklyn and then at the school. I didn't care that much about some of the magical and fantasy stuff, although most of it is very creative. But I was gripped by what would happen to Quentin and his friends.

Quentin is lumped with a talented batch at Brakebills called the Physical Kids (because they can manipulate physical forces). They form bonds through heavy socializing, and Quentin becomes romantically involved with Alice, who has powerful magical skills. Eliot, Josh, and Janet round out the troupe to fly as birds to Brakebills South in Antarctica for a semester before graduating and all living together in debauchery in Manhattan. The end of the novel sees the group being joined by fellow Brakebills alumni and punk fighter Penny as they slip into the magical world of Fillory that they had all read about as children.

In Fillory, they discover The Beast that had traumatically killed one of their fellow students during class at Brakebills is Martin Chatwin, the protagonist of the Fillory children's stories. It turns out that the popular fictional books had not been fiction at all. And Martin's younger sister Jane had been pulling strings for years to find someone who could kill Martin, finally finding Quentin and his friends, all of which disillusions Quentin. After leaving Fillory, he works for a time at an investment firm, and again, eternally dissatisfied, goes back to Fillory as the book ends.

I'm pretty excited to read the followups to this 2009 book, 2011's The Magician King and 2014 The Magician's Land.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Non-Flashy Sci-Fi Her Offers Endlessly Sad Portrait of Love

Her was nominated for best picture at the Oscars last year and rightfully lost to 12 Years a Slave.

Still, I really love the concept by music-video-director-examplar Spike Jonze. The classic sci-fi plot of machine overtaking man is taken to fascinating psychological extremes, with Scarlett Johansson's playful and sexy voice as the operating system that the weird and exotic Juaquin Phoenix falls for hard.

The two turn in wonderful performances, as does Juanquin's sympathetic friend played by Amy Adams and the hilariously clueless Chris Pratt as one of his colleagues.

The way we all stare at our cellphones as we walk down the street makes this story seem like a near-future possibility. The massive and futuristic Los Angeles setting is also captivating, as are the goofball 50s pants worn by most of the male characters. That Phoenix basically falls in love with his cell phone/desktop is endlessly sad, but it is indeed a bit of a stinging metaphor for our burgeoning relations with our technology over the past 20 years or so.

Her moves a little slowly in places and sometimes unfolds like a long music video. Luckily, Arcade Fire's soundtrack treatment is gorgeous. For fans of Jones' works like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, and for lovers of non-special-effects sci-fi, this flick is a can't miss.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Yes, We Could Get More Stupid, and Idiocracy Shows Us How

It's believed that Mike Judge's 2006 sci-fi comedy Idiocracy was released in far fewer theaters because of the way companies like Starbucks and Carl's Jr. were portrayed in it.

Fox, the distributor, allegedly didn't like that its advertisers were being treated unkindly. This is probably just one of many reasons to, even now, eight years later, watch the movie, which runs from time to time on cable TV.

I caught it on Comedy Central last night and thought it was hilarious. Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph play an average soldier and a prostitute respectively who get shipped 500 years into the future in a military experiment gone awry.

Once there, they encounter an America that has seen its gene pool deteriorate to the point where nobody is literate and people sit on their toilet loungers watching TV shows that make today's reality television look like Lawrence of Arabia.

Someone could easily say Idiocracy is, like what the Washington Post called the musical comedy I wrote with Dan Sullivan called Wiener Sausage: The Musical!, "tasteless and popular." But you can't even really say that. Sure, it's tasteless, but not many people saw it. Over the years, it has built a cult following and is becoming relatively more popular.

But if you're a fan of other Judge offerings, like Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, and Extract, go quickly to your DVR to schedule Idiocracy.

**** out of ***** stars

"The Apes of Wrath" Sets a High Monkey Bar

Planet of the Apes. Great Apes, by author Will Self. King Kong. Grape Ape. Curious George. Heck ... Donkey Kong.

Let's face it. I'm a monkey boy. I love apes. So the new short fiction anthology by Richard Klaw and Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt called The Apes of Wrath is for me.

It starts slow with "The Ape-Box Affair" and "Evil Robot Monkey," but takes off in a big way from there.

"Tarzan's First Love" comes from the sixth book of Tarzan tales by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It tells the tale of Tarzan, a boy of German royalty who has been raised in the jungle by apes. He falls in love with ape Teeka. He ends up letting Teeka go to the ape Taug because it seems more natural, but Tarzan's struggles identifying his own origins are fascinating.

The book ramps up with the highlight of what I've read so far, "Rachel in Love," by Pat Murphy, from 1991. Rachel is a chimp who lives with a human neurologist whose daughter has died. The doctor figures out a way to save his dead daughter's brainwaves and transpose them onto the chimp's brain.

Rachel struggles with wanted to be a blonde-haired little girl again, but she also recognizes that her gnarled, hairy hands will never allow it. Her father's lab is raided one day and she is captured and taken to a place where experiments are performed on monkeys. She is expected to mate with an ape named Johnson but instead falls in love with the drunken janitor at the facility. When that goes wrong, she and Johnson escape and have to make their way back across a barren dessert to get to her father's abandoned house.

"Her Furry Face" by Leigh Kennedy entails Orangutan Annie learning sign language for her keeper Douglas. The two develop a deep relationship that seems to wear on Douglas' girlfriend Therese. He is no longer in love with Therese, at least in part because he fantasizes about having a love affair with Annie, even going so far as to try to have sex with Annie. It is a disturbing read, and Annie goes from being an incredibly learned monkey who writes a published children's story to no longer caring about her bizarre craft.

Can't wait to read the rest of this anthology sometime soon.

Tarzan's First Love ****1/2 out of ***** stars
Rachel in Love ***** out of ***** stars
Her Furry Face **** out of ***** stars

Year Zero is a Loss for the Aliens and the Music Industry

Year Zero by Rob Reid may seem to have a far-out premise to some, but, upon starting the book, I considered it pretty great. Aliens discover Earth's amazing catalog of rock music and attempt to acquire rights to it all.

Many reviewers have compared it to the classic Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is certainly one of the best sci-fi novels of all-time. And Reid's style and language tricks are indeed very similar to those of Hitchhiker author Douglas Adams. But the comparisons end there.

Year Zero begins promisingly. The main characters are established and the reader starts to feel a connection with them.

The somewhat-uninteresting aliens visit Nick Carter, a low-level lawyer whom they mistake for a former Backstreet Boy. Ever since they heard the Welcome Back, Kotter theme, they have been obsessed with Earth's rock music. Now they have a plan they present to Carter that they believe will help them acquire all that music. Nick realizes that this may be a good way to undermine his awful bosses and win a girl that is way out of his league.

I loved all that part, but then the second half of the book wallows in a mess of navigating through an unnecessarily complicated inter-galactic journey that never really seems to go much of anywhere. The ending completes the mess when (I don't feel too bad in telling you) Bill Gates is some kind of alien and somehow behind it all. Even that sounds like it could be a somewhat interesting premise, but Reid's story is so convoluted that I had lost the ability to care by that point.

** out of ***** stars

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury: The Most Backwards Futurist Around

Mashable had an incredible story today on the death of one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury. The article details some amazing anti-technology and anti-futurist aspects of the sci-fi writer's complex worldview.

“I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

[He only agreed] to publish Fahrenheit 451 in ebook form in late 2011. When Yahoo approached him in 2009 about publishing a book through its properties, Bradbury reacted violently. “You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere. All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don’t want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”

In a 2000 interview, Bradbury appeared wildly repulsed by — and, in some respects, ignorant of — the way the Internet works. “This thing is bound to fail,” he said. “Napster’s out there, stealing everyone blind. They’re stealing people’s work. They should be put in jail, all of them. All this electronic stuff is remote, removed from you. The Internet is just a big scam the computer companies cooked up to make you get a computer into every home.”

Pretty incredible stuff from a man who wrote about the end of books in Fahrenheit 451, the exploration of Mars in The Martian Chronicles, and the fulfillment of childhood desires in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Controlling Matt Damon Through The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau's weakness may be that it doesn't make us care enough about the two main characters in love. However, we know that Matt Damon and Emily Blunt need each other's love more than they respectively need the presidency of the United States and dancing glory.

That adds just enough of the human touch to the techie action that attempts to swoon these two lovebirds apart from each other. And the doors that lead the couple throughout different parts of New York City and the clues Anthony Mackie, one of the members of the Adjustment Bureau's team, gives to Damon along the way make for a very cool, suspenseful, and mysterious film that is well worth a couple of hours of your time.

The movie is loosely based on "Adjustment Team," a short story by one of my favorite sci-fi writers, Philip K. Dick. Damon plays a hot politician rather than the real-estate salesman portrayed in the original story. The film's ending is not quite as fulfilling as I had hoped, but the intriguing premise develops nicely throughout and we end up satisfyingly learning enough about how certain people are being controlled by powerful forces.

**** out of ***** stars

Uh Oh! Here Comes the Apes

In keeping with the monkey theme of my last post, the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a suspenseful and riveting movie that makes all the right steps, unlike the awful Markey Mark Apes' remake of 10 years ago.

Rupert Wyatt is a newcomer director who offers deft touches, primarily the slow buildup of emerging emotions and human-like understanding of Caesar and the other apes held captive by ruthless (and stupid) animal-control officers. I actually think this method may not sit very well with many audience members in the ADD era, as seemed evident in the theater where Dan and I saw this. One person even inappropriately laughed when the life drained out of one of the key ape's eyes.

The music (not nearly as great as that of the 1968 original, but still really effective), the homage to Charleton Heston that one must be quick to catch, and the human and deep humanity of the monkeys are just a few of the elements that make this a very worthy introduction to a series of movies set for release as prequels to the '68 classic.

James Franco also does a good job as a driven San Francisco scientist who has committed his life to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which has ravaged his father, played by John Lithgow. His story, and that of Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto, is established strongly in the movie's first half, before the second half becomes devoted to the apes.

And I also like that the beginning of what appears to be a long-term war for supremacy between the two species does not dominate the movie and does not threaten to dampen the excellent character-building and socio-political setup that is sure to be a focus of future installments in this series. It will be interesting to see how the series creators will reconcile how Rise of the Planet of the Apes ends with how 1968's Planet of the Apes begins, when a nuclear bomb has killed off most humans.

There is already talk that Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and plays Caesar here, could be up for an Academy Award. That should tell you just how touching and vital the revolutionary ape's performance is, whether he is nominated or not.

**** out of ***** stars

Time to Take a "Stand" With Graphic Novels

Being a former English-lit undergrad and a voracious reader of novels, I never thought the day would come when it would take multiple months to get through a simple Oprah Book Club book (I may never get through Jonathan Franzen's Freedom!).

But such is fatherhood. In fact, I just canceled my New Yorker subscription after a strong 16-year run. I'll still read what I can of that magazine online. But I've really discovered the perfect format for great stories for the free-time challenged: graphic novels.

I bought a few recently. The first one I finished was one based on the first part of Stephen King's The Stand, which was probably the best novel I read before turning 16.

The Stand: Captain Trips, from the famed Marvel company, tells the tale of several Americans who mysteriously survive a killer virus, popularly referred to as "Captain Trips." While everyone else dies, they try to make sense of what is happening. The premise provides perfect drama, and I just ordered the next parts of this series.

Anyone half-way interested in a killer apocalypse tale should find this exquisitely drawn book. Better yet, read the 1,000-page-plus novel first, then read the comic (1,000 pages! That would take this proud papa half-a-year to get through).

***** out of ***** stars

Do Large Pigs Have the Ability to Control Us All?

As noted here previously, I've begun reading a collection of Phillip K. Dick's classic sci-fi short stories.

"Beyond Lies the Wub," from 1952, is one of his most famous. And surely one of his most pointed.

A spaceship crew captures a large pig-like beast called a "wub" who has the power of sophisticated conversation. The wub even alludes to a possible talent for mind-control. One crew member protests when the captain disregards this nonsense and demands that they kill and eat the wub.

After the captain takes some bites, he asks the horrified crew member to continue the conversation they were having about the travels of Odysseus. The only thing? The crew member had been having that conversation with the wub, not the captain.

I haven't researched what points Dick was attempting to make, but there are several ways to look at it. Ambiguity is always my favorite trait of the best science fiction. It makes you stop and think. In this case, it makes you think about how easily others can take control of our minds and may even be a statement on the pig-headedness of some humans insisting in conquering other species and being closed-minded to the obvious signs of their needs.

If these stories continue in this direction, I'll be adding Phillip K. Dick to my shelf of favorite sci-fi authors, alongside Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Douglas Adams.

****1/2 out of ***** stars