Meanwhile, Over at Procrastacritic

In October, I posted another review from the archives, this time about Rocky. Then I delved into TV, with an episode from the original Hawai`i Five-O. Somewhere along the line, my unhealthy fascination with Joe Dirt came to the surface. Now, I've completed another TV-land review, about the human denizens (and one robot) of Lost In Space. 

All these and of course delvings into Hestopia appear at the Procrastacritic blog, and I am too lazy to copy them here. 

Omigod Man

Aside from the online POTA (Planet of the Apes) crowd, almost nobody looks to me for film criticism. Maybe because I know so little, and don't know any of the names to drop or references to make.  Also, I like to review movies way after they come out; I'm averaging nearly 4 decades after release, for I am The Procrastacritic.

In 1970 (+/-3), Heston embarked on a trio (plus the POTA sequel, if you wanna count that, which I don't) of sci-fi flicks, each set in an earthly future rendered dark and dystopian by human folly: the Hestopian Trilogy. Planet of the Apes kicked it off, and Soylent Green finished it. In my usual shiftless way I arrive last at the middle: Omega Man, a post-apocalyptic costume drama. Like the others in this triptych of hubristic humanity gone awry, OM returns to certain aspects of the species Homo hestonii: his journey from adventurous gay man to abusive heterosexual, pathological criminalism, and race relations.

We begin with the decked out in sweaty suave, epaulettes rippling in the breeze as he speeds though an abandoned city in a big red caddy (Hunter Thompson appropriated the caddy and sense of doom for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The stylish safari look was judged just right for the character, Robert Neville, indulging in his twin passions of looting and shooting, and was so popular with audiences that studio execs green-lighted the epaulettes' re-appearance in Soylent Green.

He is alone, Colonel Neville, the reward and curse for having saved himself from a man-made plague while all around him perished (not having had the Hestonian wisdom to be germ warfare scientists themselves). Now, he must spend days hunting down and killing zombies. At night, he plays chess with a bust of Julius Caesar, and furthers the costume aspect of the movie by saying "I dress for dinner on Sundays," sporting a green velour jacket and ruffled blouses.

But let us not dwell on sartoriality, let us get to the point of the movie, which is…I'm not sure. So why not just make fun of the oddities? Three years after everyone died and presumably failed to produce more food, and Neville's got a fresh fruit platter and a string of bratwurst; there's always ice in the silver bucket. Car and flashlight batteries remain fresh forever in this miraculous world, different than the 1978 I lived through, where we had crappy batteries that lasted six months. Finally, in a world full of stores, Heston's natural looting mania seems to be focused mainly on clothes, expressing his every mood (to whom?) with a new outfit for every occasion.

Then there's The Family, a multiracial zombie-ish coven (disaster strikes a few years after the big race riots, so of course the first thing the survivors to is get together in harmony, right?). Well, almost harmony, because the black guy in The Family is dishonest and violent. So much for progess: the innovation of the movie is to have black people in white-face make-up. The strangest thing is that after three years of intensive searching, Neville has not found them, even though the first kid he meets knows exactly where they are.

He(ston) wants to root out their nest, kill them all before they kill him. Were they really trying to kill him before he took to shooting them on sight? I'm not so sure, but  as usual when encountering the Other in Hestopia, the only solution is to shoot, for god's sake, SHOOT! Oh, and drive like a fucking maniac (because when you are the last man on earth, every car is a rental). Costume-wise: he usually chooses something militaryey looking for ops like this, like when time was of the essence and he managed to slip into a form-fitting blue rayon flight suit.

Eventually, Neville trips across a group of survivor children (awww), protected by an aspiring germ warfare doctor (no, no stretching the limits of plausibility there), who he should have taught how to make the anti-zombification serum. But instead, he goes to the only other healthy adult, so that he can have The Kiss That Changed The World (sorta,...OK, not really).

For she is African American. Yeah. And Chuck Heston is as white a Moses as you'll ever see. Of course, this shocking romance occurred years after Poitier and Hepburn had made the move on the big screen; even Shatner and Uhuru had blazed the trail on TV while Heston was avoiding women altogether on POTA. So Omega Man kisses a black woman, subject to certain rules: there must be a false start, the kiss itself must not be lit well enough to see, and she must die before there is an issue with, uh, shall we say, issue. The costume for this scene is an pirate shirt with understated puffy sleeves.

If I don't understand what this movie is about, it's not for lack of trying by the authors and director, who beat me about the head and neck with symbolism. They foreshadow and then at the end indulge in crucifixion, savior Neville arms asplay, passing a vial of his own blood to the future that they might be saved zombification by the Pharisees or Pagans, or whoever those anti germ warfare freaks are.

Soylent Greenbacks

Somehow in the last post, which you should be reading first, I got off track. Watching the movie, knowing the secret ahead of time, the characters' anguish and shock seemed overdone. But then, I've forgotten what life was like before Reagan (our most Hestonian president, I'd say, with that veneer of smiling good nature and great hair over a dickish soul and addled mind), and worse yet Mr. New World Order. As Saul says, we had a world once,...schmuck.

But even in those kinder, gentler days before the Bush Dynasty ascended, people should have understood that in a movie where the premise is that the world is way overpopulated and food is hard to come by, there's gonna be some cannibalism. It's happened with boats and plains and wagon trains full of hungry people, and for that matter probably happens in New York city from time to time anyway.

Maybe I'm jaded by years of living under unbridled and bloodthirsty capitalism, but it also makes sense that a large corporation would pounce on the obvious profit potential in this movie world. A steady supply of willing flesh, a vast pool of consumers hungry for protein, yearning for a new product. As businessmen are so fond of saying, it's a no-brainer.

Soylent Green saw this future coming. Like all tales of the future, it is doomed to looking stupid on some levels: the lame-ass video game would have fallen prey to this in less than a decade, there are no Latinos, and the guns are pitiful little toys. On the other hand, we're well on the way to being a plutocracy, run by a few ruthless people who live in a level of wealth unimaginable to the unwashed masses. Officials who use their position to enrich themselves and appropriate other people's stuff? Yep. Corporations using public resources to enhance profitability (where do you think the Riot Patrol scoopers dump their haul?) and shaping public policy to their liking? Yep. High-powered politicians drawn from the ranks of the wealthy? Yep. Public sector workers not paid a decent wage? Yep. Corruption, dehumanization, women treated as furniture? Yep, yep, and yep.

I heard about a scientific study recently in which burgers from 6 corporate chains were tested, and it was found that they contained between 2 and 15% meat. Slightly more if you count guts and parasites, but basically a Soylent Gray disk. I haven't eaten that crap in years, but in large urban centers, it accounts for a large portion of the menu for those who cannot afford to have luxuries like fresh vegetables. I don't think it has yet become profitable to include human meat, but don't expect Archer Daniels Midland to tell you when that happens. They and the other food-stuff mega corporations may well have nicely bound feasibility studies already on the shelves, just like in the movie.

Which brings to mind a flaw. I can understand the guy from state security hiring a patsy to murder a conspirator who might not be reliable, but to think that they'd leave the investigation to a detective who is not also part of the operation boggles the mind. The bodyguard did not sweep out the books and any other incriminating evidence or kill the priest moments after he heard confession form the Man Who Knew Too Much. Amateurs. Bush I or Cheney would have disappeared the killer, bodyguard, priest and furniture immediately, would have put their own guy on the case; nobody, least of all some rabble rouser, would have ever known about the murder or the greater crime of mass cannibalism.

If word ever did get out, they'd put the media to work explaining that Soylent Green is as American as apple pie (or at least mock apple pie made with pancreas instead of those horrible ritz crackers). They'd have paraded out McCain, who would explain that he took up cannibalism out of necessity in Hanoi, but kept up with it for the pure gustatory pleasure. There would be a new ad campaign on the theme "Soylent Green is People," showing the smiling faces of the diverse Soylent workforce, appropriating and deflating the critique. Anti-cannibals would be branded as socialists and homos, marginalized, and if that didn't work, scooped up by the riot patrol and delivered to the Gitmo Processing Plant.

The voluntary suicide center would be different, too. None of this druidic robe stuff, a final film dwelling on nature. There'd be a big cross. You'd be strapped to the gurney so that you could not escape when you figured out they were lying about giving you the full 20 minutes of nice movie. Fawning Dick Van Patten manning the gates, allowing himself to be pushed around by a half-fed local cop? Hell no: a Blackwater crew, tossing the bullet-riddled bodies of interlocutors into the hopper.

The process, the conveyors and trucks and machines that transport and transform bodies into Soylent Green, appears a little silly now. Bodies given the dignity of a clean white sheet through the whole process? Maybe in the first week of operation, but soon enough some manager would get himself a promotion by figuring out that eliminating the sheets would increase the profit margin, another would move up after devising a streamlined process for gold tooth extraction. Likewise, once the suicider has signed on the dotted line, amenities are unnecessary and a waste. No self-respecting corporation in 2011, much less 2022, would want to justify the expense to shareholders anxious about meeting quarterly projections.

In 1963, Heston marched  with Dr. King and advocated for civil rights. In 1973, he seemed outraged by what the Soylent Corp was doing. In 1983, he'd changed his tune, and by '93 was excoriating the pinkos who would dare badmouth the poor maligned white male. As Heston went, so too did the leadership of our country. Less and less concerned with any right but the right to bear arms, more and more demented. Unwilling to let anything stand in the way of the march toward complete corporate domination of the economy and society. Growing Mosaic in his devotion to the one true god (with his three faces: father, son, and holy cash flow), and disgusted by the humanists.

Soylent Greenbacks are made of people.

Shallow Time Travel

Soylent Green is made of people!

Yeah. Planet of the Apes was not the end of my journey down the Hestonian road to the future. This time, to a closer one, a more plausible outcome to late 20th Century excess, introduced with the coy and squatty multiframe montage taking us from Manifest Destiny to Hestopia, penultidecadally before Koyaanisqatsi. Viewers are not asked to believe in evolution, just that overpopulation and pollution lead to some problems.

This time, our hero is not a space-ship commander, but a New York City dick, which you can read as 'detective' if you want, but the guy is a thief, a kicker of stairwell dwellers, who lets his friend kill himself and doesn't mind getting stains on the furniture. That last charge sounds lame, until you know that "furniture" in the far off year 2022 refers to the chick that comes (or at least pretends to) with apartments rented to bachelors. One piece took a swing at him, but didn't deserve the savage beating she got in return. Because in Soylent Green, the 'she was to be our Eve' sentimentality and desire for breeding of POTA is a thing of the unimaginable future. There are 40 million people in New York City alone, too crowded for love, even though the furniture might dream of it from time to time.

In the midst of this overpopulated mess--shot in yellow Hazescope (TM)--is some sort of college where Heston and his room-mate live in a dorm room. Books, mini fridge, squalor. Chuck's character is lucky, just like I was, to have roomed with Saul (I know, credits say 'Sol,' but it sounds like 'Saul,' and it adds another dimension), a Jewish guy (see?) whose intelligence and humor helps Heston's Detective Thorn make it through. Like the time he says something really beautiful, pauses for effect, and says "Schmuck."

Theirs is a tenderer relationship than me and my roommate, richer perhaps from having sprung from all they'd gone through back when Heston was Moses and Edward G. Robinson was that asshole Egyptian enforcer (General Suleiman, maybe?) bent on killing him. The general saw earlier than his colleagues did where the chips would fall, and besides, don't some boys have a thing about plaguing the one they love? The script does not tell us how they fell in together, just that Saul is the book-guy, with memories of the old world, and Thorn is the tough guy. Teacher, jaw-jutting antihero student. The only furniture around a random few rickety chairs and a dinette table, no complications.

Thorn investigates murders and kicks ass among hungry people who won't disperse. Everywhere he goes, he is a dick. Kills people he should have questioned, leaves every domicile with loot. But the thing is, he brings Saul treats when he can snag some, listens to the old man's stories, offers to pedal the generator bike that shines a 40-watt bulb on their dim existence. When Saul chooses a voluntary death, Thorn rushes to share the last moment, to repeatedly express their love. It is as tender and genuine as Heston gets.

Some website says Edward knew he was gonna die--and followed through (unlike Thorn with his pedal offer) just 12 days after filming the scene--and kept it secret until telling Chuck just before his death scene to amp up the emotion. Others say that's a bunch of crap, that Heston offed Robinson and concocted the cancer story to amp up the box office. Either way, there's nothing the furniture likes better than a poignant death.

On the other hand, they don't so much like the cannibalism. Neither do the characters in this flick. You'd think they'd be a little less surprised, not banished to Catatonia like the priest or executed for 'unreliability' like the victim, Simonson, in all his Joseph Cottony blandness, a scene that plays out as an over-wrought exchange between a monkey with a crowbar and a tired old thespian unaware that the audience left long ago.

Yeah, a shocking murder...1973 style. No visible carnage, just some really fake blood. To set it up, to make us understand that it is a major conspiracy, the killer meets with his handler, a state security heavy who supplies him with one of those fancy two-piece crowbars. Yeah, lock and load crowbar, man. Only the big boys have them. (Later, they make a point of Thorn deducing that the crowbar proved the killer was a pawn, a nobody being used by guys with guns. Sweet sweet guns....but back to the story.) So he has to use the bar to bash footholds in the concrete wall surrounding this rich guy's house so he can gain entry and bash holes in his head. Which cranial violations did not appear in 1973 mainstream film (I say with no data to back me up).

Somehow, all the clanging does not alert security. No matter, since this crime is just one guy and there is Soylent happening right under everyone's pollution-impaired nose. Thorn figures it out, though, not with fortuitous information and implausible plot lines, no, but with beatings and his smart roommate's help.

First, though, he must brachiate his way down stairwells full of huddled masses nearly as dumb as POTA humans. Then swagger into the building where the rich guy lived, where he must pass the super, who is an honest to god lawn jockey. Red jacket, weird hair and all. Turns out the guy is also an incredible dick, who doesn't even wait for the furniture to hit him before he beats them. Thorn lets him know who is boss, but doesn't kill him.

Another Dick in the movie is of the Van Patten variety. Dead and gone in 2022, but when this movie was made (MLMXXIII), he still had the glory years of Eight is Enough before him. Younger, but still bald and dull, his mattress-salesman future reverberating backwards, Mr. Obvious Tool played the role of usher to the chamber where the depressed and old could kill themselves in return for a 20 minute, clumsily edited sequence of nature shots that would not have passed muster in 1982, much less 2022.

I'd've blown the budget making the Styx-crossing movie mind-boggling, but back in '73 they went with a thing they called a 'cathode ray tube game,' an oversized Leggs container with a field of Asteroids featuring limited Pong action. Yes. Such a primitive video game that even I can describe it. The furniture had to stoop over to play the damn thing, desperately pretending to be thrilled, just to let us know that these are rich people without a care in the world.

Rich people. It seems like they keep coming up. This post is already getting long, and it's nearing midnight. If I forget to continue this later (I'm thinking "Soylent Greebacks" would be a good title, then remind me.

Pandering

The posts most viewed involve Planet of the Apes and heatilators. This week, someone got to this blog by searching 'planet of the apes heatilator.' I told myself it was someone who had been fascinated by those, but could not remember the name of the blog, some cyber-Gretl tracing her way back to this font of pontification via the trail of odd crumbs it burps up now and then.

Or maybe not. It did get me to thinking that maybe there is a link. I mean, the apes are clearly into green lifestyle, and I'm betting that if I ever watchy all the films, or better yet delve into the deleted scenes like a true POTA geek would, there would be a heatilator. How could a species so invested in groovy adobe architecture (you just know that beneath the clay skin are the hay bales and bits of dreadlock that will mark back-to-the-earth construction for archaeological progeny of Cornelius) not want a passive, heat-harvesting heatilator? 

Did these apes evolve from hippies? Sure, their repression of humans seems so un-hippie-ish, but time has passed, and evolution can take some unexpected turns. The dogmatic Zeus crowd? I've met the same obstinate preachiness from hippies shocked at my apostatic rejection of the zodiac as bullshit, my dismissal of the Greatful Dead as a mediocre country band. So the hippies grew ever hairier, changed their politics a bit, and became apes. It's not so hard to believe, is it?

And you don't have to take it on faith. If the apes had evolved from right wing humans (which would be deliciously ironic, take that, creationists!), then would their primary instrument of repression be the crudely woven net, clearly a form of macrame? Of course not.

Anyway, only a few light-skinned apes seem bent on burying the truth and keeping humans under an unopposable thumb. The rest are farming, raising horses, picking nits. If you look carefully in the cornfield massacre scene, you see some weed growing at the edges of the fields.

Lithic 1

Sorry if you clicked on this looking for something on stones. I just didn't want to title this entry "Rocky I," even though that's what it is about. After making my near-teen kid watch Planet of the Apes by way of home-schooling her in sarcasm (see "Shallow Space Travel"), I figured a lesson on abject mockery was in order, in particular the iconic moments of Rocky that have sustained comedians for decades now. 

As you may know, Rocky was the story of an exceptionally stupid and no longer very young boxer in Philadelphia who, against all odds, gets a shot at the heavyweight title of the world. (Why stupid? Maybe all the blows to the head, maybe the deadening effects of living in Philly, or maybe he was just a dumbass.) His best friend and mentor is a rubber ball whose cheerful acceptance of being slammed into the spit and velveeta-stained streets of the Philly slums provides the self-proclaimed Italian Stallion with his fighting strategy: take blows to the head until your opponent tires or dislocates something.

The champ that reaches into the City of Brotherly Love (lovingly shot in a palette of soot and carcass hues) and pulls out a smalltime leg-breaker for a sham battle resembles Muhammad Ali in some ways: black and beautiful (sorta), boastful and uppity (the late-70's was an era when white people bemoaned melanin run rampant in their sports world). But it being Hollywood, and a film released in the afterglow of the bicentennial, movie champ Apollo Creed is not a conscientious objector, but loves America so much that he wears red white and blue trunks, albeit in an uppity way. Later Rocky the champ will don similarly patriotic garb before defeating communism in the guise of a hulking nazi poster boy, but that's another tale.

Stallone, who wrote and starred in the movie (there was no director) and reportedly stitched together all the costumes as well, wanted to emphasize the value of individual will and hard work, so a fair amount of the movie focuses on his training, culminating in the flick's second most famous moment: Rocky in the same unwashed sweatsuit he's been wearing for weeks, heavily stained on the ass for some reason, charging up the stairs of the capitol and pumping his arms in the air [Yes, Internerd, I know the capitol's in Harrisburg, but Rocky thought it was the capitol.]

Anyway, Rocky runs, sweats, confides his insecurities to his rubber ball, maybe even abstains from sex, and punches beef carcasses (or, in Philly parlance, beats his meat), sometimes before cameras.

The cameras are there because this unlikely challenger has become a home-town hero. The white population of Philly, still years from their triumphant fire-bombing of black activists, seizes on Rocky as a punch-drunk messiah of sorts, or at least a working class hero (of a looser sort, given his joblessness). 

And on a more intimate scale, Rocky has other supporters. Like plastic fish and turtle toys that he believes are pets, and feeds diligently. There's Paulie, a sloppy and sometimes violent drunk whose ethnicity is never directly mentioned, but who works for a meat company with an Irish name (to be fair, Sly scrawled unflattering stereotypes of Italian-Americans as well). There's the girl who sold him the pet food and is Paulie's sister, because anyone else would have alien and confusing to Rocky's addled mind. In a true Philly romance, he traps her in his filthy apartment, shows her is biceps and armpits, and she falls for him, or at least under him, making love on the floor among the roach-husks and mouse-turds. Finally, there's his manager, a guy who everyone calls Mick (probably not a Swede), but who is clearly a retired Penguin, embittered after being humiliated by Batman, jilted by the Riddler, and robbed blind by the Joker. Mick supports Rocky by yelling at him, which I guess makes him more of a father figure than the rubber ball, and by telling him "Stay away from women, they weaken the legs." (Luckily Rocky had that one brilliant moment and figured out the beef loophole.)

Then the fight itself, lovingly choreographed by, you guessed it, Stallone. Rocky leads off with the usual strategy of standing there and blocking punches with his face, but eventually he and his corner realize that compared to his usual experience with 3-round bouts, a 15 round prize fight is way more: the cut man thinks maybe 10 times more, Rocky says 100, while the Penguin spits in disgust and says "There ain't no such number that big, Rock," then jabs him in the nuts to perk him up for the next round.

Then this nobody lands a solid punch, knocking down the champ. What follows is a boring see-saw of desperation and triumph, hitting and getting hit, blood, spit, drool, and snot. The only real good part is when Rocky cannot see because his eye is swollen, and his manager wants him to quit, but he says "Cut it, Mick!" Oh, the mockery that line has fed. We used that line doing fieldwork all the time,and I suggest you do the same. It need not relate at all to what's happening; thus are the rules of Rocky's utterances.

So does he win? I dunno, maybe the movie does not say, or maybe I just didn't care. I was too caught up in the most famous moment of the movie, when he is done with the fight, and all the world is crowding into the ring, and Rocky keeps howling "Adrian!"

Adrian had been the name of his pet-shop girl, drunk-boy's sister. But that woman was poor, and based on her glasses and clothes was either a time traveler or some religious extremist who dressed as if the 1960s had never happened. The woman who comes to the ring has new clothes, uses rich-girl conditioner, and sees fine with no glasses. Adrienne, maybe, but not the same spinster he'd woo'd and screwed on the kitchen floor. In any case, a few seconds of celluloid killed off those names, maybe forever. Nobody from that point forward wanted to name their kid something that would be bawled loudly by people trying to act retarded. "Aaaa Dreee Uuuunnnnnn!!!"

So did my kid learn anything? Maybe, but probably not. She did stick it out 'til the very end, through 15 rounds of incomprehensible "dialogue," unlikelihoods galore, gore unbridled, Rocky's incontinence, and of course, my dumb comments. For with so little to work with, refined sarcasm is difficult, and mockery grows dull before long, which is why society as chosen two or three scenes to mock as shorthand for the entire movie, and why I went for the richer grounds of POTA first.

BONUS: That was it for the blog entry proper, but I cannot let this pass without mentioning that fact that the movie included among Apollo Creed's entourage none other than Arnold Johnson. Yeah, Putney Swope himself. Same suit, same beard, although the voice lacked the magic Swope. Sadly, I think that his tertiary sidekick role here was one of the biggest things to happen to him since he starred as the revolutionary advertiser a decade earlier, maybe his last movie appearance. He showed up in episodes of The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son, and after exhausting the 'black' shows, appeared in other shows in the only roles available to bearded African Americans: old men and drunks. Although he did appear in several episodes of Hill Street Blues, it was never in a major role, and unlike Rocky he never got a real championship shot. 

Shallow Space Travel

The other day I subjected my older child to Planet of the Apes, the original (1967 or 68, depending on your source), the Hestonian dystopia (Hestopia?), the ... uh, movie. Yeah. I'm film illiterate.

The point is that the kid needs some education regarding the crazy culture I grew up in, totally alien to this 21st century progeny. I mean, when I was a kid people were racist and new technological frontiers kept expanding and the US was mired in a war that dragged on nearly as far as this IED-laced road to Nowhere, Afghanistan we're on now and uh...

Yeah, completely different.

Sarcasm is not taught in schools, except by often ill-disciplined student prodegies and wannabes. So I have to home school, but I'm not really turned on at the prospect of the religious curricula, which I consider to be merely snide, sarcasm turned weak and mean, like an aged chihuahua from a bad home. Besides, who wants to pay their prices?

Kindof with Mystery Science Theater in mind, I pulled up a couple comfy chairs and started the flick. Heston in a suaved-out swagger on the bridge of a Spaceship, a cynical antihero who doesn't let some pinhead back at Command tell him he cannot smoke a cigar in a pure Oxygen environment. Then he shoots up and the movie begins.

But before that, think back to when I was talking about having the teach Sarcasm 201 (she placed out of Intro without batting an eye, just those slack lids and the teeniest of eyebrow lifts). One great technique is the Training Film, liberally basted with audience comments. There were some Archaeology Training Films that shaped who I am. Platoon (imparting the proper sense of doom, leavened with the fun of stalking through the jungle and giving hand signals), Indiana Jones (learning to say "That belongs in a Museum!" with conviction, and at other times a series upon which sarcasm is to be heaped), Predator (cannot remember why, probably because of swampy jungles and the dude's cool dreadlocks), and so on.

To Planet of the Apes, featuring Cornelius, an archaeologist-hero who clearly knows his methodology better than Indy and has respect for human remains. Not only that, but he's a staunch evolutionist and is romantically involved with Dr. Zira; together, they defend science from the ruling cadre of light-skinned religious bigots. They seek Truth, and my beef is not with them.

It's with Heston. Always with Heston. And maybe too it's just fun to make fun of decades-old effects and stuff like the sudden pointless zooms that punctuate the movie (I kept expecting it to cut to commercial). Oh, and of course the Ape technology. They can do brain surgery and make functional guns, but their means of capturing humans is the Crudely Woven Net, available in sizes large enough to be effective (the trip-wired net fences that I'm pretty sure they stole from Marlin Perkins), but usually deployed awkwardly between two horse-riding Gestape-o, invariably in a size too small to entangle a large biped.

The Planet of the Apes is geographically interesting, too. They land in a lake ringed by the telltale white stains of a drawdown, evidence that the lake is impounded behind a major hydroelectric dam, yet there are no power lines in the whole movie.

What there are are footprints, on the sands before them in several Forbidden Zone scenes. Because nobody has been there in 1200 years or so, they must be fossils, remnants of the last people stupid enough to abandon a lake full of water to strike out aimlessly through the desert in white patent leather boots with back packs full of useful things like test tubes containing pink sand. More sand. In a desert where you banished yourself. Sarcasm.

On the more local scale, there's the big boulder inexplicably rolling down a hill at them, after which they rest, beneath another precariously balanced boulder! Heston is the best captain ever. Yeah.

History lessons can be drawn from this flick as well. The casting is a window on the 1960's that era of upheaval and promise, change and retrenchment. I'm sure that including among the astronauts a woman and what were then called Negroes (one of the sequels has a character by that name, in case you have doubts) gave the writers a warm fuzzy feeling, but consider what their roles were. The woman has been brought because the uterus would die witrhout her. Cap'n Heston briefly mourns the passing with the creepy "She was to be our Eve," although the idea of repopulating with 3 guys and one girl instead of the other way around is a recipe for at least one murder. Then of course the female lead for the rest of the movie is the perfect woman in Hollywood terms: enamored with the hero, mute, and scantily clad sexy body topped by a great head of hair (legs and armpits shaved, though she acts amazed that Heston can shave).

The one black guy in the movie, although clearly the smartest of the survivors, is given every bit of work that happens. Need someone to climb up and flip an important switch inexplicably located at the other end of the sinking ship? He'll do it. Test the new planet's soil, or run ahead and find the path while everyone else jawbones about their egos? Call on the Negro. Somebody need to get killed to establish the apes' disregard for human life (only to later appear as a museum specimen, suggesting that they have some scientific curiosity)? Perfect job for a Negro in 1967. Or 1968.

And through it all, Hestonian machismo. The derision for his lesser crew. The violent attempts to grab paper from Dr. Zira instead of just pantomiming or gently reaching out. The insults hurled at his captors. The only break in his mindless macho posturing is his obvious homosexuality. That's pretty much the only explanation for why he would order his man-crew to strip naked and cavort in the water (check out the scene where they stand together looking at each others peni), then indulges in a diva-ish strip of his own under the gushing white waterfall. I have it on good authority that Chuck got so deep into this aspect of the role that he insisted the film be the first to show several naked men, but no naked women. Groundbreaking. And if you doubt my conclusions about his gender, consider this: even if the ape scientists only gave me a mate because they are horny voyeurs, I'd have started repopulating immediately, but Chuck barely touches her, even when he hears he's about to be gelded. Maybe he'd planned on ordering the Negro to start breeding the new human race, but in 1967 (or 1968) even science fiction frowned on interracial relationships. Ergo our current president's childhood diaspora.

So, having looped around to the present again, I should consider stopping, or surrender to another gyre over that ridiculous planet. Rich grounds for smartassery and sarcasm, but I think I'll just have to step away for now...