Movies You Already Should've Seen: PSYCHO

The long-awaited. If I had to describe to you how much hatemail we got as a result of delaying PSYCHO for almost two months, I would describe it as almost none at all.  You know for whatever reason that poster reminds me of video game boxart. 

PSYCHO (1960)
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Written by: Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch

PSYCHO in one sentence:
Yourself: For almost a decade, the advertising slogan of Candy Corn was "We all go a little mad sometimes.".

Golem: One man's ventriloquist act goes too far.

Here's a story about me and PSYCHO:
Yourself: Supposedly the MPAA of 1960 was as worked up about the toilet flushing as it was about the stabbing, but it's the sandwich hovering millimeters from Marion's lips that gives me the willies. Stop breathing on your food like a goddamn animal.

Golem: I actually went into this film without knowing the plot! Hooray!

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: As this is the movie that single-handedly invented the spoiler, I did not share the delight of witnessing PSYCHO in the dark. The first act dragged for me, not because it was poorly paced or poorly made but because I was in the theater to see Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. But Lord Almighty is that not to say that Marion is some generic slasher meat; her conflicts are set carefully enough to persist even after Janet Leigh has been gone for an hour.

That there are so many memorable scenes from this first half is a testament to a.) the formal strength of PSYCHO and b.) how little the story and characters actually matter. Which I think is pretty securely the point of the film, and also perhaps related to the genre madness it precipitated. But let's not say things about history we can't evidently back up.

Golem: Marion isn't your typical slasher victim, but her plot plays out a lot like the predictably-doomed protagonists you see in film noir (or just '40s thrillers). PSYCHO's spin is that we get to see the effect her fate has on the world. Going in and expecting the film to be about Marion, that's how I watched it after her death. The film dwells on her murderer, her sister, and her boyfriend dealing with the impact of her theft and death. It reminds me a little of CITIZEN KANE, but only at a high-up abstract level, given that KANE is much more character-centric. (I got the whole story from... his sled.)

Or you might say PSYCHO has trouble picking a main character, which is the fun of the movie. After Marion's death, we spend a quiet minute with Norman, watch Arbogast as he takes over the film, and finally rest on dividing our attention between Lila and Sam. Norman Bates has an interesting character in him, but he doesn't get the screentime necessary to take the picture over from Marion. Instead, the film bounces from character to character, which keeps events moving at a nice clip without disorienting me.

The funny bit is that it's all pinned together by the $40,000, which Norman never notices.

The aesthetic is basically:
Yourself: Black and white is really throwing my aesthetics radar. But, to leverage that to my advantage, I could say that PSYCHO looks very little like DOUBLE INDEMNITY. We see many of the sets at multiple times of day - which feels like a dumb observation - separating light and color from location and reinforcing how much time is passed in the same place. Our main locale is the Bates Motel, subdivided between the office, the units, and the caretakers' house, and we watch as characters walk from one to the next. This establishes a clear space for the film, mundane and static, just the opposite of DOUBLE I's character portraits amidst disintegrating darkness.

The narrative lingers at the Motel as if chained on a leash, given only a small playground to watch whatever characters or events cross by. There's a voyeurism inherent to the constant character shifts, a pronounced dehumanization that separates the drama from the people inhabiting it. It isn't Marion that drives Norman to be a peeping tom - the hole in the wall was already there. He just lucks into catching some skin. And it isn't her deeds or her nature that drive him to murder, but the simple fact that she is there. The lurking camera plants the viewer in Norman's isolation, but not in his mind - we aren't asked to sympathize with his perspective any more than with his antagonizers. That dissociation is compounded through the destabilizing camera, its exaggerated and unexpected angles, zooms, and cranes mimicking the splintering effects of psychosis, creating, dare I say, a very different kind of "psychodrama".

Golem: Marion initially spends her time in the city, surrounded by people. The film's opening shots gaze upon Phoenix, a giant city and a far cry from the solitary motel 15 miles outside of Fairvale. When she's got something to hide, she sleeps on an empty highway, squirms under the gaze of a creepy police officer (who eyes up her car from the outside, trying to gaze into Marion herself), and stops at an empty motel. When she cuts herself off from the world, she finds Norman Bates, the town hermit.

Which is to say, the city becomes friendly, open, and orderly, while the rural becomes scary and shady. There, you find a monument to solitude: a big house with no one to live in it. Norman hides his psychoses in it in the same way Marion tries to hide her one moment of madness by avoiding people.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: PSYCHO is surprisingly funny. Much of that is accomplished through suspense gags like the car sinking, and much of it is accomplished through Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. He hits all the right stutters and awkward pauses as Norman cobbles together the worst lies imaginable under interrogation from Arbogast. It's not laugh-out-loud funny but it's that kind of giddy amusement you get in the best fumbling klutz performances. Norman is never anything except completely likable. It's fun just to watch him sit in a jail cell!

Golem: Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson) would be another fun performance if I didn't need a shower after he hits on Marion. He finds a way to take over any shot he's in. Marion walks into her boss' office to ask him a question, and this happens. His deep, boisterous voice is crucial, and he says his lines slowly and deliberately. He's a great counterpart to the delicate George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor), too.

I don't know if this is a Hitchcock thing, but everyone seems so lively. Caroline (Pat Hitchcock) kills me when she rattles off her dull list of calls, along with the way she says "flirting": "He was fliirrting with you!"

Honorable mention goes to Lila Crane (Vera Miles) for getting fed up with BS, having a good sense of intuition (40,000 means your sister was here... well, okay!), and sticking her nose where it doesn't belong. She drags Sam Loomis (John Gavin) by the ear for the second half of the film, and it's great. Her forthright-to-a-fault personality makes her the perfect character to uncover Mrs. Bates, contrasting her with the anything-but-forthright Norman.

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: Well, virtually every single shot in PSYCHO would qualify for this category, with nearly a half-dozen frames that rank among the most famous in filmdom (although tbch I am not yet onboard with the most iconic, perhaps for the same reason it takes a handful of album listens to recontextualize and appreciate overplayed singles).

So with that said, there were two really weird shots that caught my eye. The first comes during Arbogast's interview with Norman after the disappearance of Marion. Norman is standing across the office desk from Arbogast, creating a sort of deliberate distance from the record book. When Arbogast points to a name, Norman cranes his neck and we get a lengthy close-up of his adam's apple, filling the entire screen. This is not a movie of weird insane close-ups, and the shot feels like a flick on the nose to pay attention.

The second grabbed me with its technique, because I'm getting kinda film geeky. Late in the film, when Norman rushes to grab his mother from her bedroom and carry her to the basement, we see a shot from the hallway pointing at her bedroom door. Before Norman comes out, the camera pulls up and away, angling downward, moving in one continuous motion from pointed at the door at eye level to pointed straight down at the staircase from ten feet up. I imagine this was done with a crane, but it must've also involved some disassembling of the house. Very cool movie magic.

Golem: After Norman cleans up Marion's room, the camera often rests on her hidden $40,000 in the foreground with Norman in the background. This happens three times:

1. when he rushes in after the murder
2. when he closes the door and shuts off the light before deciding to grab cleaning supplies
3. when he brings in the cleaning supplies

Each time, the camera sticks behind the newspaper and pivots to show Norman as he walks between the doorway outside and the bathroom doorway. These shots lend irony and tension. Irony, because Norman has no idea what's in the newspaper, and tension, because he goes so long without noticing the newspaper. He almost misses it, and he only notices it when he does a double-check of the room after clearing everything out.

The $40,000 also sticks Marion to the Bates Motel, setting in motion the private eye who finds the motel. We watch Norman scurry around the room, trying to remove all traces of Marion, while the money just sits there. Even though it's all but forgotten in the second half of the film - a maguffin that's named only because it has to be - that money ties the two halves together.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: Once upon a time, a friend and I were naively skeptical of the claim that opening credits should present the thesis of a movie. I believe the filmic expression we were indulging on that particular night was TOTAL RECALL, and as a result I will always remember its streaky red titles. As the years wear on I'm increasingly deferent to that little hint as a launching point for thematic analysis. (It probably helps that I've moved from watching predominantly Arnold movies to predominantly genre classics). PSYCHO has some of the most idiosyncratic credits you'll find, not least of all because of the magnetic score (the one that predicated Danny Elfman's entire career):

I suck at music terminology, but is that higher pitched melody that comes in around 0:14 a counterpoint? The way the song alternates thrusts between that shrill line and the deeper pitch echoes the fracturing of the titles, the split motif that dominates the entire film. It's the Mrs. Bates taking over Norman's mind intermittently, the weird cuts interrupting our perspective. Since this is the most transparently Freudian movie I've ever seen, I won't go into the id/superego stuff. More interesting is tracking all the dramatic story and visual splits, from the split titles to the split plot to Norman's split personality to split shots, like the one with Lila descending the stairs to the basement and Norman going up to the bedrooms.

So let's talk about the plot split. Boy is there a lot to love about such a simple decision. Because it isn't a twist, or at least it isn't a plot twist. I mean, we can get down in the trenches and fight a semantics war on hackneyed terminology, but as far as I'm concerned, a twist is an unexpected story event that - very key point here - re-contextualizes the preceding story. Revealing Mrs. Bates death is a twist: suddenly every scene she's in needs a second look to figure out what the hell a mummy would be up to and if there's anything Brendan Fraser can do about it. To the contrary, Marion's straightforward crime tale is utterly independent - at least narratively - from its premature conclusion. She may as well have slipped in the shower and broken her neck for all it says about her character and her world. The death is a hard break, there to give way for a new story: essentially, Marion's flight was the cold open. That Marion isn't actually the protagonist and this isn't her story is a metatextual reveal, and very much a post-modern twist: the audience is invited to re-evaluate their own relationship with the first half of the film and their expectations of narrative media.

Golem: The film manages the viewer's perspective in order to maintain the split Yourself mentions. In Marion's plot, the film has a central perspective. We always know what's on her mind, and sometimes we even hear her thoughts literally. The camera never strays from her side until Norman comes into the picture. Of course we're ill at ease when Norman peeps on Marion, but it's all the more unsettling because we're divorced from Marion's perspective for the first time in the film.

But PSYCHO doesn't take up Norman's perspective as a replacement. Our hearts are in our throats when Marion's car almost fails to sink, so it feels like we sit behind Norman's eyes, but he's eerily silent to us. Later, as he wriggles under investigation, we definitely part from him while collecting information from Arbogast, Lila, and Sam. Norman would never suffer the Sheriff's observation that Mrs. Bates was dead, for instance.

But of course, Norman knows that his mother is dead. Which brings us to the point of the film: Norman is locked out of his own mind. Marion's plot, aside from being a pretty sweet trick, also lends a counterpoint to Norman's lack of center.

Note to future self on watching PSYCHO:
Yourself: There's nothing that can be neatly summed up about my initial experience of PSYCHO. Most fascinating to me is its insistence on form, on providing a unique and compelling film experience without relying on traditional mores of act structure and character arcs. It is Hitchcock envisioning a purer cinema, one which spurns literary posturing in favor of technique and delivery; a statement about interactivity so bold and pointed that it still feels against the grain. And that connects with me a lot as a viewer, as someone who has always been a little wary around the truism "good movies are about characters".

Golem: PSYCHO is a great roller coaster, with catchy cinematography and fun characters. When the sheriff says AR-BO-GAST, say it with him.

Come back next week as Greg and Greg kick off the Halloween season with the god of ghouls himself, Vincent Price starring in THE HAUNTED PALACE.

Other movies you already should've seen:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
GREMLINS (1984)
TERMINATOR (1984)
RETURN TO OZ (1985)
COMING TO AMERICA (1988)
DICK TRACY (1990)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS (1999)
THE MATRIX (1999)
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)

Movies You Already Should've Seen (filler week): GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS

I swear we watched PSYCHO though. Golem said he didn't want to write it this week as a show of respect for the pope coming to America.

GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS (1999)
AKA: Gamera 3: The Awakening of Iris
Directed by: Shûsuke Kaneko
Written by: Kazunori Itô and Shûsuke Kaneko

GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS in one sentence:
Yourself: Iris? Iris... Iris! IRIS?! IRIIIIIIIIIISSSSSS!

Here's a story about me and GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS:
Yourself: I still can't watch these without wishing it was Godzilla instead of Gamera, but at least this trilogy makes for far more consistent popcorn entertainment than its hair-pullingly stupid Toho counterpart. Who would've known a writer/director can make better creative decisions than a boardroom of executives? Not Nintendo, that's who! Zing! Video game satire!

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: Erm, like usual we have one protagonist too many. GAMERA 3 is really the story of teenage orphan Ayana's hatred of Gamera, but she only hangs around til the midpoint. I will at least give the script that it's sticking to the series formula - sidelining Iris' human avatar when the monster takes over is exactly how GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE handled Gamera's avatar, Asagi. I can appreciate the structural consistency, even if I consistently don't enjoy watching boring bird-watching de facto protagonist Mayumi.

It is not necessarily a failing that the series doesn't scale the stakes linearly over three movies, but it certainly threw me in terms of traditional trilogy pacing. In retrospect, LEGION was really the climax of the Gamera story and IRIS is more of a prolonged denouement, addressing the emotional aftermath of the previous two films.

I appreciate the injection of a high-ranking government official who apparently belongs to some Gyaos-worshipping, Gamera-hating cult. It is never directly addressed as such, but Asakura's presence certainly seems to hold a cardboard sign by the side of the road reading "Hey. Maybe this is why the military keeps inanely treating Gamera as an enemy."

The aesthetic [of the monsters] is basically:
Yourself: Iris is more fantastically batshit demonic weirdness, flinging tentacles and lashing obscenely as a weird sort of phoenix/squid hybrid. There is the unifying sense that these are ancient deities more than monsters, their bodies purposefully evocative of historical aesthetics and stylized reinterpretation of natural form. The Nazca lines come to mind. Iris, Legion, Gyaos, and Gamera could belong to the same pantheon, and the movie even briefly suggests as much.

Gamera sadly seems to have gotten a downgrade. He's far from awful, but just compare the suit in that poster to the one from ATTACK OF LEGION. The neck is longer, the snout shorter, the shell oversized, and it just looks way more like a person than a turtlesaurus rex. But more importantly, the sweet original flame-based attacks continue (again, I won't spoil the final move, but you may feel encouraged to shout the name of a particular fighting game special).

It is also nice to see a brief return of Gyaos, though forgive me for being too rusty to distinguish this new mutation from the original. Gyaos gets particular credit for providing fodder for some of the more gruesome practical effects, first when one is revealed rotting in the sun, later when another is mauled by Gamera. I almost felt a little bad for the bird boys, they were getting horrifically murdered so frequently. In fact, the first two movies occasionally flirted with gore, but IRIS is the first that gets legitimately nasty. There are lots of cocoons and fluids and such gushing around, even a bit of body horror when Iris essentially grafts itself to Ayana. I would not necessarily show this to a kid.

But the elephant in the room this time is CGI, as there is simply so much (more than the previous two films combined) that it needs to be mentioned. The big showcase fight between Gamera and Iris is aerial, and that means 100% CGI. It just looks really weightless, scaleless, and unclear, and as a result I never got the sense that flying Iris was the same character as grounded (man-in-suit) Iris.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: While neither were exactly showcases, ATTACK OF LEGION was a lot campier than GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE. It made sense in the most Gamera-centric of these three movies - there's not a lot of subtle emotion that can play on the same screen as a screeching giant turtle. GAMERA 3 wants to ground things in human drama again, and while I continue to temper my compliments, Ai Maeda's central performance as the brooding Ayana does exactly that. Ayana is kind of unpleasant and not all that likable. She's quiet, frowny, and standoffish. Even if I can't attest to that as a documentary-quality portrayal of a bitter teenage orphan, it is at least in keeping with cinematic convention, and she is first and foremost sympathetic. I get the character. Mayumi on the other hand....

But then, a couple actors seem to wholeheartedly believe they're in GAMERA 2, and I don't know what the hell Kaneko was thinking leaving the door open to such clashing tones. The two cultists, in their broadcast evil manipulation of Ayana's hatred, are basically supervillains. Dreamcast hobbyist Kurata in particular is maniacally laughing in almost every scene, including as he dies. The performance is theoretically fun, but majorly distracting set against the dour Ayana and plain Mayumi (so's the treatment of Dreamcast as an open software development platform, but don't get me started).

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: Just to go with a brief shot, it's pretty bitchin' when Gamera lights up a Gyaos over Tokyo and the immolated corpse delicately falls to the ground. That is some sweet dramatic tension, breaking from the action to a solitary shot against a black sky that slowly carries us along back into turmoil.

Oh hang on, my mental notes remind me the one I wanted to write about is this scene in a forest where a young couple's picnic is rudely interrupted by tentacles. It is true slasher movie fare, complete with Monster Vision, and a testament to the not-ripping-off-ALIENS-anymore nature of the brief horror segment of the film before Iris is fully unveiled.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: Whelp, in "Jesus the Giant Turtle" moments, Gamera brings a girl back from the dead. To demonstrate forgiveness.

Indeed!

Note to future self on watching GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS:
Yourself: The only thing I expect a daikaiju movie of this vintage to provide is cool monster fights, and IRIS has two out of three monsters and two out of three fights that are cool. Even the CGI waste and weaker Gamera suit are easy to forgive alongside human drama strong enough to hold things together. This is not to say (as many have) that the movie is a return to "characters before action" GODZILLA '54 form, as the emphasis still leans heavily on the battles. It's just the rare iteration of the post-VS. formula that doesn't need to be saved from itself.

[UPDATED 10/13 because the original edit came across way too negative for a movie that I very much liked]

Come back next week to find out what Greg and Greg's new excuse not to be covering PSYCHO will be.

Other movies you already should've seen:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
GREMLINS (1984)
TERMINATOR (1984)
RETURN TO OZ (1985)
COMING TO AMERICA (1988)
DICK TRACY (1990)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
THE MATRIX (1999)
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)

Movies You Already Should've Seen: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Here we are after seven movies, finally caught up on Planet of the Apes. Since DAWN is only a year old, I figured I'd remind everyone that, as always, this post contains full plot spoilers.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)
Directed by: Matt Reeves
Written by: Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver

DAWN OF THE POTA in one sentence:
Yourself: I would guess I'm only the millionth person to say this, but this must be the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK of the Apes saga.

Golem: A zombie thriller, except instead of zombies they're apes, but I don't mean that people turn into apes.

Here's a story about me and DAWN OF THE POTA:
Yourself: Golem and I took on this series last summer in the run-up to DAWN, then proceeded to never actually go see it. Thankfully it made 8 trillion dollars even without our 26.

Golem: I always mix up the titles to RISE and DAWN. It seems to me this is about the rise of the apes, not about their dawn. It's the RISE OF THE APES OF THE PLANET.

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: We could definitely use more development of the ape characters. Caesar and Koba are great, but how come Maurice and Caesar's wife (did she have a name?) don't get more playtime? Maurice connecting with the quiet artsy kid seemed like it could be really interesting... then he never gets another character beat. The scarcity of apersonalities is particularly felt when Koba's betrayal knocks the good guys out of the picture. At that point we're whittled down to Blue Eyes, whose teenage angst finally gets a minute to be interesting before he once again loses center stage.

What's particularly frustrating is that we're in the second film of Planet of the Apes, yet the script is so damned conservative about letting the movie just be about apes. That we have a chimp with teenage angst shows how willing DAWN is to invest in these characters. But for some reason that's offset by a human with teenage angst, and one who lost a wife just like Caesar, and etc, because despite the bleakest reality ever, we need to be literally reminded at every turn that humans deserve another chance. Fucking commit to being a genre movie, DAWN. Mirroring every single ape dynamic with a human feels like the movie doesn't understand metaphors, or doesn't think I do. Or has an extra 40 minutes of running time that it doesn't know what to do with because it's 2014 and that's what blockbusters do.

Golem: To DAWN's credit, it opens with a cool ape hunting scene. Apes swing through forest trees, spear elk (I think they were elk?), and eventually stare down and fell a bear. And even when humans enter the picture, their first encounter is gripping, since both sides are confused and scared. From there, however, things get mired in trivialities: the film goes for deep, long-brewing tension, but instead I come to feel at ease as humans try to fix a dam in ape territory. The whole plot lacks a certain focus or punch to it, and I can't help but feel like Yourself's commentary above (so many characters, so little attention!) results in a movie mired in complexity.

That said, there are sparks of personality on both the human and ape side of things. Apes don't always just listen to whoever screams loudest. Also, the plot structure pulls mean twists at just the right moment. For instance, Caesar's newborn happily plays with the small band of humans. I know something bad is about to happen, but it's still gut-wrenching when the newborn accidentally uncovers a human gun and gets our heroes kicked out.

If someone told me DAWN had an interesting plot, I'd tell them it was boring; if they said the plot was boring, I'd say it was interesting.

The aesthetic is basically:
Yourself: Grimdark monkeys. RISE was equally serious, every bit a horror movie except that it wasn't. The villains were cruel and the apes were unpredictably demonic avengers, but it was a jailbreak story with bursts of violence driven by necessity and soothed with righteousness. DAWN spins a far greyer yarn, pitting beleaguered apes against beleaguered humans with extinction at stake. The utter gravity of it all becomes so dire it almost gets back to being funny. But definitely does not.

The weight put into the premise makes me all the more willing to invest in Caesar's fall, but does an action adventure really need to feel this miserable? Even EMPIRE STRIKES BACK has a Frank Oz puppet fighting a robot for a cookie. I desperately needed a splash of comic relief. A splash of comic relief that doesn't end in a dude getting shot in the face.

That was actually tone, not aesthetic, but sometimes I get tired of writing about set colors. Here: the range of background ape tech isn't as insane as what we had to stomach in BATTLE, but there are some (humorously) eyebrow-raising selections. The only thing that actively annoyed me were those surgical masks made out of bone or roots or something, because come on, what the hell is that.

Golem: An overgrown post-apocalypse. If you told me that this was the monkey episode of The Walking Dead, I would believe you.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: Before we take on the obvious, let's take on the Gary Oldmanvious. His Dreyfus is basically functional as a charismatic leader just barely holding it together, but with Oldman I was expecting something more aggressive, more of a Governor Kolp. I feel like there's an Oldman character I didn't get to see between that starting point and the finale, when he's suddenly a fragile psycho willing to suicidally martyr himself "for humanity".

The apes are of course amazing. I don't know how to properly express it, but Caesar just has cool expressions. Just seeing him smirk feels like a moment. Koba too. The flick-on/flick-off 'monkey mode' he uses to deceive the armory guards fantastically illuminates just how human the apes have become. Creating such a disconcerting context for a chimp to act like a chimp is well-earned showing off for the animators. Possibly the greatest emotional charge in the movie is when Caesar puts Koba in his place and we get a face of the defeated ape's face, beaten and bloodied, mixing shock, humiliation, and supplication.

The combination of sign language and truncated shouting for ape communication works extremely well; it's stylish, dictates tone, and reinforces the focus on the stunning facial animation.

Golem: Koba makes a fantastic villain. While his mistrust of humans is a serviceable motive, he's truly interesting because he evolves. He starts the film openly defiant of Caesar and visibly frustrated. Eventually, he sneaks away to survey the nearby human camp. It's a subtle deception, but in this moment he is manipulating what Caesar knows. Then, Koba comes into his own when humans find him in their armory. At first you can see his alarm, but in moments, he hides it behind a stereotypical ape facade: playing dumb. It's an outright, self-aware lie. I got a kick out of following ape society in this film, since it's hard to tell how advanced they are. I didn't expect Koba's ability to lie, and neither do the humans in the armory.

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: The hunting scene that kicks off the movie post-credits show a really impressive efficiency of direction and writing, establishing everything we need to know about the characters in a quick action sequence almost void of dialogue. (Fun story: I didn't realize the movie had a subtitle track, so it wasn't until ~10 minutes in that I realized the sign language was meant to have subtitles. I almost like the opening better when I was guessing what the signs meant.). We see a form of organization, with a large cadre led by Caesar (the notion of civilization is reinforced when Caesar chastises Blue Eyes for breaking from the group). We see apes have adopted human technology like sign language, weapons, and some kind of war paint. We see they're operating completely in the wilderness. We see Koba is now Caesar's right-hand man, and we see Blue Eyes is a rebellious teen. But the scene also emphasizes its characteristic ape-specific action, right off the bat digging into its unique niche and proving it isn't just an arbitrary conceit.

I was also impressed that they worked in Blue Eyes getting a distinguishing scar. It's a classic monster movie trick, where an individual in a roughly homogeneous species is given a recognizable physical trait to set them apart (for lack of anything better coming to mind, see the grid-alien in AVP). Although, truth be told, I was probably more impressed with myself for immediately picking up on the technique.

Golem: Koba's judgment of Ash showed some camerawork that drew me in. When Koba stops a human in a stairwell, it's played like another moment in the battle. However, he takes this opportunity to test trust - he's intelligent enough to know that just yelling doesn't make apes follow you, and he knows personally how to betray a leader. He commands Ash to bash a human's head in. When Ash refuses, Caesar grips him, lugs him up the stairs, and hurls him off a balcony to the floor below. The camera has a great sense of flow in the scene, following Koba up the stairs, panning to give a shot of Ash flying off the edge, and leaving you to imagine Ash's fatal landing.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: Perhaps more than any Apes since the original, DAWN is principally interested in the nature of civilization, the dividing line between man and beast. Caesar balances his kingdom on the virtue of trust: faith that apes will naturally always work together toward good. Ape does not kill ape because apes are innately good. Koba indulges in this illusion as a means of burying his deep-seated anger and hatred: he has faith that Caesar can succeed. Koba's loyalty is set directly against his animal emotions when Caesar asks that the apes trust humans, overwhelming rage ultimately proving that his role in civilization was a facade. That anger unleashed consumes the apes like the fire set to their homes (or the simian flu to mankind), and ultimately Caesar can only vanquish Koba by accepting that there is no absolute trust - that he must be killed. Blind faith in apekind cost Caesar paradise, but sacrificing that value doesn't bring it back.

Golem: The film opens with a hunt, where the division between good and bad is stark. In order to sustain yourself, you kill. The rest of the film pushes its characters to the point where they compromise their values for self-preservation. Carver has no value above self-preservation, and he conceals guns against Malcolm's orders. Koba doesn't either, and he plans to backstab Caesar at the first sign of weakness. On the other hand, Caesar forsakes his "ape shall not kill ape" only when Koba is beyond compromise. Even in Malcolm's last stand, though, he puts himself at risk for his friends. We don't see his breaking point.

Note to future self on watching DAWN OF THE POTA:
Yourself: In a lot of ways I think I reacted to this movie the same way others reacted to 2014's first returning franchise giant, GODZILLA. The good parts are captivating, but there are whole additional plot lines I'll always want to fast-forward through. The humans were boring. The big name actor ended up with a bit part. The headline conceit got shortchanged on time despite an overlong movie. Of course, applied to GODZILLA that reaction was trite and stupid - there the eponymous creature is a plot device meant to precipitate human drama, so extended creature action would be action pornography of the Michael Shitbay caliber. But DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES does a really good job exploring the conflict of an ape hero and an ape villain, so the humans can't help but feel extraneous. Plus, this time I'm the one saying it.

Golem: Conceptually, DAWN is interesting: one society falls as another rises. In practice, I've seen enough about the fall of humanity, and its exploration in DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is unremarkable at best. On the other hand, ape society has interesting touches strewn throughout, and it's great to watch them evolve (figuratively).

BONUS! Planet of the Apes final series ranking:
Yourself:
#1: Great and stars Charlton Heston: PLANET OF THE APES
#2: Great but stars James Franco: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
#3: Weirdly too entertaining: BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES
#4: Self-loathing and entertaining: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
#5: Vapidly entertaining: BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES
#6: Vapid: ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES
#7: Self-serious retconning crap: CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Golem:
#1: Straddles the line between goofy and thoughtful: PLANET OF THE APES
#2: Unoriginal but balls to the wall weird: BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (and such an ending!)
#3: Half the characters are interesting: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
#4: Enough wacky stuff for me to enjoy but not enough to be good: ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES
#5: Should be higher on this list but didn't grab me: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (need a rewatch?)
#6: Kinda weird, kinda thoughtful, and mostly nothing: BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES
#7: Made Ricardo Montalban jump out a window: CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Come back next week to find out what Greg and Greg think of PSYCHOOOOOOOOOO!

Other movies you already should've seen:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
GREMLINS (1984)
TERMINATOR (1984)
RETURN TO OZ (1985)
COMING TO AMERICA (1988)
DICK TRACY (1990)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
THE MATRIX (1999)

Movies You Already Should've Seen (filler week): GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION

This is the kinda thing I watch when being sick and working the weekend leaves me too depressed to be interested in PSYCHO.

GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
AKA: Gamera 2: Advent of Legion
Directed by: Shûsuke Kaneko
Written by: Kazunori Itô

GAMERA 2 in one sentence:
Yourself: Daaang son, that was badass.

Here's a story about me and GAMERA 2:
Yourself: Geek note: green skin aside, the Gamera series is closer to ULTRAMAN or PACIFIC RIM than it is to Godzilla, delivering fantastic wrestling matches between good and evil rather than anything resembling science fiction.

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: The movie features the same annoying multi-plotting that drags down '90s Godzilla, but Gamera himself is a clear enough hero that it never feels quite as soulless. Ultimately this is a movie where an elementary school teacher explains "symbiosis" to generals and engineers, so the humans are hard to take seriously. Oh no, there goes our best source for details on Gamera!

It is fairly arbitrary in the context of giant space bugs, but I like that Legion generates an electromagnetic field that washes out EM waves near it, shutting down radios, TVs, phones, and all other electronic devices. The creatures' invisible presence permeates the city and projects a lurking tension beyond imminent evisceration. It also means the swarm has a sort of event horizon - as we watch reporters, investigators, and military probe subterranean tunnels and scout the skies, the eventual blackout signals that they are beyond all recourse for help or even reporting back. The effect is lost a little because the script doesn't hide the monsters from the audience as diligently as it does from the characters, but it's still creepy in the same way as watching video feeds cut out in ALIENS.

The aesthetics [of the monsters] are basically:
Yourself: Awesome. Gamera, the jetpants-equipped turtle-x-spinning-top, is a pretty goofy creation, but damn is the revival effective in bringing him to life. Maybe one day I'll be proven wrong, but I don't think you can make quote-unquote realistic action based around a giant bipedal turtle. It doesn't need to double over laughing to be possessed with the blatant anthropomorphism that infects the baby-targeted late-'60s Godzilla performances. Thankfully the camp design (it just now occurs to me that Gamera is Bowser) feels better achieved in LEGION than it was in GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE, possibly because the spin-boosts, rocket ship takeoffs, and fire-spitting hardly let up, or possibly because Legion is a far more outlandish counterpart than the saurian Gyaos. Strafing a skyscraper-sized plant pod with fireballs by rocket-skating 180 degrees around it is exactly the kind of sequence we need to capture the comic book energy of Gamera. The fire-breath in particular looks massive and, it pains me to say, much cooler than Godzilla's contemporaneous lazermouth.

Legion is a multi-tiered threat combining swarms of flying bugs with a burrowing queen and explosive plants. It wouldn't so thoroughly demand comparison to 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah were the movie not stocked with the exact same ALIENS-riffing soldiers vs. bugs action, but that isn't meant to be a complaint. Legion pairs the terrifyingly unpredictable life-cycle that made Destoroyah so dynamic with a completely original artistic model. Up close, the pointy cyclopean drones are too '50s B-movie to be menacing (they remind me of Gohma, which sorta makes this a showdown between Nintendo villains), but mostly they exist to be the creepily inescapable swarm cloud that dances through the air and perches on power lines. Their queen is a hyperbole of jagged spindly appendages made more uncanny by its forward-protruding head and bipedal gait, less an alien insect than a forgotten insect god.

I like that there are callbacks to the previous movie, but it does highlight one place the sequel falls short: the visually referenced destruction of the Tokyo Tower by Gyaos was ballsy, impressive, and one of the most memorable images of the daikaiju genre, and ATTACK OF LEGION's attempt to one-up it by replacing Sendai with a smoking crater (seen only in a black-and-white newspaper cutaway) is fairly disappointing. Statistically it's bigger, but dramatically and visually it is not. It doesn't help that the city of Sendai is an utterly blank spot in my cultural consciousness.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: The acting is pretty fun, which is a good enough alternative to the genre standard "pretty boring". Miki Mizuno as Honami has a playful edge as does Mitsuru Fukikoshi as the painfully nerdy Obitsu. A particularly entertaining moment comes when the army men show up to visit Honami and are silently menaced by her father solely for having the nerve to visit a woman at her home.

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: Gamera's skin-crawling defeat as he's swallowed in a husk of swarming, sparking bugs creates a kind of tension I never imagined I'd see: daikaiju body horror. There is a prolonged sequence of shots of Gamera stumbling blind and helpless under an insectoid horde, shrieking in pain, all to the effect of a more vulnerable, not necessarily humanized but certainly enlivened hero. Legion doesn't just drive off Gamera, it hurts him, and in doing so imbues Gamera with humanity's pain.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: The character who christens the invaders "Legion" does so by explicitly recounting the New Testament exorcism where the name originates. Typically I'd feel unbearably philistine invoking the Bible with regard to giant monsters, but GAMERA 2 went and got its hands dirty all by itself. And, of all things, our giant turtle hero is indeed rather Christ-like, reproducing not only the exorcism of demons but also the Lord's most famous routine, The Resurrection. At their first encounter, Gamera is swarmed by Legion, weighed down by the innumerable abominations to inevitably be purged in the flames of death. The sacrifice is made while literally bearing mankind's woes, a reference to Christ and His Cross as explicit as they come. Gamera's death doesn't extinguish the evil, but it stays destruction long enough that he can be called back amid the vigil of the faithful. The petrified giant miraculously breaks through his ashen burial like Christ casting aside an entombing boulder, in the process severing his psychic link to Asagi and the rest of humanity. Liberated from mortal incarnation, the reborn spirit rockets off to preach life after death - but while Jesus was content to boringly haunt his disciples, Gamera's gospel comes with a significantly larger helping of lazers. His final attack technique, which I won't spoil, is summoned forth from the life-force of the entire planet, a symbolic transcendence to omnipresent all-powerful godliness. Asagi's bloodied hand as she clutches the remains of Gamera's pendant ominously suggests the grave cost of this resurrection, but that's a topic to be addressed in the sequel.

I don't know why GAMERA 2 is a Passion allegory, but there it is.

Note to future self on watching GAMERA 2:
Yourself: I was ready for GAMERA 2 to be a fun watch, but I wasn't expecting to come out hotly anticipating THE REVENGE OF IRIS. That ATTACK OF LEGION pursues a continuing story arc rather than a permutable formula makes the series (or at least the first 2/3 of it) an honest-to-god trilogy, and that's something I can get behind in any franchise.

It looks like being sick and working the weekend was a blessing in disguise, kind of, because I just got word that PSYCHO will be visiting the theater this month (if you've got a local Cinemark, check it out!). To pass the time, Greg will rejoin me next week to take on DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

Other movies you already should've seen:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
GREMLINS (1984)
TERMINATOR (1984)
RETURN TO OZ (1985)
COMING TO AMERICA (1988)
DICK TRACY (1990)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
THE MATRIX (1999)

Movies You Already Should've Seen: BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

PSYCHO had to be put on hold due to technical difficulties, so the pickup movie for the week is the finale of the original Planet of the Apes saga. Sigh. No offense intended to Alfred Hitchcock and associates.

BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
Written by: John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington; story by Paul Dehn; characters by Pierre Boulle

BFTPOTA in one sentence:
Yourself: It would seem the poster artist is the only one who figured out we wanted to see apes fighting the actual Army.

Golem: A final climactic battle to decide the fate of mankind, or maybe just have a dopey skirmish.

Here's a story about me and BFTPOTA:
Yourself: This series has been surprisingly interesting. I can't think of another franchise that comes this far afield in five installments or in five years, let alone in five installments in five years.

Golem: While watching BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, I was consistently engaged (if confused). The next day, I had no reflections on it. I can't think of another film that has had so little effect on me.

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: It would be senseless to even begin to describe how out-of-continuity this movie is. It adds up with basically nothing we've seen set before or after. Considering how thoroughly CONQUEST mangled the story and knowing that this is the endpoint anyway, it's hard to care. Jesus. I'm still not over the plague of cats and dogs thing.

Unfortunately, the setup is reliant enough on a continuity that doesn't exist that it interferes with the otherwise extremely simple story. There is nothing to lead me to believe we're looking at the final apes and humans on earth except that one character says it, so why is everyone so eager to go to war? I can see Central City being nuked to quell the uprising from last movie, but you're telling me so was every other city and town in the world? What? Why and how? Isn't the story of how we blew it all up more interesting that Caesar's petty saga of hiding in the trees and covering his ears? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the premise of this series is "what if apes were mankind", not "aren't apes way more interesting than humans and don't you wish humans would just die already so we can get ape stories?" While we're at it, why is "Ape City" so sucky? We see that plenty of the old city's technology still works, and even the assumption that apes reject human tech doesn't fit with their use of guns, English, and, apparently, general relativity. Can't they build a proper house or at least work steel? And was Caesar's "revolt" really such a success if, of all the ape slaves in the entire world, only like a hundred survived? That's not really an ape conquest. If I were a human living in Ape City I'd be like hey seriously fuck you guys.

Still, low expectations (and budgets) taken into account the only genuine disappointment in BATTLE is the lack of a series' trademark shockingly dark ending. You might consider humans and apes living in harmony to be shockingly dark, but I'd say it adds to the inconsequential TV-episode feel of the film. And god knows it doesn't provide any closure to our ongoing arc. The happily-ever-after frame is set in 2670 AD, still 1300 years before the events of the first movie. Come on, this is the franchise that blew up the planet in the second installment! Rock the boat a little for Christ's sake.

Golem: Yourself told me that this section isn't literally just for bitching. But then, what else is there to do with BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES? At first, the editing holds together well enough, but after our protagonists escape the Central City ruins, scenes stop sticking together. Are the rude jump cuts there to indicate parallel time? Then why are things so different as we jump back and forth? Does it really take 30 seconds to report intelligence on the ape city? How long does it take Cornelius to die? It's just hard to gather sufficient context sometimes. The film isn't hopeless or broken, just really, really rough around the edges.

(Irrelevant note: I just saw AIRPLANE!, where the presses run off newspapers to report on a plane in crisis mid-flight. That's the sense of time distortion that I got from BATTLE.)

Even then, I don't feel great with the plot elements that do properly flow. An Ape City party travels to Central City to unearth historical tapes from Caesar's parents. The scene is played without any ceremony. We already know what's going to happen, so the important part is Caesar's reaction, which we get disappointingly little of. And hey, why did it take so long for MacDonald to bring those tapes to his attention anyway?

And any roughness in the plot is hard to excuse because so much of it is a toned down, less cool version of BENEATH. The one thing BATTLE has going for it is the inner conflict of Ape City humans and Ape City apes, which sadly gets lost in the complexity of the film.

Maybe the best part is Caesar using a water hose to hold back Central City guards. Crossing the Rubicon, indeed!

The aesthetic is basically:
Yourself: The rugged, Tarzan-like feel to the ape village comes through much better in interiors and nighttime shots, because the grassy and sparingly forested shooting location looks like my parents' backyard.

The shadowy scenes set beneath the ruins preserve the gunmetal, mechanical, claustrophobic look of the city itself. They are not better or worse than the spacey expansive tunnels of BENEATH, but certainly more appropriate for the new gritty continuity.

Golem: I wondered if the desert shots were supposed to evoke the first film. Aside from the above, the aesthetic is also defined by humanity's declining fashion sense and the increase in unconvincing ape suits.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: It's kinda funny to think that in a franchise called "Planet of the Apes" it's been two full movies since we had an ape civilization or anything resembling a new ape character. So I was pretty darn thrilled just to be watching apes in their natural [future hyper-evolved] habitat. My new favorite would have to be Mandemus, the Yoda-like guardian of the armory who ties up visitors with an endless stream of pointless questions. The new gorilla villain Aldo was a fun blowhard too, even if I can't tell him apart from BENEATH's equivalent.

This is not any one performer's fault, but I found it hilariously bold that the filmmakers would send humans playing apes climbing up trees. Twice. I mean normally I just forget that we're supposed to be seeing apes, but watching a person kinda sorta try to affect a simian manner of climbing calls attention to it in a really bad way.

Golem: Here we have our first ape child. (We skipped over Caesar's childhood, after all.) Caesar's son, Cornelius, plays a pivotal role, fitting well in a cheesy film. His innocent approach to topics such as war come off as genuine, even in a staged kind of way, if that makes any sense. His hapless discovery of Aldo's plot does have a tragic hint to it, making for one of the scenes that did end up gripping me. His pleading is creepy.

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: There's a ROAD WARRIOR-esque sequence where the human army and its salvaged machinery trek out of the dead city across the desert. It relies on a matte painting as ridiculous as many we've seen in the series, but I still like the design of the twisted metal hulk birthing this lumbering misfit convoy led by a school bus. It really embodies the mutant nature of the humans clinging to their past existence, clashing with the fresh, idyllic air of Ape City. Sadly, the "army" looks a lot more budget-priced in the battle scenes.

Golem: Tons of shots inside Central City use the ol' dutch angle. Tight corridors make for long shots. The entire sequence builds tension with dramatic irony (you can see the governor order attacks on an unsuspecting Ape City party), and it comes to a head while the Ape City party wanders through a hallway of sickly people. They're all laying down in cramped bunks, and it's hard to tell why. Are they just resting? Are they sick? Why do they just let the intruders through? That last question in particular lingers for a while before a guard leaps out of the mass and assaults the Ape City crew. The layering of "why are things this way?" and "when will they attack already?" really got me.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: This is far removed from anything resembling science fiction, but we're at least back to ape history running a course tragically parallel to man's. We see from the classroom introduction that the tension between Aldo and Caesar ultimately leading to the broach of the Main Ape Rule ("Ape does not kill ape") stems from the treatment of humans. Inequality fucks up their society and Caesar is punished for believing his own noble goals can iron out the wrinkles.

Golem: The urge to kill is inherent to life. Is it better to be Aldo, who lives in perfect awareness of his urges? Or should we be Caesar, who suppresses them and in the process lies to himself?

Note to future self on watching BFTPOTA:
Yourself: It was nice to be reminded of the joy of apekind. That alone raises this above the previous two movies, which felt tonally detached from the gonzo fun where the franchise started. While BATTLE doesn't have the means to reach nearly as high as it wants, it at least has the right spirit.

Golem: I'm not going to put this movie in the gonzo range, but apes are fun to watch. The joy of this movie is almost entirely in watching it. It's fleeting, but good while it lasts.

Come back next week to find out what Greg and Greg think of I'm gonna be pissed if it's not PSYCHO.

Other movies you already should've seen:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
GREMLINS (1984)
TERMINATOR (1984)
RETURN TO OZ (1985)
COMING TO AMERICA (1988)
DICK TRACY (1990)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
THE MATRIX (1999)