April 22, 2003
Important hiring announcement.
Due to the overwhelming response to this blog-in-progress, I am pleased to announce the hiring of a full-time assistant, Sparkles the chimp, who will assume the duties of uploading images, answering your emails, and, eventually, I hope making the occasional post. I also plan on training him for my upcoming rodeo and wild west show, as you can see here. Please join me in welcoming Sparkles to this blog.
While we are on the subject of simians, I have something to get off my chest. Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake--which I finally forced myself to watch on HBO recently-- might be the worst movie I have ever seen. Well, okay, not as bad as Nurse Sluts XII, but still. (And all I have to say about that is, if you're not going to follow the formula that made the first 11 so successful, please, don't waste my time.)
I grew up with The Planet of the Apes. I saw all the movies, repeatedly. I had the bubblegum cards. I even watched the TV show. In addition, I used to love Tim Burton. Edward Scissorhands? Rawk. Ed Wood? Brilliant. I even liked the first Batman. I liked it so much, in fact, that for two weeks straight I walked around Berkeley like this:
But clearly, Burton has lost it now. Planet of the Apes, the remake, is a mess. It's not funny. It's not scary. It's neither faithful to the spirit of the original, nor is it successful as a "parody." Obviously, he didn't even know what tone to take, which is kind of a problem if you're the one making the movie. I wish he had actually played it straight, personally. He should have just made a super-scary horror film. Do we really need ironic wink-wink movies based on other movies? Enough. Scare the sh*t out of us. That's what we really need.