Planet of the Apes (1968) vs. Planet of the Apes (2001)

For Spectrum Culture's Re-Make/Re-Model series, I have tried to discuss remakes with artistic credibility in their own right, to show that not every retread is simply a lazy cash-in on an established property. I wanted to find any such merit in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, which I had not seen since its release when I was 12. But man, was it worth all the disdain I had for the movie even as a tween. Where the original film combines several major subtexts (white slavery panic, nuclear holocaust fears) into solid, simple high-concept film, Burton's has no central point to make, content to just monkey around, as it were. It's a shame, as the production design and prosthetic work are so wonderful that, stylistically, this blows the recent reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes out of the water. But even that inconsistently plotted movie comes off as a classic next to Burton's movie.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Greatest & Did You Hear about the Morgans?: Numerals

You can do these activities separately or together if you want. The Greatest is more challenging for the numbers are long and you also have dates and times. The one from Did You Hear about the Morgans? is much easier, it is suitable for beginners, but you must tell the students that they don't have to understand everything, just the numbers. It is a great listening exercise and you can practice this point in a meaningful way.

A. Try to complete the blanks below with the given numbers.

18 - 216 - 164 - 25,920 - 311,040 - 08/18/2008 - 2:30 pm - 02/12/2009 - 119 - 2,136 - 128,160

1. How old is the girl?

She is _______ years old, _________ hours, ________ weeks, ______ days, ____ hours.

2. When did she arrive at his door?

She arrived home on ________, at __________.

3. When will she have the baby?

She will deliver the baby on ___________. She still has ______ days ,_______ hours, ______ minutes to go before she has the baby.

B. Now watch the movie segment from the movie "The Greatest" and check your answers.

C. Now write the numbers, dates and times in full.

D. Watch the movie segment from the movie "Did You Hear about the Morgans?" and complete the information below with four numbers said in the bingo. Write the number and then write it in full.

1. I _________ - _______________________

2. N _________ - _______________________

3. B _________ - _______________________

4. G _________ - _______________________

E. Play a bingo



WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - THE GREATEST

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? - NUMERALS

Answer Key:

A.

Correct order: 18 - 216 - 164 - 25,920 - 311,040 - 08/18/2008 - 2:30 pm - 02/12/2009 - 119 - 2,136 - 128,160

C. eighteen, two hundred sixteen, a hundred sixty-four, twenty-five thousand nine hundred twenty, three hundred eleven thousand and forty, August eighteenth two thousand and eight, two-thirty pm, February twelfth two thousand and nine. a hundred nineteen, two thousand a hundred thirty-six, a hundred twenty-eight thousand a hundred sixty.

D.

1. I 18 - eighteen

2. N 32 - thirty-two

3. B 4 - four

4. G 46 - forty-six

Prince: Prince (1979)

So much of Prince's eponymous sophomore effort can be summarized by its hysterical cover. Where For You functioned as primarily a disco record, Prince fit more into the funk mold. The move from a hot and current genre to the (relatively) old-fashioned sound that helped spawned it is matched by the change from For You's blurry, flashy cover to the almost-pastel colored photograph that adorns Prince. Featuring a visibly bored Prince standing with his shirt off, the album art suggests Prince at once in his own skin (figuratively stripped down from disco to funk and literally stripped down to a bare chest) and uncomfortably and artificially donning an image in the fierce hunt for success.

That contradiction holds back Prince's second LP, but the fact that Prince is at least somewhat at home with the material marks a step up from his debut. It still sounds more like For You than Dirty Mind, but Prince shows its maker starting to consolidate his early sound into something more focused, capable of setting trends instead of merely following them. Hell, even as Prince starts to distance itself from disco, it does disco better than For You, managing to give even single-length numbers the elasticity and bounce of extended dance mixes and just having groove in the first place, an element sorely lacking from so much of the first album.

Prince opens with the extended cut of its lead single, "I Wanna Be Your Lover," instantly announcing the leap in quality and cohesion between this album and its predecessor. Adding a tighter low-end to For You's spacious synth lines, the track actually has a danceable beat to hook a crowd. Prince also develops his vocal style more, adding funkier, raunchier yowls to his slick falsetto that start to lay on the sex merely talked about in For You's more ribald tunes. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" proved to be a smash, climbing to the top of the Soul chart, going gold on its own and helping push the full LP to platinum status within months.

But it is not even remotely the highlight of the album. "Sexy Dancer" anticipates the compositional busyness that would make Prince's compositions among the densest pop ever recorded. With a female choir chanting the title over funky, spare guitar lines, programmed handclaps and drum patterns and humming synths, "Sexy Dancer" sounds more like a great b-side for Prince's next album than something from this era of his music. "Bambi," meanwhile, expands upon the rock-tinged For You closer "I'm Yours" with a much more refined guitar showcase that still makes an appearance live when Prince wants to cut loose with his axe. Best of all is "I Feel For You," which is not quite as Dirty Mind-ready as "Sexy Dancer" but is nevertheless the runaway highlight of the album. With giddy synths and a bassline that seems to pass through and back out of the song as if it were traveling in elliptical orbit around it, "I Feel For You" wouldn't fit in the arenas Prince would soon fill. But none of his songs to this point feel as primed to set a club going than this, even "I Wanna Be Your Lover," which clearly hooked listeners more.

As with For You, Prince suffers from an excess of uninspired filler. Generally, the fluff on this record rates higher than that of its predecessor: The half-rocking, half-funky "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and swooning "Still Waiting" are solid numbers that simply do not stand out the way that the superior tracks do. "With You" and "It's Gonna Be Lonely," on the other hand, start slipping from memory even before they conclude. Both recall those weighted standing punching bags that always seem about to tumble, only to frustratingly whip back to their starting point unaltered. Even they seem like early classics, however, when stacked against "When We're Dancing Close and Slow." Easily the worst song off Prince's first two albums (and several LPs beyond that), this travesty lives up to its title by listlessly trudging through its approximation of a prom night slow dance. In fact, it so captures the awkward maneuvering and desperately repressed hormones of a teenage dance that the song may actually be a brilliant work of subjectivity.

But never mind the dross; Prince clearly develops from its artistically and commercially disappointing predecessor, and if it occasionally seems over-calculated to appeal to an audience, that planning clearly worked. In going platinum, the album helped conform Warner Bros' faith in the young artist when they signed him to a three-record deal. It must have also boosted Prince's confidence, as the man who mumbled nervously at the microphone of a rehearsal show for label executives would subsequently go out and support this album, proving so popular that he soon became Rick James' opening act. Before long, Prince and his assembled band would regularly sabotage James and win the open preference of the attending audience. That is more rebellious than anything on Prince, but Prince's music would soon match this brashness, and more.

Dragon Eyes (John Hyams, 2012)

If there is any justice in this world, John Hyams will not have to suffer in his direct-to-DVD or VOD-first-release purgatory for much longer. Dragon Eyes, which creeped onto VOD without fanfare earlier this year, lacks the same physical and emotional grace as Hyams' last film, Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Made in-between that film and its upcoming sequel (due on VOD in October, though with a theatrical release of some sort(!) planned later), Dragon Eyes feels altogether rougher around the edges, with more brutish direction, stodgier writing and a few flashy visual gimmicks that Hyams himself says were not his doing.

Even so, Hyams' filler is a high-concept piece, a loose retelling of Yojimbo set among American gangs that trades samurai skills for MMA combat. MMA fighter Cung Le stars as Hong, a mysterious individual who shows up in the gang-run town of St. Jude and promptly begins kicking everyone's ass until he manages to anger even the corrupt police chief who controls everything, Mr. V (Peter Weller). Flashbacks to Hong's training in prison under mentor Tiano (Jean-Claude Van Damme) break up Hong's rampages with martial arts philosophizing, and a few extra kicks for good measure. Other flashbacks providing Hong's backstory manage to be even more clichéd, mostly silent interludes that gradually piece together what sent the man to jail in the first place.

So, yes, nothing in Dragon Eyes has the unexpected gravitas of Dolph Lundgren's grasping regret in Regeneration, but as a straight-ahead action movie, Hyams is still a director to watch. He loves his big, open spaces, making even Tiano's cell back in the prison large enough to almost seem cozy. The confrontation that closes the second act occurs in a darkened warehouse that seems to stretch into inky blackness so deep the area almost recalls the matte-painted infinity of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Over time, even the excessive color grading—which washes sunny exteriors in spray-tanned bronze and Mr. V's seedy deals in avaricious green—come to fit their settings.

But the real draw is, of course, the action, which Hyams continues to film in such a way as to elicit thoughts of the genre's 1980s heyday even as he puts his own imprint on the genre. Hyams' sequences do not lack the rapid-fire editing and hand-held, close-up framing that defines so much action filmmaking today. He merely uses the technique as punctuation, not the whole damn sentence. This allows Hyams to use "chaos cinema" flourishes as they are intended, to provide real-time flow between thought, action and result that can actually make a fight more fluid, not less. One slick movie—Hong disarming one thug, ejecting the clip and throwing the empty gun at another—is performed so swiftly that its comic principles take an additional second to catch up to what happened, yet the smaller movements performed in his maneuver are clearly shot enough to give the joke the clarity it needs to be funny at all. On the flip side, Hyams also includes an extended take Steadicam sequence that serves as a reminder of his capable skills as a choreographer.

Dragon Eyes betrays its DTV financing and lowered expectations in a way that Regeneration never did, yet such phenomenal action staging continues to stretch the boundaries and assumed worth of that format. In fact, though this is the lesser film of Hyams' last two efforts, it may be better at demonstrating the kind of spontaneity and low-scale creative freedom DTV, VOD and the like could afford genre filmmakers who don't need $100 million worth of effects to cover up their mediocrity. Nevertheless, it is hard not to imagine what Hyams might do if he actually got his hands on a $50 million budget, rather than making movies that look like he received $50 million instead of 10-15.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration (John Hyams, 2010)

John Hyams' Universal Soldier: Regeneration, the third official installment of the Universal Soldier series and fifth overall, was released ignominiously direct-to-video in the United States and Europe and got only the softest theatrical release anywhere else. Yet this quietly dumped sequel to a long-forgotten franchise, made for a paltry $14 million, displays a better grasp of 1980s action filmmaking and more visceral pleasure than just about anything to come out of America in a long, long time. And even if it did not meet this level of quality, how many direct-to-DVD cash-ins also contain credible aesthetic and thematic nods to John Carpenter and Blade Runner?

Opening starkly on a young woman's face as Hyams' camera gently glides with her through a museum, Universal Soldier: Regeneration has just enough time to recall John Carpenter with its 'Scope-framed tracking shot before the rug gets pulled out from under the film and all hell breaks loose. As this girl and her brother, the children of Russia's prime minister, head out with their escort to return home, a reinforced SUV pulls out of nowhere and slams into their vehicle, killing a bodyguard as armed terrorists leap out and abduct the children. An ensuing car chase is an object lesson in how to start an action film: all chaotic but carefully ordered cuts of traded machine gunfire and sudden swerves as civilian cars suddenly stumbling into this fracas cause problems for police and abductor alike and require swift visual recalibration to deal with these new objects.

That sequence contains more than its share of decidedly un-'80s camera movements and editing, yet the problem with the contemporary trend of handheld, visceral action has never been its use but its overuse. Judicious shot patterns help clarify this and other action showcases in the film while still intentionally disorienting the viewer. The constant entrance and exit of other cars in this early scene serves to constantly upend the action but also displays a carefully choreographed stunt rather than a haphazard maelstrom of movement.

Even so, what makes a more memorable impression are those aforementioned moments of Carpenterian camerawork that meshes the dulled metal color palette to create an unexpected sense of melancholy. Hyams then parlays this mood into an elegiac view of the film's returning action superstars, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. JCVD returns as UniSol Luc Devereux, now old and weary and, as is the fate of all once-revolutionary technology, grown obsolete. Called into action when a rogue scientist helps Russian terrorists unleash a next-generation universal soldier capable of tearing through the old models like paper, Luc finds himself caught between involuntary inactivity in his rehabilitation from a life of war to his outclassed status on the battlefield he returns to with equal reluctance.

Lundgren makes an even bigger impression with a fraction of the screen time. Playing a cloned version of the psychopath Andrew Scott, Lundgren downplays his genetic copy's mental instability for existential angst. Rather than a mindlessly violent killing machine, Lundgren's Scott asks questions so lofty they sound rhetorical until he acts out aggressively when no one can answer him. Lundgren's vague musings and almost tragic inability to think of anything other than his own existence recall Rutger Hauer's performance as a dying Replicant in Blade Runner. There are even similarities in action—Lundgren dispatches his "father" in the same manner Hauer vents his fears and anger on his creator. When JCVD and Lundgren finally get to fight, both seem so enveloped in their own regrets that the other person serves more as an interruption of their own pain than a nemesis.

By actually engaging with the realities of its stars' aging, Universal Soldier: Regeneration finds ways to  update well-worn material while also having fun with old forms. As intriguing as its character development is, Regeneration never flags as an action film. Blunt, forward-motion direction reflects the juggernaut intensity of Andrei Arlovski's unnamed next-gen engineered soldier, while JCVD's more nuanced tactics get the carefully organized shots to match. His tear through the bad guys' compound at Chernobyl in the climax operates through a simple but balletic entwining of action and camera movement, with the camera gliding around with Luc as he knifes a terrorist and constantly shifts his hiding spots to wait for the screams to draw the next hapless victim (and piece of bait). These days, such spare, effective technique in an action movie is as beguiling the deep pondering of people (or clones) in same.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)

I have not seen Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke in five years, and in that time I had not only forgotten what a superb documentary it is, but also how profoundly I was affected by Hurricane Katrina. Rage and sorrow run through Lee's film, their purest outlet in his filmography since Do the Right Thing. But Lee also focuses his emotional response to the gargantuan blunder by interviewing such a wide variety of people that blame is cross-examined, shifted around, and finally rendered both unclear and sharply honed. One of Lee's finest works, if not his best.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Premium Rush (David Koepp, 2012)

David Koepp's Premium Rush feels like the first posthumous tribute to the work of the late Tony Scott. Unintentional, of course, but beneficial for those of us already missing the British director and wondering if anyone could match, much less exceed, his approach to action filmmaking. Koepp certainly cannot top Scott, but for a time, but it appears he picked up a thing or two while doing uncredited rewrites for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Stylistically, Premium Rush feels like a throwback to Enemy of the State-era Scott, with its constant zooms in and out of satellite views of New York City as a GPS plots courses for the bike messengers on whom the film focuses. Narratively, though, it calls to mind Scott's fondness for regularly making epic the banal occupations of working-class stiffs. In bike couriers, Koepp nearly manages to surpass Scott in choice of subject. Not only are these men and women paid wretchedly for grueling work, they may be the most hated group in New York City, foe to pedestrian and driver alike.

Premium Rush gets off to a great start, following reckless, brake-less rider Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) barreling nonstop through traffic-gnarled streets as he casually gets into phoned arguments with his girlfriend Vanessa (Dania Ramirez, also playing a bike messenger), pissing matches with ripped colleague Manny (Wolé Parks) and trying to get more work (and cash) from his flippant boss (Aasif Mandvi). Like Scott, Koepp casually employs a multiracial cast not for the sake of commentary but merely as a reflection of an increasingly diverse America. And like Scott, Koepp wastes no time introducing the central, driving conflict, embodied in this case by Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon), a crooked cop who attempts to intercept a letter entrusted to Wilee by a friend (Jamie Chung) in order to pay off some gambling debts he owes to Chinese mobsters.

All of this is communicated in mere minutes, with breakneck speed but visual fluidity that keeps everything coherent even as digital cameras placed low to the ground race feverishly along with Wilee's split-second reroutes around traffic jams (including visualized what-if paths that all lead to crashes until Wilee finds the perfect escape). Time stamps on-screen show a realistic passage of time as these characters pedal miles and miles at a time, but Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt's editing gives the early material, and the first chase between Wilee, Monday and a hapless bike cop who gets drawn into Wilee's dangerous evasive maneuvers is among the most thrilling sequences of the summer.

Then, the pace completely collapses. Koepp starts throwing to flashbacks that begin at the dizzying, slick speed of the what came before that soon turn to plodding, wholly unnecessary backstory. Koepp, a screenwriter by trade, perhaps feels the need to overcompensate as a director, to show Monday getting into debts, or the reason Nima has to send such a valuable package to a mysterious person in Chinatown. But these are matters summed up in single sentences, and to devote minutes to Monday stumbling around Chinatown dropping stacks of cash on games or Nima's issues with authorities back in China saps the momentum from the film with whiplash-quickness. And even when the film gets the thread back, it moves into much duller midpoint sequence that makes Willee race a belligerently irritating Manny for the object now revealed to have deep personal consequences. Manny's incessant boasts and refusal to stop only serve to derail an already sidetracked movie.

At last, though, Koepp and co. live up to the early promise when Manny's insipid chase is cut short by police and Wilee gradually recruits every bike messenger in the city to help his cause. Gordon-Levitt and Shannon even get to share a deliciously ludicrous torture scene that lets Shannon jettison what little restraint he had shown to this point. Compared to the other talky moments of the film, this bit flows into the action rather than interrupting it. A chase out of police impound manages to top even the early promise of the first sequence. In such moments, Premium Rush displays a physicality and ingenuity so sorely missing from most of the bloated blockbusters released this year. A brief outtake during the credits of Gordon-Levitt proudly brandishing an open wound received from a sudden journey through a cab's rear windshield is worth more than all the CGI in the world.