The Lindsay Brothers

Month: November 2010

  • Planet of the Apes

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    94

    What would it be like it if you weren’t the most dominant species on the planet?  You might be hunted for food, domesticated as a household pet, or experimented on by cosmetic companies.  And how bad would you feel if those excruciating make-up tests still made people look like this?:

    Welcome to the Planet of the Apes, where the above is actually considered fantastic make-up.  In the bizarro world of Hollywood, they actually give you honorary Oscars for that, which is strange, since at first blush, Planet of the Apes doesn’t look like Oscar material.  It’s a movie with a bunch of actors dressed up as monkeys, imprisoning other actors dressed up like idiot humans (insert your own actor joke).  And yet 40 years later, the movie is a hallmark of American cinema, enshrined by the Library of Congress, honored as having one of the best film scores by the AFI, and quoted by millions of people every day who want to call their boss a “dirty ape.”

    Apes are actually quite fastidious.

    The movie begins several thousand years in the future, with a group of astronauts crash landing on a planet.  This happens with some frequency in sci-fi stories.  Contrary to The Right Stuff, fiction writers believe that astronauts are actually among the universe’s worst pilots.  They never simply land on the planet.  They always crash.

    Also common in sci-fi stories are planets that are well suited for human living, and the Planet of the Apes is no different.  The oxygen is breathable, the soil is found to produce vegetation, etc.  In fact, there are already humans living on the planet, though they are mute, feral, and quite fetching in their little buckskin miniskirts.

    Meow.

    Like all good Twilight Zone episodes (the first draft of Planet of the Apes was written by Rod Serling), this is a story where the hero is the same and everyone else is different.  The hero is, of course, Charlton Heston, playing the part of the incompetent astronaut pilot who is immediately captured by great desert warriors.  I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but the humans are not the planet’s dominant species.

    Give up? It's the armadillos!

    On this planet,  it is the apes that enslave the humans, and they’re pretty mean about it, so shut your trap, Jane Goodall.  The apes are quite surprised to find that one of their new captives can read and write, and even more surprised to find that he once went to flight school.  They want to keep this smart human quiet so as not to disrupt the ape supremacy thing that they’ve got going.  They have many methods for doing this, such as hitting him in the throat, locking him in a cage, and sentencing him to castration.  But along the way, Charlton (whose character is named Taylor) befriends some orangutan scientists (as well as the pretty gal in the next cell) and sets off to discover the true history of the planet.

    "Uh, I think I'd prefer the cosmetic testing."

    There is the obligatory chase scene, the showdown, the saving of the bad guy’s life, the return of the favor, and of course the discovery that humans were once dominant, but have fallen by the wayside, presumably because they did not scratch their armpits enough.

    The big finale contains one final shock, in which we find out that Rosebud was actually the name of Bruce Willis’s ghost (just kidding!  That ending would make no sense!).  Everyone on Earth knows this spoiler by now, but just in case you’re a monkey who only recently crash landed on our planet, I’ll let you in on the big twist.

    When trapped in quicksand, raise one arm while keeping the other close to your chest.

    The planet of the apes is actually Earth.  We know this because Charlton Heston stumbles onto the ruin of the Statue of Liberty lying on the beach (remember, it’s several thousand years in the future).  First time audience members always gasp in shock, partly because we don’t like the idea of Bubbles the Chimp running for Congress, but also because Taylor is apparently such a bad pilot that instead of exploring new solar systems, he flew in a giant circle before crashing our tax dollars into the desert.

    One has to admit that Bubbles is five times less creepy in this pose than Emmanuel Lewis.

    Next up, #93!

  • The Right Stuff

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    95

    The Right Stuff is a book written in the seventies about the sixties, which was made into a movie in the 80s, took the 90s off and then was read by me sometime in 2010. It is about the mercury seven and is very similar in to Apollo thirteen in tone. All that being said, it is anything but by the numbers. It was written by Tom Wolfe (who was indeed raised by Wolfes), but is not related to Virginia Woolf even though he was born in Virginia.

    Seeing as he's an artist, Tom Wolfe must always be photographed in black and white from a low angle.

    Though there’s a lot of action in the book, it is actually really about the titular “right stuff” that may or may not be possessed by certain men in a certain profession. Mainly test pilots in the late fifties and early sixties. Lucky for us, that righteous stuff, even in story form, cannot be stated–only shown. And so we are treated with one thrilling story after another. The most thrilling of them occur with a man named Chuck Yeager at the controls. These are some of the best flying stories I’ve ever read.

    Chuck Yeager's first attempt at the altitude record

    The ego of the fighter pilot is said to be immense and having seen Top Gun, I feel qualified to agree with that assessment. Which is why it is all the more shocking, that Yeager the best star pilot in the galaxy was not chosen. And because the ego of the fighter pilot is so immense, so are all the other pilots equally shocked. And because the fighter pilot’s ego is so immense, it is not shocking that a great many of them (Yeager included) didn’t even sign up to be astronauts in the first place. Their immense egos, you see, would not let them look beyond the fact that the first flights would be merely “manned” not technically “piloted.”

    The other pilot's egos were writing checks that their bodies couldn't cash.

    And so we are left with the Mercury Seven. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Out of the seven, I was familiar with merely three of them. And truthfully I suspect I only know Gus Grissom because he and I are both from Indiana and we had to learn about him in fourth grade (Thank you Mrs. Quakenbush). The other two Alan Shepard and John Glenn should be recognizable to most everyone who grew up in America.

    Seriously, this is them. They're doing some survival training and parts of their clothes are made out of parachutes!

    Though I remembered it vaguely once it was stated, I do admit to being a bit surprised upon being reminded that Shepard was the first American in space. For some reason, I thought it was John Glenn. Wolfe goes into why I thought that. Turns out John Glenn was the only one who really understood what was going on. Knew what the mercury program was and actually worked to make sure it was perceived in the way it was. Even though there is no proof that getting up at four in the morning and running for 2 hours helps you to sit weightless in a floating capsule thousands of miles above the earth. It’s part of the right stuff.

    At any rate, Americans liked him so much that they simply moved the goal for glory from being the first American in space to being the first American to ORBIT the earth, which he was. Also they kind of ignored that the Russians did all this before them and still do to this day. So sometimes you’ll hear that Glenn was the first man to orbit the earth, be annoying and correct those people when this happens. Tell them he was the first American to orbit the earth. Then scoff and say “Haven’t you read The Right Stuff?’

    Kudos to you if you're an American and know this man's name.

    The Right Stuff goes into a lot of territory, from the astronaut’s political hangers on to the pecking order of the astronaut’s wives. Their celebrity status and their ticker tape parades, but the best part is always the stories about the speed of the rockets and the test planes. It’s no mistake that NASA called it Project Mercury. The Right Stuff is the first on our list to be a true story, but it captures the awe factor of the space race. Especially in the present age, after we’ve been to the moon and shrugged it off as being boring. The Right Stuff is able to make even the creakiest of envelope pushing stories sound thrilling. The breaking of the sound barrier, or tumbling slowly head over heels at midnight over Australia, The sunsets in space, and what to do when you’re plane stalls out and the chute won’t open and you’re a hundred miles from home and 25,000 miles above the open desert.

    Next up: Ninety-four!

  • Gulliver’s Travels

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    96

    One suspects that Lemuel Gulliver did not have great guidance counselors in high school. Here is a man who believes the only proper response to a failed business model is to become a sailor. It’s like if all those Enron guys had joined up on some random ship rather than going to prison. Preferably the Titanic.

    If the ancient seafarers thought that Jonah was such bad luck that he needed to be tossed over, imagine what they would have thought of Jonathan Swift’s titular hero. During his travels, Gulliver is shipwrecked, mutinied, or attacked by pirates no less than four times. The guy is a walking disaster. If Gulliver ever met Inspector Clouseau, the resulting explosion would be roughly equivalent to six hydrogen bombs.

    He may be tied down and surrounded by killer Smurfs, but he's still gracious enough to sit up and smile for the camera.

    But maybe it’s not all bad, because every time Gulliver ends up in the water, he usually washes ashore on some strange island that nobody has ever heard of (probably because it has an unpronounceable name like Brobdingnag or Houyhnhnm). Each island is roughly characterized by having people drastically different than Gulliver himself; i.e. their people do not run off and join the navy every time they bounce a check.

    Lilliput is the first island Gulliver “discovers,” as well as the most famous to those who are marginally familiar with the story. Lilliputians are tiny people who tie Gulliver down with thread when he is unconscious, and then proceed to starve themselves by bringing Gulliver all of their food. They also build a giant wagon for Gulliver to ride in as he goes to visit the king, which makes about as much sense as me having my dog tow me on a bicycle from the bedroom to the bathroom. They waste all this energy and food for the same reason any government wastes resources when presented with something strange and different: They want to weaponize it.

    The Lilliputians are at war with another race, and a giant who can stomp the enemy houses to pieces just by going for a morning jog figures to put them over the top. In this manner, Gulliver’s Travels is pretty much the Godzilla story told from the point of view of Godzilla. Maybe if the Japanese had stopped screaming and firing rockets, they might have learned that Godzilla was merely a failed businessman whose sailboat just happened to spring a leak.

    In the monster version of "Castaway," Godzilla is Tom Hanks and your apartment building is Wilson

    The reason for the war has something to do with a dispute on the right way to crack eggs. Hey, wars have been fought for more ridiculous reasons, such as control of Texas. I suspect this is some sort of satire on the part of Swift, but the symbolism got muddled right around the part where Gulliver is sentenced to death for putting out a house fire by peeing on it (I’m not making this up).

    Did I mention that Gulliver excels at vulgarity in his travels? After leaving Lilliput, he later finds himself on the island of Brobdingnag, in which Gulliver is tiny and everyone else is a giant, providing some insight into just how willing Jonathan Swift is to beat a good idea to death. Here Gulliver gets to frolic around on giant naked women and be disgusted by them. He is especially disturbed by their peeing. Maybe it will help him gain perspective on which hose to use the next time he sees a tiny house fire.

    Gulliver makes a few other random stops (and ruins several more boats) before his last adventure lands him on the island of Houyhnhnm, which as you might guess is populated by philosophic talking horses. As you might also guess, Gulliver fits right in. The horses teach him that all humans are idiots, and Gulliver apparently recognizes this in himself. He in turn teaches them the English Constitution, proving that philosophic talking horses and cursed English nincompoops are perhaps intellectually equivalent.

    A Houyhnhnm will never speak unless he has something to say.

    While Gulliver’s Travels is a well-known tale and has been adapted many times, it has never really found much success outside of the original book. Its reputation as a children’s story is a little ironic, given all the peeing (or maybe not so ironic after all). As fate would have it, there is a big budget movie coming out later this year. Like most Gulliver adaptations, it seems to focus exclusively on Lilliput, but since it stars Jack Black, it also bodes well for some good urine jokes.

    Already looks better than Nacho Libre

    Next up, number ninety-five!