This morning while driving to work, I finally hit 5000 miles on my car’s odometer.

You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?

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Semper fi, Esposito. Semper fi.

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“Damn them all! Damn them all to hell!”

Yeah!

Planet of the Apes at the Mann Village in Westwood was an experience. I’d always loved going to movie premieres in Westwood. A rambunctious college crowd always makes an otherwise generic film a moviegoing experience. It turns into a fantastic experience if the movie turns out to be a crowd pleaser, which Apes turned out to be.

The line was already long by the time Jo, her friend Ed, and I showed up two hours before the movie. Back in college, I’d typically reserve three hours for a movie with this much potential for attracting the college kids, so I wasn’t surprised. Kiyong had arrived earlier and ensured a better line placement. Stephanie had tried to buy tickets to the 10:30 show at 6pm and therefore failed. When I asked why she didn’t just buy it online, she pleaded the $1.00 service charge as a reason. Luckily, another friend of Jo’s (of which she has many and quite a few were sporadically placed throughout the length of the line) found an extra ticket for Stephanie to buy … with the extra $1.00 charge because it was an online ticket. I tried to give her an extra buck, stating this was what she wanted to save that got her into this mess in the first place, to which she called me mean. Heh. It’s fun to be a villain. Angie and Nhat joined us minutes before the doors were opened.

Inside, a beach ball was inflated and began bounding about the crowd. A couple of guys started shrieking like apes and swatting the ball in earnest, much to the amusement of the audience. Then a theater guy came and caught the ball as it sailed across the aisle. Boo! Boo! went the cries to no avail. Then another theater person came and asked the couple of shrieking apes to step outside for a talk. Hiss! Boo!

Two minutes passed and suddenly another beach ball was sailed through the air.

“The crowd goes wild!”

Four theater people, two to each aisle, like the Nazis theater people become in the summertime, thundered down the aisles and attempted to grab the ball. Five minutes of “No! No! Yes! Ah! Yay!” went by until the lights began to darken and the ball was allowed to be caught. The necessary boos and hisses were given but immediately drowned by the applause for darkening of the theater.

While I’m old enough to sometimes want to just go see a movie, I did find that night very enjoyable. Nostalgia is always fun.

Oh, the movie.

The movie was fun. An expensive B-movie done with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. I mean, c’mon, apes for god’s sake. It’s worth a see, and I especially enjoyed the ending. The premise is essentially the same as the first one which starred Charlton Heston (who makes a great cameo in this remake): a spaceman lands on a planet where apes are the dominant species and humans are their slaves. Helena Bonham Carter, who I continue to stress never looked better than in this film (much to everyone’s amusement), is great as a human rights sympathizer and outstages that blonde chick they got for eyecandy. I didn’t even realize Tim Roth was Thade – though in retrospect the manic energy was definitely “Rothian”… Rick Baker gets yet another Oscar. The plot is generic, the presentation is excellent. Mark Wahlberg plays it straightlaced, the way a hero stuck in a bizarre situation is supposed to play it. And the ending? Like I said, I liked the ending. It doesn’t have to make sense, it has to make B-movie sense. And in this ever cynical world, B-movie sense somehow makes the best sense: enjoyable nonsense.

Did you get that?

Read it again.

So grab your keys and drive to your local multiplex. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the return of a genre that began as a symptom of a low budget, but has come back with a vengeance as the only way to spend millions of dollars on a sci-fi flick and pull a profit out of it.

Come with me and I’ll show something that’ll change your world forever.

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Last night, after dinner at the Little Hong Kong Cafe on Sawtelle, Angie, Jo and myself went to A Videostore Name Desire to rent a movie. Jo grabbed AntiTrust almost immediately. I couldn’t argue, since I’d never seen it (and yet I have hit the theaters to watch Hey Dude, Where’s My Car? … don’t ask) I couldn’t contest the choice. We went back to her place and popped the video in the VCR.

I have to say, I was quite surprised. Predictable plot (I won the bet on how things’d shake down concerning the chicks), but actually quite thrilling. There were perhaps three points in the film where it actually got nerve-wracking to watch. A nod to the director on that one.

It’s not in the box, it’s in the band.

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Wow! You are mean!

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When you borrow something and don’t tell anyone, they call that stealing.

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Last Friday I went to see Brother, Takeshi Kitano’s first American production, a low-budge thingy with Omar Epps in it. This movie kills. The suggestion of violence is more effective than anything you could put on the screen. Kinda like when you read a good book, your imagination is far, far worse than what some cheesy special effect can give you. The movie follows exiled yakuza Aniki Yamamoto (Beat Takeshi) to Los Angeles, a bizarre Los Angeles boasting an Italian mafia and a Little Tokyo that isn’t just a tiny commercial shopping center but a neighborhood for yakuza to prosper. What follows is the self-destruction of a man with no purpose but to kill anything that moves. Aniki is a psychopath, one you can’t help but enjoy watching as he silently, apathetically, walks through the movie to the inevitable end, located in perfect Americana at a diner alongside an endless highway. Don’t expect any real sense of meaning from this film. It has moments, but it also has equal moments of Hollywoodish crap (enjoyable Hollywoodish crap, but crap nonetheless). Fun movie, and perhaps one of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen.

I followed that up with America’s Sweethearts, which I excused as a John Cusack film. Ironically enough, it WAS a John Cusack film. Julia didn’t make much of presence until the last twenty minutes of the movie, which, I have to admit, did show why she gets such a big paycheck. But honestly, Billy Crystal and Seth Green did a lot of legwork in this uneven “romantic comedy.” Alan Arkin and Christopher Walken do great cameos, Hank Azaria is splendid. And I will always be a fan of John Cusack, even if he’s missing the presence of Piven in this outing (to be corrected with Serendipity, which may be total crap, but I’ll go see it anyway).

And that was the weekend in movies. Outside of that, I went clotheshopping since I hadn’t in, oh, months. Need some new shirts and pants, ’specially if I’m to go on vacation next month to Manila and Tokyo. No worries, I still have no fashion sense… but hey, at least the threads’ll be new. Heh.