Phew! It was a tough go, but I made it through two months of consecutive weekly posting. This month – to mix things up – I’m going to be digging into my home video archive to bring you a whole batch of articles on movies I own on the antiquated and inferior home video format known in some circles as the Reflective Optical Videodisc System, or DISCOVISION! I’m sure you’re thrilled.
I am, too. There aren’t many left to watch compared to how many there were when I was at the acme of my collection: I had run out of space in the designated area my wife had given me and they were starting to pile up on the floor. I had a problem! Now there are 100-150 left. It still sounds like I have a problem, but their shape-and-size (which resembles vinyl records) leaves a smaller footprint then if I was collecting say, VHS tapes. VHS is known as the ash heap of cult classics but there were a few that made the jump to laserdisc, too (doesn’t mean they made it to DVD, though). We are going at random, so there may be some I’ve already seen; some Choice Cuts; and ones like today’s that I never knew were things. Maybe there will be a surprise-or-two as well, if I’m on-the-ball.
What is the life expectancy of my critical writings? My Laserdisc collection is finite, but what about other movies? Video games? Haven’t I said before that I’m trying to move away from watching TV? From playing video games? What will I write about if not media? Books? Am I that interested in writing an essay about Atlas Shrugged out of rapture when I couldn’t put the same effort in to doing the same thing for school? Didn’t I go to school for this very thing? First film school and then art school, so now I can’t even watch a movie for pleasure without superimposing my own education on it. I’ve been thinking about down the road, if I decide to keep this “blogging” thing up: couldn’t I, eventually, repeat myself? Isn’t it possible that I could watch something and have the same opinion on it that I did about something similar? And then write virtually the same review? And in turn plagiarize myself? Wouldn’t that be a writer’s ultimate betrayal? What does any of this have to do with a forgotten monkey movie from the 80s starring Matthew Broderick? I guess I endure because I hope that one day I will find that elusive, perfect Movie Made For Jason, with a great plot that’s original and tremendous acting that supports a brilliant script as opposed to eclipsing it; well-edited and fast-paced with maybe some tiddies or some gratuitous, cathartic violence; and an ending that is as unexpected as it is earned. I ask for too much, I know. It’s a monkey movie. And all I could think about during the first twenty minutes when our simian hero Virgil is captured in Africa and dragged to America to be taught sign language by Helen Hunt is, where is all the monkey shit? There would be monkey shit EVERYWHERE. Helen Hunt would have a face-full of monkey shit. If I never write another review again that has Helen Hunt and monkey shit in the same sentence then I think my paranoia is no longer founded.
At first glance, Project X seems entirely predictable. “Where could this movie go?” My wife and I hypothesized. Well, Helen Hunt teaches the monkey sign language and empathy, and the opening crawl mentioned it was a true story based on actual Air Force experiments. So when Hunt’s school is shut down due to lack of funding and Virgil is relocated, we figured Broderick must work for the military and he will discover Virgil’s amazing gifts and wonder how he learned it and then he would team up with Hunt and maybe they don’t like each other very much at the beginning but they’ll bang by the end and the two of them will break the monkey out of the research facility to take him back home to Africa! That is still technically the plot of the movie but it tangents in some unexpected ways. First, there is no romantic subplot. At all! Hunt is barely in the movie before it forks off to spend its majority with Broderick’s demoted Air Force grunt: working maintenance in a facility that trains the apes in those old-school kiddie ride flight simulators. He forms a bond with Virgil just as Virgil becomes Pack Alpha to the other apes in the enclosure and trains them all to think for themselves and question their captivity. And THEN Broderick finds out the monkeys are actually being exposed to FULL-ON NUCLEAR RADIATION to test pilot stamina in post-exposure conditions should the bombs have to be dropped on Russia (really?). Broderick stands up for chimp solidarity but is thwarted by his superiors, including Will Sadler (from Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile) as the film’s resident freakazoid playing the facility’s closed-minded superior.
But wait! Apparently the monkeys are more-than-capable of looking after themselves because they manage to break out of their enclosures without any human assistance; hand-stack an extravagant pyramid out of found-items; and try to break out through the four-story ceiling by smashing the glass with a crowbar, all before Broderick even gets there. They run havoc through the entire base, including the room where they would normally get zapped with radiation. In fact, they almost cause a TOTAL MELTDOWN – potentially killing everyone there – if it wasn’t for the Monkey Martyrdom of one brave ape named Goliath who sacrifices himself so the others may live. And then the monkeys end up escaping by stealing a plane and flying it by themselves using the skills they were taught them in the program! I’m flabbergasted at how engaged I was in the movie, for what essentially smelts down to “Ender’s Game-meets-Planet of the Apes with Matthew Broderick”: back when they used real monkeys instead of CGI and your movie was PG even though it dabbled in themes of GROSS ANNIHILATION. And props to the late-80s special effects that make the military-grade flight simulators the monkeys play look state-of-the-art when reality was cruel to the rest of us. It has me thinking of the Monkey Movie Market. Where have all the monkey movies gone? Where are the MVPs or the Monkey Shines’ or the Dunston Checks Ins? Why have they been replaced with brooding, computer-generated apes that contemplate things like existence and geo-political intraspecies conflict? The apes of old were more concerned with living then they were with surviving. Maybe that’s more a sign of our times then it is theirs’.
//jf 3.4.20
theory of a daskeman 