America is going apeshit over Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been covering since June after 20th Century Fox asked me if I’d like to head to Los Angeles, get treated like a king for a weekend and see a shrub pruned to look like Bart Simpson.Alright, they didn’t exactly phrase it like that, but it was a great time nonetheless and I was stoked to see the hard work that went into the new Apes joint that hit theaters this past weekend. It’s been met with rave reviews by everyone from The LA Times to Rotten Tomatoes for god’s sake.I honestly haven’t seen it yet because I was tending to some vacationing I’d been meaning to catch up on. And if i can be completely candid, between work and the always hilarious process of moving into a new apartment, I wasn’t sure when I’d see it once I finally got around to it. That was until I had friends coming up to me telling me it was the best movie they’d seen in a while. Trustworthy friends too. Friends who use big words when they discuss ‘the cinema’ and reference directors when they’re talking about completing daily tasks.But no amount of my credible peers’ learned advice could better prompt me to see the flick than catching a less-than excited review of it by Sandy Kenyon on an 8" TV in a New York City cab on my way home from the airport. If you’ve ever taken a yellow cab in New York, you know Sandy. He’s the enthusiastic guy with the rectangular face and conflicted look in his eyes who is, if nothing else, capable of reviewing movies in 60 seconds or less.It’s not that I have anything against Sandy Kenyon personally. it’s my contempt for the strategic placement of superfluous light boxes and noise machines; what Walter Benjamin would fit into the “commodity-phantasmagoria of the spectacle” and what Guy Debord would argue is a mindless tool of depoliticization. What I would call television in a fucking cab.In fact, it would seem Rise of the Planet of the Apes, despite its spectacular use of CGI, considers many points that directly contend with everything TV in a cab stands for. In his review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, futurist and ethicist, George Dvorsky cites 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Truman Show, in order to shed light on the deeper psychological subtext of the film:Reminiscent of the apes in 2001, [The film's protagonist, the enhanced chimp] Ceasar was caught between animal savagery and civilized potential. And like the outer boundaries of the giant studio in The Truman Show, the walls of the sanctuary were a giant illusion that presented a false sense of freedom. Though painted with trees and skyscapes, the walls were a hard boundary, a metaphor for limits, constraints, and oppression. The shelter offered Caesar a glimpse into what life would be like in the natural state—a life filled with mind numbing brutality and devoid of any potential.TVs in cabs, cute as they are (and luckily equipped with an off button that occasionally works), are little more than obscure flickering lights meant to keep human beings preoccupied with some equivalent of what Aldous Huxley would describe as the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy; in the backseat box of a New York City taxi, these are the very foundation of the constraints and shelter that keeps the apes down.Good thing taxis in Manchester don’t have those TVs. Not yet at least.
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