Tweet of the Capsule of the Dawn of The Planet of the Apes

Of the. of the. of the. Help, stuck in a prepositional loop! I regret to inform that there is no full review of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) -- you may have noticed unusually sparse off my game posting -- but I press on with this exhaustively multi-tasking post. It's a list. It's a tweet roundup. It's a review.

I can't go on. I'll go on."
-Samuel Beckett 

Were I to write a traditional review of the surprisingly strong sequel to the surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) it would essentially be some sort of fussy expansion and tangent filled detours of these 10 points:

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Lee Pace Plays Hard To Get For a Day

Remember when Lee Pace and Amy Adams played the romantic leads in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) ? Every once in a blue moon I flash back to that movie because Lee Pace is so dreamy and Amy sings so sweetly.

But things are rocky between them at first.

Amy: Kiss Me?

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Linkhood

Luise Rainer is now on Spotify with numbers from The Great Ziegfeld. And she's still alive to see it!
Vox this is why (well, one of the reasons) Emmy nominations are always so disappointing/strange: behold the labyrinthine nomination process
Overland Glenn looks back at Twin Peaks' influence on television's corpse littered playground 

Mash-Ups To Go
Have you binge-watched "Frozen is the New Black" yet? By which I mean watched it three times in a row like I just did. 

Oh i know you're not reading one of my books, bitch.

I love Belle's cameo so much.

APEHOOD trailer (Boyhood & Dawn of the Planet of the Apes mashup) from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo.

And in other mashup news, this trailer for "Richard Linklater's Apehood" is making the rounds, a cute fusion of two great movies that happened to share this very same opening weekend so I hope you're seeing both this year. Oh, and Land Ho!, too. It's a really really good movie weekend y'all.

Emmy Nom Hangover: Snubs & Peculiarities

Apologies for my radio silence yesterday. Off my game I was for the entire day plus which means I'm know 36 hours behind on writing projects. Hooray. Nevertheless, because Emmy nominations are still very much on my mind after the initial response and the main titles detour (oh don't pretend you aren't still thinking about them) I polled a few members of Team Experience about their feelings. And here's what they had to say on four questions. Answer them yourself in the comments, too. The more the merrier. 

What's the Nomination That Most Perplexes You?

Adam Armstrong: Kristen Wiig – The Spoils of Babylon. When I read her name among the nominees, I was like:

...Pure, unadulterated, ecstatic, confused bliss. 

Andrew Kendall: So many options, but it's impossible for me to let Christina Hendricks in Mad Men just pass - for so many reasons. Everyone loves Joan and Hendricks is one Mad Men's finest actors but in the seven episode "half season" 2014 gave up what did Joan Harris even do to warrant a citation? I'm always willing to defend the Emmy voters when people accuse them of voting without watching (maybe they just have trite tastes?) but can anyone have watched this last season of television and sincerely felt Christina Hendricks did anything of note? Her nomination this particular season is even more of an albatross to the category than Maggie Smith's never ending series of nominations for frowning on Downton Abbey.

Dancin' Dan: Michelle Dockery, Lead Actress in a Drama. Does she actually do ANYTHING remotely interesting or difficult on Downton Abbey? This nomination has always perplexed me.

Anne Marie: Apparently the only people still watching Glee are Emmy voters. It's the only way to explain how it got a directing nomination for an episode with fewer audience members than the population of New Mexico.

Omission You Will Hold Against the Emmys Forever?

[RuPaul, Hannibal, Archer, The Good Wife and much more after the jump]

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1973 in animation: Disney's Robin Hood

Tim here. We’re celebrating 1973 at the Film Experience all throughout July, and in terms of animation, that can mean one of only two things: the Czech-French allegorical science fiction film Fantastic Planet, a peculiar head trip of a movie made with highly-detailed paper animation, or Disney’s all-animal Robin Hood, a film regarded as one of Disney’s most perfect classics by a small group of people while being largely forgotten by most younger people, making it one of those films that’s simultaneously both over- and under-rated. All my love and respect to politically laden avant-garde Eastern European animation, but our current path seems clear enough: Robin Hood it is.

I will first confess that the film has never been one of my favorites in Disney’s canon; it exemplifies a very particular aesthetic that dominated the studio’s work for just a short while, seven features released between 1961 and 1977. These were the Xerox Years, when the old process of inking individual cels by hand over the animators’ rough pencil drawings had been replaced by simply photocopying the pencils directly onto the clear celluloid. This cut down significantly on the cost and time of putting together a feature film, and it also had the effect of giving the finished animation a much scratchier, hand-hewn look. For many fans of animation, and many animators, the direct one-to-one mapping this results in between what the artist drew and what we see makes it more valuable than the glossier, more polished, and arguably more lifeless work in Disney’s more expensive productions. For myself, all I can see is the cost-cutting.

But let's shelve the technical chatter and move on to the film itself...

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