The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 49

TV #21 of 2024:

Saturday Night Live, season 49

The last season of SNL was cut short by the onset of the recent writers strike, and the premiere of this next one was delayed while negotiations were ongoing. Whether due to those factors or not, there wasn’t any significant cast turnover in-between, with no one from season 48 leaving the show and only one newcomer joining the ranks (Chloe Troast, who hasn’t made much of an impression on me yet). Overall, the troupe still has something of a welcome leaner feel to it, although as usual, screentime is hardly uniform across all the players.

In his monologue for the final episode, host Jake Gyllenhaal riffed on how season 50 will obviously be the big occasion that everyone tunes in for, with the year before that anniversary coming off as more of an afterthought. Nevertheless, the sketch comedy and semi-topical political material has generally acquitted itself well this time around. In terms of earworms that immediately lodged in my brain, the highest SNL honors would have to go to Emma Stone and the ensemble in “Fully Naked in New York” and Kristen Wiig and Andrew Dismukes for “Jumanji,” but plenty of other skits in this run are pretty classic too, like “Hallmark Horror” or especially “Diet Coke by Olay.” Over in the Weekend Update corner, Michael Che and Colin Jost likewise continue to exhibit a fun repartee, despite/because of this being their tenth season at it (far past the previous record set by Seth Meyers), while James Austin Johnson’s Trump impression remains hilariously uncanny. In general, I’d say that the series is on a strong footing for its celebration event ahead, whatever that actually winds up looking like.

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Movie Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Movie #12 of 2024:

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Another thrilling post-apocalyptic adventure, with some excellent worldbuilding for this new era of the setting: “many generations” beyond the lifetime of Caesar, the chimpanzee protagonist of the 2011-2017 trilogy who experienced the collapse of human civilization and the rise of his own people firsthand. By now, that leader’s name has fallen into legend, with piecemeal and contradictory accounts of his time. In fact, our new hero’s tribe doesn’t seem to know that history at all, adding to the fragmented feel of the current ape culture. They do have their own cherished practices and teachings, like raising eagles as hunting companions, but those customs extend no further than the valley they call home. It’s very Clan of the Cave Bear, and helps to suggest a more expansive vista than we’re ever actually shown.

The villain of the piece is ape with delusions of grandeur, who styles himself a king and is willing to raze and enslave the smaller communities to forge his realm. That’s what initially sends Noa on a quest of rescue and revenge, as the outside world intrudes forcibly on his quiet and insular one. Along the way, he also connects with a wise orangutan and one of the few humans who has miraculously retained the powers of speech and higher thought.

That character is the only one in the film whose presence doesn’t really work for me. She’s too clean and modern in her appearance, with her sculpted eyebrows looking like she just walked off the set of an Abercrombie & Fitch commercial. I also don’t buy how familiar she is with the old world — the script’s treatment of the apes does such a great job of conveying how much knowledge has been lost over the centuries, it becomes jarring whenever she speaks up to mention concepts like viruses or government. She comes off almost as a time-traveler visitor from the past like Taylor the astronaut in the original movie, rather than someone who would have been born and raised long after such ideas fell out of common use.

But that element aside, the story is good. I love the design visuals of all the overgrown, broken, and repurposed artifacts of our day, and Noa is a worthy new lead, whether any subsequent sequels continue to follow his journey or not. I’m so glad that this franchise didn’t end with Caesar’s last stand in the previous film, even if this one never comes close to matching it in spectacle or pathos.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Book of Games by John Peel

Book #76 of 2024:

Book of Games by John Peel (Diadem #12)

This novel is one of two that author John Peel self-published (in a single bound volume) to close out his long-running Diadem fantasy saga, but I really wish he hadn’t bothered. It’s an embarrassingly poor effort, riddled with typos, repetitive wording, and rather basic continuity errors that any competent proofreader should have been able to catch. (To pick just a few examples: the planet from book #8 is referred to as Ocean instead of Brine, the spelling of Zarathan temporarily switches to Xarathan for a few pages, and Destiny gives her age as twenty-three after earlier saying that she’s twenty-seven.)

The protagonists all feel out-of-character, too — Score keeps threatening to spank people for some reason, Helaine calls the antagonist a bitch and a slut, and so on. The warrior girl is also sexually objectified herself pretty strongly throughout the text, with other characters making comments about her chest and legs, calling her a bimbo, and magically forcing her into skimpy “harem gear.” If this is Peel’s unfiltered writing, his former publishers must have been doing quite a lot of unsung work to shape it into acceptable middle-grade and YA fare before.

The plot, such as it is: we basically abandon the unresolved time-travel antics of the previous story to whisk the heroes along a sequence of artificial storybook scenarios, playing the imposed roles whilst trying to gain the upper hand over their opponent. It’s like one of the more infuriating Q or holodeck malfunction episodes of Star Trek, and although it eventually wraps around to perfunctorily conclude the business concerning Score’s mother, there’s no real sense of urgency or climax like an epic final showdown against the Triad or anything. No, instead the teens simply convince the superpowered eleven-year-old that they aren’t the bad guys like Destiny said, team up to stop her, and notice almost in passing that Oracle has become corporeal again. And then in the literal closing sentence of the book he announces that he’s dating Shanara now, because sure. Why not.

I liked the early books in this series a lot when I was younger, and I’m glad that I took the time to reread those and see how the sequels developed the characters further. But these last two novels are so thoroughly and utterly bad that I’m having trouble even reconciling them as being part of the same broad narrative at all.

This volume: ★☆☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 5 > 10 > 9 > 7 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 6 > 4 > 8 > 11 > 12

Movie Review: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

Movie #11 of 2024:

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

[Edited version of my original review from 2017.]

When I first came home from seeing this in theaters, I noted that it was “probably the best Planet of the Apes movie ever made.” Having had seven years to sit with that assessment, and having just spent the last week rewatching all nine of the existing films in the lead-up to catching a matinee of the new one for my birthday tomorrow, I can now categorically double-down on that claim. This is the Apes movie, folks. I love the 1968 original and the 2011 reboot too, but War is really in a class of its own.

Obviously it builds on everything that the franchise had previously established in terms of worldbuilding lore and Caesar’s characterization, but I think an audience could basically start here and still follow along (and be blown away) just fine. The script establishes itself with an immediate confidence, despite jumping several years from the seeming cliffhanger end of the preceding feature, and from there all the pertinent backstory is delivered naturally as it becomes relevant. In fact, I would say that the weakest part of this title is how disconnected it feels to its direct predecessor — we’ve skipped over the Colonel and Caesar’s initial encounter(s) to find them already mortal enemies, and there’s no sign or mention of Malcolm and his fellow human allies from Dawn (which likewise summarily dropped Will and Caroline from Rise). That’s especially jarring when you watch through the films in quick succession.

But this is Caesar’s story overall, and it serves him well by sending him off on a bitter dig-two-graves revenge narrative, only for his arc to finally come back around to his roots as a Moses figure for his people at the journey’s end. As a protagonist, he’s offset by Woody Harrelson as the unhinged military leader — the chimpanzee’s Kurtz in their cross-species dystopian take on Apocalypse Now — providing electrifying scenes together and the first truly worthy villain for this series since the days of Dr. Zaius.

Even outside of those opposing primal personalities, this film is a gorgeously-shot snow-covered post-apocalyptic western mashed up with a war movie – which doesn’t mean we’re subjected to endless combat maneuvers, but rather to a personal tale suffused in the anguish of sustained warfare with thoughtful treatment of occupying forces, collaborators, POW labor camps, and so much more. Yet even with all that heaviness, the comedy lands nicely too, tapping into a sense of humor that we haven’t really seen in this franchise since Escape in 1971. And the plot meanwhile feeds lightly into the context of the original Charlton Heston piece, in that the apes continue to develop their powers of speech while the dwindling remnants of human civilization have begun losing theirs. There’s even a plausible link to the “alpha and omega” mutant cult of Beneath and Battle, though thankfully without the accompanying campiness.

I’m so excited to see how Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes brings this setting forward even further — reportedly by centuries, to a time when Caesar’s name has passed into legend — and the rest of the era that I’m sure is being planned to follow. There’s still plenty of ground left to cover before the Icarus arrives, but I’ll take this opportunity to sing the praises of Andy Serkis and his supporting team of motion-capture animators, who have elevated this old science-fiction saga to new heights over the course of their modern trilogy. Take a deserved rest, king. Apes together strong.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, torture, and gore.]

★★★★★

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Movie #10 of 2024:

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

[Edited version of my original review from 2017.]

Still a very strong picture, but not quite as good as Rise in my personal opinion. This sequel is the first time that the modern Apes series goes fully post-apocalyptic, but we’ve jumped forwards ten years, and there’s not a whole lot of worldbuilding for how ape and human society alike have changed over that span. The human characters are likewise pretty thinly-sketched compared to Will and his father in the last film, with both Gary Oldman as the primary villain and Keri Russell in the middle of her Americans era getting frustratingly wasted here. The ending too leaves a lot up in the air for the next movie to theoretically resolve — though it ultimately doesn’t — resulting in this one feeling somewhat adrift between two superior entries. (A string of short web films and a pair of tie-in novels by Greg Keyes are intended to bridge those canon gaps, but I’d imagine most audiences aren’t even aware of them.) And finally, as a big fan of the franchise, I can’t help but notice how much this title remixes key elements from Battle for the Planet of the Apes, like agitators on both sides ruining the chance for peace and Caesar’s belated realization that his species can be just as cruel as humanity.

Nevertheless, it uses those familiar pieces well, and is overall a compelling immediate story in its own right (if rather inelegantly named). The decision to tell much of the dialogue through subtitled ape sign language gives it a radically different feel from its 2011 predecessor, which presented an extraordinary amount of character and plot information through nonverbal visuals alone. In contrast to the humans, the apes around Caesar seem much more fleshed-out this time thanks to how much more they can communicate to one another / us. And even though the script ends on an apparent cliffhanger with the incoming military forces, the central conflict between the human settlers and their ape neighbors is well-told with legitimate motivations on all fronts. While I do think their individual characterizations could be deeper, I appreciate that the various antagonists are basically reasonable people who care for their loved ones, and that the production goes out of its way to humanize (/chimpize?) them all.

At 130 minutes of runtime — 25 longer than Rise — matters could stand to be more propulsive, but it’s hard to argue with the striking images like apes on horseback firing machine guns, a gas station reclaimed by woods, or Koba’s deceptive minstrel performance for the human guards. This probably ties with Battle for the single most forgettable Apes installment, but in the moment, it’s solid enough.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Movie #9 of 2024:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

[Edited version of my original review from 2017.]

After decades languishing as a punchline in the wilderness of popular culture, Planet of the Apes got a long-overdue update in this 2011 feature, which is best understood as a quasi-canonical reboot for the franchise. Specifically, I would argue that this title is a prequel to the very first movie, going back to the original timeline — that is, ignoring the parallel version of history that branched off from the time-travel in Escape — to show how Earth started down the path towards eventual ape domination. There are still some plot holes to that approach, like how the future apes were taught that their ancestors were slaves and Aldo was the first of their kind to rebel against the masters, but it seems generally in line with what these filmmakers intended. (For example, a running thread in the background involves regular news reports about the Icarus spaceship going missing, and that was the name of the vessel that went off-course to bring Taylor and his crew crashing down to the planet where he met Dr. Zaius and the rest.) We’ve shifted focus from the threat of nuclear war to the risks of genetic tinkering, yet the moral thrust of the work still places humanity’s downfall as a consequence of our own misdeeds, with the apes serving as more of a lucky bystander recipient than the active agent of our doom.

But this is an intentional refresh for the series, so you don’t necessarily have to have seen any of the other films to follow along and enjoy it, fun as it is to spot the familiar lines of dialogue or the parallels to Conquest in particular. On its own terms, it’s a thrilling and heartfelt adventure that definitely carves out a distinct place for itself within the wider Apes narrative. If anything, its tale of a miraculous serum unlocking a worthy protagonist’s advanced powers recalls the superhero movies of the early 2000s, complete with the supporting presence of both Brian Cox and James Franco.

The storyline is pretty grounded compared to previous installments, especially once you accept the overall premise that an experimental superdrug to treat Alzheimer’s could boost the intelligence of its chimpanzee test subjects to the level of planning and carrying out a grand escape from captivity. (It’s a Rats of NIMH retelling! Kinda. And did I mention this came out the same year as Limitless?) Despite the title of the flick, the apes aren’t trying to launch a revolution to overthrow their oppressors at this point, merely to gather their brethren and reach the safety of the nearby forests across the Golden Gate Bridge. But a subplot neatly depicts how the viral treatment that’s made the apes smarter is also starting to spread throughout the human population, where it’s both highly contagious and fatal — rather chilling to rewatch now post-2020 — and thereby charts a plausible course from our reality to that of the ape-dominated future in the first movie. If the franchise had ended here, it still would feel like it had managed to come full circle and tell a complete story.

The characters are great too, with this Caesar getting more of a personal arc than his namesake in the 70s films. Both chimps are Moses figures, raised apart from their people and only belatedly learning the depth of their plight and taking on the mantle of saving them, but this one undergoes more of an obvious evolution in his growing disillusionment with humanity. In his final destructive charge across the city, he spares a few humans who have done him no harm, but he pointedly refuses to extend mercy to the actively abusive ones and in the end he coldly rebuffs the family that abandoned him. Throughout it all, the motion-capture CGI is a welcome change from the old makeup and masks and an impressive achievement even over a decade later, bringing him and the other apes to life in a way where you often genuinely forget that you’re not watching trained animal actors at work. (The 2001 Tim Burton film, to its shame, remains the only entry in the franchise to utilize any actual non-human primates.) It’s a bold new start, and one of my absolute favorites.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★★

Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (2001)

Movie #8 of 2024:

Planet of the Apes (2001)

The Planet of the Apes franchise went dormant in the 1970s after five films and two short-lived TV shows, but was brought back to the big screen for this Tim Burton production several decades later. It’s best understood as a reimagining of the first movie — or as an even looser adaptation of the original French novel — rather than a further installment in the same continuity. The piece thus revolves around Mark Wahlberg as a new human astronaut in the old Charlton Heston role, crash-landing on an alien planet where talking apes reign supreme over our own species. (Heston himself gets a cameo appearance as an ape, which is fun, and a few of his more famous lines of dialogue are repurposed.) This version eschews the classic twist that the world is Earth’s future, but it does spring a similar reveal midway through: humans and apes from the protagonist’s time were the progenitors of intelligent life there, and he’s fallen across millennia to reach their descendants.

The story is alright, for the most part. Burton’s main attention seems to be on the visuals and background details, which range from impressive in the case of Paul Giamatti’s orangutan character to extremely off-putting in the case of Helena Bonham Carter’s chimpanzee. Tim Roth as the villain growls and bellows and jumps around a lot, though his motivations and the exact cause of his rage go unexplained. Meanwhile, the underclass of local humans have retained the power of speech, but they don’t do much with it; this is definitely one of those Hollywood pictures that designates a woman as the love interest by default simply for standing near the leading man.

In the end, Captain Leo escapes as Colonel Taylor was never able to, and the apes and humans he leaves behind have committed to reconciling and living in peace. But then the plot closes on a bizarre sequence that cribs off the ending of the book, with the hero arriving back on contemporary Earth to find that apes are now the dominant lifeform. The idea that they took over in his absence would be fine, and in line with what happens in the source material, but somehow the Lincoln Memorial in DC has also been changed to depict Roth’s General Thade, which is significantly harder to explain. (My best attempt would be to theorize that the antagonist at some point traveled back into Earth’s past, beating Marky Mark there, and altered the course of history so that his people overthrew ours. But that doesn’t really account for how all the familiar trappings of our culture like specific architectural landmarks, the design of police cars, and so on remain identical, and it’s certainly not spelled out in the script.)

The striking visual of Thade in place of Lincoln is a surface-level twist that’s plainly meant to recall the 1968 Statue of Liberty scene, and perhaps to set up a sequel that never materialized before the series was rebooted again in 2011. But it just fundamentally doesn’t make much sense, which is a frustrating but apt way for this curiosity to resolve.

[Content warning for gun violence, slavery, and torture.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Movie #7 of 2024:

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

A perfunctory conclusion to the original Planet of the Apes movie series, although the franchise would live on in television shows, comic books, an odd Tim Burton reimagining, and an eventual big-screen reboot in 2011 that’s still ongoing today. In this film, the uprising in Conquest has won the apes their freedom (at least in this one small area of the world), and they now dwell in a tentative peace with their former masters, who have been relegated to second-class citizens and taught never to use the word “no.” Off-screen between installments, a nuclear war has helped destroy much of human civilization, and all apes have apparently learned to speak like Caesar. The chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans believe they are naturally better than humans because they are not as prone to violence, although it’s clear that this attitude is entrenching old divisions and hiding the corrupting role of social privilege, even for audiences who haven’t seen Charlton Heston on the receiving end of ape brutality.

Our returning chimp protagonist is worried over whether that future that his parents came from is inevitable or not, and so he decides to seek out the archived recordings of them still housed in the ruins of a nearby city, in order to hear their words for himself. There he runs afoul of an old enemy and his servants, all of whom have been mutated by radiation (presumably on their way to becoming the ancestors of the underground psychics in Beneath). Though most individuals on both sides would rather not fight, misunderstanding ensues and the conflict of the title soon breaks out.

Meanwhile, an aggressive gorilla named Aldo is seething under Caesar’s imposed pacifism and plotting to seize power. In the process, he kills the leader’s son for eavesdropping on his schemes, which causes the rest of his society to realize that apes are perhaps not so morally superior to humans after all. The hero has also learned from his father’s tape that Aldo was the name of the ape slave who stood up against humanity in his timeline, supporting his friend Virgil the orangutan’s theory that history can indeed be changed. Caesar renews his commitment to peaceful coexistence, and a framing device with the legendary ape Lawgiver 600 years hence suggests that his efforts are working out and that the oppressive situation encountered by Taylor the astronaut may not ever come to pass.

As a finale it works, but it’s bland and plodding storytelling overall, with lots of scenes of generic forces running and exchanging gunfire. Not the worst of its era, but hardly a highlight either.

This movie: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Movies ranked: 1 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 2

Movie Review: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Movie #6 of 2024:

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

By this point in the initial Planet of the Apes series, viewers had seen a future world where our species had been overthrown, its apocalyptic destruction, and a tragedy wherein the only surviving refugees of that dystopia, having traveled back in time to our day with expressions of friendship and pacifism, wind up getting brutally murdered due to local xenophobia. In that last installment, we even learned details from ape history about humanity’s downfall in their original timeline: a plague wiped out other animals like cats and dogs, humans enlisted apes as pets and then slaves, and the mistreated underclass ultimately rose up against us.

This next sequel thus turns naturally to depicting that particular conflict. It’s not quite how Cornelius and Zira described it — either because their arrival in the past changed things, or because the account hadn’t been passed down faithfully to them in the first place, or just because the continuity across these films isn’t really as airtight as one might hope. But generally speaking, the state of Earth’s society a couple decades after Escape is in line with what those visitors said. Their son, swapped with a regular chimpanzee at birth to protect him, is now fully grown (and played by his late father’s actor, Roddy McDowall). He’s been brought up away from civilization by a kindly circus-owner, and is shocked at the start of events to finally see his people’s plight firsthand. When he reveals his power of speech by yelling out, “Bloody human bastards!” — which his friend tries in vain to claim was his own comment of “inhuman” — he’s forced to flee and hide amongst his mute peers, helping them strategize and slowly build a movement towards revolution.

This Apes film, more than any other, leans very strongly into the underlying racial allegory that’s always been a part of the franchise. (It’s also the entry that the later rebooted movies most clearly draw their inspiration from, whether relatedly or not.) The way the other primates are treated is specifically modeled after the worst abuses of historical slavery, with chains and auctions, beatings for disobedience, forced breeding, patronizing assertions of their inferior mental abilities, and beyond. The one Black character in the cast both disapproves of this treatment and is subjected to racist comments over his real and perceived sympathies, and the climactic struggle at the end of the movie is framed like a contemporary race riot, complete with armored police ordering the protesters to disperse.

It’s easy to root for the apes here like the script intends, but the conclusion pulls its punches a bit. After the simian forces have won and the cruel governor lies trembling at their feet, Caesar undergoes a curious change of heart and instructs them in sudden religious language that he’s never used before to show mercy and let the man go. It’s a whip-turn reversal in the middle of his closing monologue, which conspicuously plays out from there onward in voiceover, closeups of his eyes, and looping and reversed footage from earlier in the scene. The truth is that the intended ending made the bolder choice to commit to the triumphant hero overseeing the defeated villain’s death and crowing about the masters meeting their destined fate, but test audiences complained so much that it was reworked ahead of its release. That’s a bummer, but it’s still one of the better installments of its era overall.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

TV #20 of 2024:

Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

This six-part animated Star Wars anthology is pretty clearly modeled on the similar Tales of the Jedi project from 2022, and it inherits some of the same structural weaknesses. At least this time around, the story pushes forwards for one of its two focal characters — Barriss Offee, a former Jedi last seen getting locked up for bombing the temple during the Clone Wars — and doesn’t just provide general background filler, as was largely the case before. Here we learn that that protagonist subsequently became an Imperial Inquisitor for a while, before losing faith in their mission and returning to her old Jedi ways.

The other half of this season, though, is spent on Thrawn’s loyal servant Morgan Elsbeth from the live-action Mandalorian and Ahsoka shows, whose backstory proves not particularly revelatory. This is solid but unremarkable Star Wars for the most part, and although it isn’t the worst of the franchise, it never comes close to justifying its existence, especially as a separate series rather than Tales of the Jedi season 2.

★★★☆☆