What did you watch on this Simian week? (06/03-06/09)

Unsane - Thought it had the potential to be a lot better, but it was a disappointment. (low 6/10)

Love, Simon - Very good, liked it better than I expected. (8/10)

The Departed - It was decently good, but with all the acclaim it gets I was underwhelmed. (7/10)

Anon - Decent but forgettable. (6/10)

White Zombie - A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiancé, but instead turns her into a zombie slave. (6/10)

Supercon - A rag-tag group of former TV stars and comic book artists, who make their living working at conventions, decide to steal the loot from a crooked promoter and an overbearing former TV icon. It was okay for a while, but then it got ridiculously dumb. (4/10)

Primal Rage - A newly reunited young couple's drive through the Pacific Northwest turns into a nightmare as they are forced to face nature, unsavory locals, and a monstrous creature, known to the Native Americans as Oh-Mah. (6/10)

Sliver - A woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets. (6/10)

Girl, Interrupted - Very good. (8/10)

The Witches of Eastwick - Took some time for it to get going, but once it did it was good. (7/10)

I also started watching Silicon Valley. Love it so far.

I went to the cinema to see Hereditary. The best horror film I've seen in a very long time. It's so refreshing to come across a filmmaker that really knows how to work the genre. A master stroke with brilliant performances all round.

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Ikr! I'm a big fan of '90s Jackie Chan's movies. They are totally great and legendary. Old man Jackie Chan however, should stop doing action movies. Actually he's quite good at acting. One of my favorite movie of his is The Shijuku Incident (2009) and it has all the melodrama with virtually no kungfu.

Chan is the richest, not one of the richest, but THE richest Hongkong actor of all time! He, unlike Nic Cage, does not need to make mediocre-to-bad movies just to earn money. I don't know why he keeps doing this. All of his new movies are basically crap. The Foreigner being the best of those is not saying much, really.

I watched 2 forgettable Netflix specimens.
I liked the first two Ape films btw, haven't seen the third one.
"Caesar IS home!" Heartbreaking stuff.

Ladybird (Prime) I think we're all aware of this movie by now, so I'll just go ahead and give it an 8/10. Saoirse Ronan never disappoints.

Papa Hemingway in Cuba (2015) In 1959, a young journalist ventures to Havana, Cuba to meet his idol, the legendary Ernest Hemingway who helped him find his literary voice, while the Cuban Revolution comes to a boil around them.- Shot on location in Cuba. Ribisi was great, although I think they could have found a better Hemingway. 6.5/10

i haven't seen the 2001 apes since it was released. i remember feeling a little indifferent to it, but i'm definitely open to going back and revisiting it some day.

i think the recent apes trilogy was just great. slightly departing from you, i think i like dawn a bit more than rise, but why quibble. i thought they were all terrific. the last one in particular is a model big budget blockbuster, i think - exciting, incredible effects, but also heartfelt. i feel a touch silly saying this about a movie that featured talking chimpanzees, but i think it's one of the most soulful, elegiac summer films i've ever seen.

attack of the clones 1/5 apparently something approaching a consensus, or perhaps a loud plurality, has developed that insists this is the worst of the prequels (and therefore the worst of the sw films). i had a few internet fights with a few people recently over that topic, so i decided to spend last saturday watching aotc, probably for the first time in a good 5 or 6 years.

it is definitely one of the worst films ever made. it has to rank highly among the worst large budget films released by a major studio. but i still think phantom menace is worse, and by a good margin. i mainly put that down to momentum. as horrible as it is, aotc does move pretty well. phantom menace on the other hand plods along with no drive whatsoever, perhaps excluding that sequence at the end featuring the fight. and it has jar jar, a frankly annoying kid actor, 'yippee.' all that. this is terrible, just awful. never should have been made. but pm is quite a bit worse.

deadpool 2 3/5 i didn't laugh, & if a comedy doesn't make you laugh, then you can't really call it a success, can you. maybe it will play better on a 2nd viewing, but as of the moment, it feels like a disappointing followup to a fun debut, though it's still perfectly enjoyable.

digging for fire (2015) 3.5/5 husband & wife have separate adventures over a weekend while renting a get-away house. low-key, even simple in that meandering, borderline shambolic joe swanberg manner that i usually enjoy, and this one is no exception.

sequence break (2017) 3/5 i would definitely say the director was trying very hard to recreate videodrome. it's not a tenth as good as that cronenberg classic, but if the idea of someone trying his best to make an homage to that film appeals to you, by all means give it a go. it's certainly not great, really feels a bit incomplete, not quite fully formed, but it has some fun moments, reasonably good effects, a very cute girl, and it's not 4 hours long.

the green fog (2017) 4/5 guy maddin's latest is an 'interpretation' of alfred hitchcock's vertigo, made by piecing together film & tv footage shot in san francisco. wonderfully odd, naturally, as one would expect in something with guy maddin's name attached, but it's a bit more openly silly than you might anticipate, even goofy, but in a very endearing way. some people may throw up their hands, perhaps find it a bit of a waste of time, but i thought it was a demented hoot & i absolutely loved it.

Until I clicked in, I wondered if there'd been some big monkey-related event that'd happened in the news!

I've only seen one on your list -- Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I liked the concept, and there were a few heart-tugging moments, but the CGI kept taking me out of the movie. So for me it was only a 6-6.5.

Since you're on a simian kick, you may as well watch the original Planet of the Apes! The masks were good for the time, but now impossibly dated. Still, that aside, I think it holds up well.

I watched Wild, Wild Country, the Netflix series about the Bhagwan cult in Oregon. It was a wild, wild ride! It left me with a lot of questions, which sent me off Googling. It seems to assume viewers know all about the cult and Bhagwan, and I didn't. The biggest question I wanted answered was what his big appeal was, because I wasn't seeing it.

I've reluctantly gotten drawn into the Australian show Wentworth, and have made it into the first few episodes of the 2nd season. Set in an Australian women's prison. Really it's like an Australian Orange Is the New Black, except a lot less sex and more violence, and no comic relief. It's pretty bleak, although well done. Very doubtful I'm going to want to make it through all 6 seasons, but will give it a 7.5