Seeing Some Jerks At The End of the World

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning
                                           ..."Los Angeles is Burning", Bad Religion

Six years ago, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel made a short film, actually a movie trailer, on what would happen if the world suddenly ended. From there, they decided to expand this to a full-fledged movie. But who would want to see a bunch of actors play themselves, battling the Apocalypse..and who'd want to be in it?

Answer to both: a LOT of people. Rogen got together with Evan Goldberg to write and direct this wild end-of-the-world comedy where you see some familiar faces do unusual things. Just remember it's not quite the real Seth Rogen, James Franco, etc. in this movie. After they see what they do, they'll make sure they're not like how they act here.

It starts with Seth and Jay meeting each other at LAX, with Seth filming the moment for some reality show or whatever. They both go to James Franco's house for a party, where we such surprising things like Michael Cera as a coke addict slapping Rihanna's butt..and doing a few other things he never did on Arrested Development. We also see Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Kevin Hart and even Emma Watson there, too. Jay feels uncomfortable, and decides to go to a convenience store. Seth follows him...
...and then the Ancient Gods from The Cabin in the Woods decide this movie's getting tedious, and jazz things up by setting up the Apocalypse. You know, fire, brimstone, sinkholes swallowing Aziz Ansari, Rihanna, and a few other people. What follows is seeing very familiar movie stars acting like most of us would trapped in the apocalypse. Add Danny McBride as the most unthinking jerk around, even worse than his character in Eastbound and Down, and you got a very funny situation. Oh, and Emma pops up alive with an axe. Between this and The Bling Ring, she'll leave her Harry Potter days way behind. There's also a cameo at the end that will stun a lot of people.

If you want a raunchy comedy in a sea of imperfect blockbusters, This Is The End is just the location. It'll conquer the comedy roster until The Heat with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy arrives, and also GrownUps 2.
Oh, and look closely at the end credits. There's a name you may recognize if you saw Much Ado About Nothing recently

Meanwhile, there's a trailer for a new Vince Vaughn movie called Delivery Man, where a sperm bank accidentally uses his sperm hundreds of times..and now he's being sued as if it's his fault. I know Law and Order did an episode with a plot that is strangely similar to this. So, it's Dick Wolf's fault if you don't like this movie.
Also, I saw a trailer for RIPD, which is the undead version of Men in Black. I can buy Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges pretending to be Yosemite Sam as police partners, but not if they're disguised as an old Asian man with a banana and a Victoria's Secret model. RIPD only makes us appreciate Man of Steel...or GrownUps 2...even more, and that's cheating.

CGI Has Made a Better Monkey, and a Good Movie

Remember the old explanation of how the humans made apes their pets and helpers, but were attacked by them, creating the Planet of the Apes?
Forget it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a more evolved version of the old movies from the 1970's and even the recent reboot.
They came up with a great idea: what if Man came up with a miracle cure for Alzheimer's, and it wound up making monkeys smarter, and eventually able to outsmart us?

In this case, the man is James Franco, who plays scientist Will Rodman. He has a personal stake in this because his father suffers from Alzheimer's. A prototype is tested on a monkey called "Bright Eyes" (the first of many callbacks to the original Planet of the Apes canon). The drug makes the chimp super-smart, but she is shot dead when she attacks someone at the lab. We see the properties of the drug is passed to her son, who is called Caesar. He is a chimp prodigy, who is able to communicate with Will quite well. However, the chimp has also inherited his mom's temper, and soon he's put in a primate prison. It's there that Caesar gets a hard education that will help him develop into Man's worst nightmare.

It's no accident that while the human actors are generic, although Franco has a wonderful relationship with Caesar, the chimp and monkeys are the most developed characters in this movie. Just look at the expressions Caesar have. You can see him evolving with one look. This is also due to the genius work of Andy Sirkis, who does a great job bringing Caesar to life. Some have said he should get an Oscar nomination for this. The Academy's reluctance to embrace a new type of acting, especially assisted with CGI, will probably keep that from happening. Otherwise, Zoe Saldana could have had a chance at a nomination for Avatar. It's still a great performance. When Caesar does something even more unlikely, I heard a lot of gasps in the audience.

They also have an orangutan named Maurice who's a dead ringer for a familiar Planet of the Apes character. That is no accident. Neither is a guy named Dodge, played by Tom Felton of Harry Potter fame. This guy sees the primates as his own objects of abuse. He's not too far off from Draco Malfoy.

Some may be a bit skeptical abut how quickly Caesar gathers his army against the humans, but the story is a starting point to how Earth could wind up being ruled by apes. When it ends, you wonder if it will become the PotA that we know from the original movie and sequels, or will go a different route.

As far as the trailers that came before the movie, the only one that got my attention was Contagion, about a doomsday virus. It's got an all-star cast, and I hope it can live up to its potential