As a wise man once said, “Yo, dawg, why report boring-ass movie news when you could just copy Patton Oswalts tweets n’ shit anyway?” And so here we are. I’ve gotten probably ten emails today from publicists quoting various entities’ reactions to their Oscar nominations, and believe me when I say that I couldn’t possibly give less of a microscopic speck of a particle of a shit on a gay gnat’s penis. The only thing remotely interesting to come out of it all was Patton Oswalt’s account of a fictional Oscars-snub party that he’s been tweeting out all day, starting with “Join me for a drink at The Drawing Room, @AlbertBrooks? Me and Serkis have been here since 6am.”

The IMDB trivia section is a treasure trove of interesting information (some of it fake, I’m sure) that I’d probably tap into more often if I wasn’t sure most of it would be met with comments like “This is OLD NEWZ, how about some NEW NEWS that happened TODAY, STUPID,” or “I liked this story better when I read it TEN YEARS ago, on YOUR MOM’S PUSSY, YOU LIMP-DICKED SLOTH KISSER.”

Well I’m braving the hate mail and posting this anyway, because it relates to our favorite monkey, Andy Serkis, who’s probably going to get nominated for an Oscar tomorrow. Turns out he almost ruined Predator.

An attempt was made to get shots of the Predator swinging from tree to tree using a monkey in a red special-effects suit. However, the monkey kept removing the suit and the idea was abandoned. [imdb-trivia]

AMAZING! As good as Predator was, imagine how much better it could’ve been if Andy Serkis had been around to play a monkey playing the Predator pretending to be a monkey? Swinging from trees? Hell yeah Andy Serkis can do that. I heard he swung from trees for six months in preparation for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I hear he still swings from trees three hours a day, every day in the private forest in his mansion, just in case they make a sequel. I hear sometimes he gets so tired that he stops to rest on a log, scratches his butt, then smells his finger and falls off.

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If they gave an Oscar for Things I Wish People Would Shut the Hell Up About, Andy Serkis’s performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes would win in a landslide. Naturally, Fox is busy pouring gasoline on the fire, releasing three CG-free clips of Andy Serkis in ROTPOTA to build Oscar buzz in advance of tomorrow’s next Tuesday’s nominations, and to back up James Franco’s “Andy Serkis is the Che Guevara of Chimps” article from last week. First of all, acting like a chimp isn’t hard, no matter how many times you say it is. He had one line, and the rest was grunting. Channing Tatum doesn’t win awards for that and neither should Andy Serkis. Secondly, asking people to consider performance capture against regular acting is like someone on American Idol getting to use autotune. You can swear you hit the notes all you want, the point is, there’s no way for us to tell.

Check out Andy Serkis’s incredible chimp acting below.
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YOU ARE A MONKEY, DEREK!

With Oscar season about to heat up, James Franco has written an article for Deadline in which he argues that his be-ping-pong-balled co-star, Andy Serkis, deserves the same consideration for wearing a wetsuit and jumping around like a monkey that other actors get for pretending that guys in wetsuits are actual monkeys. As I’ve said before, only through a team of men drawing another man acting like an ape who became a man were we able to discover what it means to be human.

…Narratively it was always his film: I play an emotionally stilted scientist who in the process of mistakenly unleashing a lethal virus on the human race, learns to care for others; Serkis gets to play Caesar, essentially Che Guevara in chimp form.

Che Guevara as a chimp? What an innovative idea, it’s almost as if they got it from a t-shirt…

Andy Serkis is the undisputed master of the newest kind of acting called “performance capture,” and it is time that Serkis gets credit for the innovative artist that he is…

…Audiences are used to large scale effects: impossible explosion, space travel, fantastic fairytale worlds, boys in tights swinging around New York, men with Squids for faces, but there is still a disconnection that happens when a character’s outer surface is rendered in a computer like Caesar’s was. We want to forget that there is a human underneath, the effects are so  well rendered we either forget that the spark of life in it’s eyes [sic] and the life in its limbs is informed by a breathing human or we are so drawn into the ontology of the character we can’t grasp its artistic origins or exactly how it was created. What this means is that we can enjoy such a character – enjoyment testified by the response to such films as Avatar, Return of the King, and Planet of the Apes – but we don’t give artistic credit where it is due.

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The media is going bananas today (WHACKETY SCHMACKETY) with the news that Cheetah, the chimp who starred opposite Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man, died this week at the age of 80. Not only did he outlive both his co-stars (Weissmuller died in 1984 at 79, and Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane, and who died in 1998 at 87), but chimps normally don’t live past 50, making Cheetah some kind of chimp George Burns. If that were the end of the story, it’d be quite simple. But these chimp stories never are.

It seems “this is the chimp from Tarzan” is a popular claim among chimp owners (and to be fair, there were likely multiple chimps used in the film), and an impostor was outed a few years ago.

Another Cheeta – this time with no “h” at the end of his name – was exposed as a fake in 2008 by Washington Post journalist RD Rosen, who had been asked to write a biography of him. In later years, the fake Cheeta had found himself marketed as a painter of “ape-stract art”, with several canvases exhibited at London’s National Gallery. However, with a little investigation, Rosen discovered that the cigar-smoking, paint-daubing impostor was in fact born in 1960 or 1961 and had never been in a Tarzan film.

I like the idea that this journalist made it his mission to out this CHIMPOSTOR for the fraud it was. He’d probably be sitting in his crappy motel room, watching yet another human-interest story on local TV, with this fraud Cheeta finger painting and living it up, while RD Rosen gritted his teeth and crushed a pencil in his fist. This son of a bitch had to be stopped, but no one would believe him, not even his gruff-but-fatherly editor. “GIVE IT UP, ROSEN! YA GOT NO EVIDENCE!” But RD Rosen never let a few banana peels slip him up on his way to THE TRUTH.

As for the recently-departed Cheetah, here’s what we know about him:

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