Nick Broomfield, who’s made documentaries about Kurt Cobain (Kurt and Courtney), Tupac and Biggie (Biggie and Tupac), and Heidi Fleiss (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam), among others, is sort of a tabloidy, British version of Werner Herzog, and most recently, he turned his God-awful, droning, British stroke victim narration on Sarah Palin, for a new documentary that will be premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, for the no doubt untold millions of Palin supporters present there. There’s a new clip from it after the jump, and the crowd shot you see above comes from a Palin event in Lemoore, California (fun fact: that’s a couple towns over from where I grew up, I used to play basketball there). Between Sarah Palin spouting idiotic talking points (DEATH PANELS! FAT CATS!) and Nick Broomfield’s Kermit the Frog-gargling-oatmeal narration, it seems that the goal here was for no one to watch this ever. Which is really the preferred response to anything Palin-related. Great job, everyone, let’s break for lunch.

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20th Century Fox showed new Rise of the Planet of the Apes footage at San Diego Comic-Con and wisely put it online immediately so we wouldn’t have to post a buttcam bootleg.  The audience in Hall H saw the clip below and the ones from yesterday.  The new clip shows an army of primates attacking San Francisco, which is what I imagine a normal day on the west coast looks like.  The director explained to the Hall H crowd why they rebooted the franchise so quickly (besides “for piles and piles of money”).

“It’s never been possible to tell this story, technologically,” Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt told the audience, explaining why Fox is revisiting the franchise just a decade after Tim Burton interpreted the story about chimps that achieve humanlike levels of intelligence. “We wanted to tell our story without using live apes for any number of reasons. It would be a cruel irony to tell the story of the exploited and repressed and use live apes to do so.” [HeroComplex]

Okay, so that’s their reason for the mo-cap, and I’ll admit it’s growing on me a little.  A couple of the scenes in the clip below, particularly the end, were a bit intimidating.  You could even say these apes aren’t monkeying around. . . .  Play me off, Johnny!

What was that director guy saying about exploited animals again?  I’ve already forgotten.  Ha, funny kitty.

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“Let’s see. We got soda, purple stuff. Sunny D! All right!” *

Did you love the amazing realism of the clip Vince posted earlier this week, where Alzheimer’s disease means you forget how forks work, apes who attack a person in a nice neighborhood somehow aren’t shot by police or euthanized by order of the court, and the motion capture effect looks like “a character from Madden superimposed onscreen”?  Yeah, that was great.  Oh, but there’s more.  Andy Serkis (AKA Gollum), who plays Caesar the ape, is back to introduce two more clips from James Franco: Sexy Scientist, also known as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The clips below really show off the motion capture we can expect from the film, which opens August 5th.  We get to see how Ceasar escapes and makes the other apes intelligent (still no explanation why firearms and the military don’t exist to fight the apes).  I’m still not sold on this mo-cap, especially when Brian Cox just standing still looks fascinatingly real by comparison.  But the most important question raised by these clips isn’t one of our humanity but rather a more practical concern:  they spent all this money on mo-cap but they didn’t use any of it to fix Draco Malfoy’s creepy forehead?

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Didja catch our clever reference? Didja didja huh huh?

After the jump, you can watch a new clip from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (opening August 5th), introduced by Andy Serkis, who plays the guy in the digital monkey suit. Here’s his partial introduction:

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes is considered to be the first live-action film to star and be told from the point of view of a sentient animal.”

Bitch, please, we’ve seen Milo and Otis.

“…a character with human-like qualities who can strategize, organize, and ultimately lead a revolution.”

Oh sure, well it’s true once you qualify it to death, but it becomes a lot less impressive. For instance, I am the greatest lover in the world. …A muscular, clown-haired lover who can finish quickly, multi-task, whistle show tunes, and ultimately photoshop cats into pictures on the website FilmDrunk.com. NO ONE ELSE CAN MAKE SUCH A BOLD CLAIM!

“Another historic accomplishment for the picture, was its use of visual FX and performance-capture work on practical locations outside a soundstage. Which allowed me as Caesar to interact as never before with the other actors. Here you see him displaying purpose, outrage, and tenderness as he comes to the aid of his friend Charles.”

Yes, let’s watch him display those things. But first, a question: if Andy Serkis is so indispensable as an actor that they would take the time to hire an expensive team of animators to record and recreate his every move, how come they never actually put him in any movies where he’s not wearing a mask (so to speak)? Him, Ron Perlman, and Ray Park are the only guys who’ve managed to get typecast as non-human.

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All along, my hopes for Captain America haven’t been too high because they hired Joe Johnston to direct it, but this newly-released fight scene clip (aptly titled “Shield Fight”) might be enough to give us false hope for another day. The music is cheesy and overdone and ridiculous, and the Nazis seem to be shooting plasma guns for some reason, but the lack of shaky-cam is promising. And if you’re some kind of bullsh*t liberal arts major, there’s probably a thesis to be written about the symbolism of the personifaction of America running around kicking the sh*t out of everyone with a shield. “WHAT? I’M JUST DEFENDING MYSELF!”

Oh, and what was up with the guy who gets hit in the chest with the shield who falls forward? That thing must be made out of the same material as the bullet that killed Kennedy. And by Kennedy I mean JFK, not the MTV VJ. She of course died of dysentery.

[More clips available at IGN]