So after a generally satisfying summer of comic book heroes and villains, transmorphing mechanical organisms, horrible bosses, aliens and then cowboys and aliens at the box office, was this blogger ready to go ape?

Let’s put it this way: I left the theater thinking that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of a movie that I had seen this entire year! And in many ways this movie’s grasp and execution of concept exorbitantly surpasses that of the 1968 original film.

Now, I love the original film with Charlton Heston like all get out. The ’68-vintage Planet of the Apes will forever be a classic movie. But y’know, for audiences forty-some years on, the notion of an Earth taken over by simians could be… a bit more “boss”, as they used to put it. As an example of filmmaking of its own time ...