Alyssa Rosenberg, who I respect but very frequently disagree with (if not for her conclusions than for her path to those conclusions), has come out against Andy Serkis winning an Oscar for his work on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I didn’t want to comment at first, because I haven’t seen the film yet, but my issue with her stance lies in a fundamentally flawed assumption on her part about the nature of film.

Film is a collaborative art form. When someone is nominated for Best Director, they are receiving praise for the costumes, for the lighting, for the lenses used, for the performances, for the script, for the way it was shot, for the way it was edited, and yes for the way they championed all those things to make a final product. I’m not saying that Directors don’t offer up tremendously valuable work or that they shouldn’t be considered for awards because they rely on others to make a final product.

Serkis is one of the few actors who has figured out motion capture as an art form. He acts through totally fictional characters, but if you were to compare his work to any of the wholly CG characters you see in other films that don’t have an actor providing a base performance, it would be laughable to claim that he contributed nothing to the film.

Should we create a new category called Best Baseline Performance for CG Character? I guess we could, but I don’t see the point. What Serkis does is acting. He acts without little balls tapped to a spandex suit just as frequently as with. However they altered his performance in post production is a part of post production and should be examined as a separate act.

Hilzoy has a post reiterating her support for a ban on primate pets. All her arguments are excellent, and the reasons for not having primate pets are manifold. And yet she ignores — consciously perhaps? — the most obvious reason to never take apes as pets…

Dan Meth posted his Trilogy Meter and because I’m a pedant and a geek I thought I’d raise a little umbrage over a couple of points.

First off, a lot of these aren’t trilogies. Trilogies need to have a consistent narrative and at least some semblance of progressive story. If the next Batman movie isn’t by Christopher Nolan then those three movies put together are not a trilogy; at least, not necessarily. Back to the Future is a trilogy because the story is consistent throughout and each movie sets up the next. Going back to my point about films changing hands mid-trilogy belying the term, the X-Men films switch from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner for the final film. But, and here’s where it gets tricky, they are still a trilogy because the second one sets up the Dark Phoenix storyline that the third one carries out, however poorly.

I honestly can’t say much about Rambo, because I haven’t seen any of them, but at the same time my intuition regarding Rambo is that the films merely follow the same character. Are any three consecutive Bond films a trilogy simply because the same character heads the film? I give the Die Hard movies a pass because the third one involved Hans Gruber’s brother, but it was different from the previous two in almost every other way. Similarly, I have trouble considering the Indiana Jones movies a trilogy; but there is a tenuous theme that runs throughout the movies regarding the growth and development of Indiana Jones that qualifies them, but I flip-flop on this subject.

We tend to have this desire to collect films into sets of three, even when they’re not a set of three. Which brings me to my biggest question about this chart. Which trilogy does it mean when it rates Planet of the Apes? Does it mean the first three Planet of the Apes movies? Because I don’t see how you could interpret those as a cohesive trilogy. The second one ends with the world being incinerated by a doomsday bomb. The third, fourth, and fifth movies are a wholy different animal and are in fact a consistent trilogy with an overarching storyline threading through the three films.

Not everything is a trilogy, but our pattern matching monkey-brains still have a fascination with the number three. The same circumstances don’t make movies a part of a trilogy. The same actors don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. The same characters don’t make a movie a part of a trilogy. A consistent theme or ongoing story does. I know I’m being finicky about this, but people throw the term trilogy around for any set of three films and they’re not all trilogies.