Word: apes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deliberately plodding quality: the magician is lowered--haltingly--from the splashy proscenium on a "magic carpet"; an actor stands on a platform that is then turned round and round by other actors to indicate movement through space or disorientation; a charmingly flustered little girl (Tamsy Johnson) removes her ape head at the end of the show and recites--haltingly--a speech about how she's not really an ape, but the wicked magician cast this spell...
Despite plot holes through which one could fly several 747s (Why does this potion only affect him and not the Mexicans? When somebody gets killed, aren't the police usually involved? Don't most people recognize an ape when they see one? etc.) Altered States might have redeemed itself with a successful conclusion. Instead, Chayefsky, Russell and even Hurt are at their worst. The director lifts the worst parts of the ending of 2001; the screenwriter suddenly discards the rest of the movie in favor of banalities about the "power of love"; and the actor plays it all like Aeschylus...
...mongoose reprehensible, but applaud the climactic spectacle of two brawling men making hamburger out of each other's bodies. It says something about the American body aesthetic that Eastwood's previous picture, the innocently droll Bronco Billy, failed at the box office while Philo and Clyde, the Ape Man and the Ape, have moviegoers queuing and cheering...
...Lilly, known also for his experimental work on dolphin communication, developed the tank in the 1950s. It is similar to the tanks that helped scramble the brain of the Lilly-like hero of the new sci-fi movie Altered States and turn him briefly, and improbably, into a pseudo ape. Tank centers have opened in most states, and a few therapists are using the tank as a successor to the Freudian couch, or in a search for ASC (altered states of consciousness, in the lingo) or OOB (out-of-the-body experiences). "What I'm experiencing is beyond...
...eyes of his wife Emily (Blair Brown) and his colleagues (Bob Balaban and Charles Haid), Eddie determines that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states. And that reality can be externalized." He imagines, or remembers, himself as primitive man; he becomes that lithe, voracious ape-human...