Word: monkey
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Reading today's [April 3] editorial cartoon, however, I was finally moved to comment on Conley's by-now familiar pattern. His "Monkey King" cartoon epitomizes the worst of both his editorial and strip cartoons: it is insulting, aesthetically unpleasing, but above all, unhumorous, uninsightful, and downright immature...
What you get is a big, bustling, intermittently dippy melodrama that takes the Preston premise a few steps further. The virus becomes airborne and infects a California town. Now sneezing in a crowded theater can spread an instant epidemic. And a cute monkey may be the innocent agent of genocide...
...could stanch the epidemic in a trice were it not for that old bogeyman the nut case Army general (Donald Sutherland, eyes rolling goofily). Appar-ently a killer virus, the threat of plague, a White House crisis-oh, and a pretty blond child set up for a big bad monkey bite-aren't enough for one doomsday movie; the military has to go bats as well. We can only surmise that back in 1986, when he produced Platoon, Kopelson contracted a deadly strain of the con-spiracy virus from Oliver Stone...
Patrick Dempsey is wonderful as the virus' first victim, a Generation X kid trying to make a buck by bending the rules and smuggling the monkey to sell...
...movie's frequently plausible situations make the viewer uncomfortable. Motaba, the incurable, fatal African disease brought over by a monkey, can't be laughed off. Nor can scenes of the town's isolation under martial law. The formerly bucolic Cedar Creek is surrounded with barbed wire. Heavily guarded "camps" are constructed in which people march in, and emerge as corpses. The final solution for dealing with the infected, and thus incurable, is also disturbing--bomb them and destroy the virus...