The male staff at HipoPress had been holding its collective breath for three months in anticipation of the release of Planet of the Apes. For whatever reason - Tim Burton's track record, the role in our development played byt the original Planet of the Apes series, or simply the prospect of large-eyed, scantily-clad supermodels being chased around the landcscape by talking chimps - we had spent the weeks leading up to the premier counting off the days like children before Christmas.
We went to the movie as a group. To call it a "Guys' Night Out" would be to downplay the spiritual significance of the event. It was less a movie than a quest.
Planet of the Apes was a bad movie - bad, bad, bad. it was heart-wrenchingly disappointing on too many levels to discuss here. It was just awful - depressingly, soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly awful.
Now, here's the odd thing: almost everyone hates this movie - critics, film historians, actual apes - but nobody seemed to have hated it as much as we did. Their reviews have been uniformly negative, but not vitriolic. Why did we hate it more than everyone else? Probably because we had a bigger emotional investment in this movie. It's not that the movie was so bad - though rest assured that it was - it's the heart-breaking sense of disappointment and betrayal involved.
Suddenly, we know what it's like to be our girlfriends.
