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It's astonishing how many gorillas turned up on "Gilligan's Island." Gorillas are native to central, Western, and Eastern Africa, so it would be highly unlikely that one would organically find its way to the South Pacific, where Gilligan's Island is likely located. Gorillas, however, were common fodder for 1960s comedy writers, and they were employed frequently. Or rather, actors in gorilla costumes were employed frequently, and created an absurd subset of ape tropes that we, as a culture, still haven't fully and philosophically unpacked. 

Apes were featured heavily in the "Gilligan's Island" episodes "Diamonds Are an Ape's Best Friend", "Beauty Is as Beauty Does" (September 23), "The Chain of Command" (December 2), "Forward March", and "Our Vines Have Tender Apes". It was a profuse plethora of primate pransktership. 

In all of the above cases, the apes were played by prolific Hollywood stuntman Janos Prohaska,...

Gene Hackman was an American original: an everyman actor with unremarkable physical features who became exceptional through the sheer force of his authenticity. Actors can drive themselves nuts trying to be believable, to simply inhabit a scene as a human being with sincere purpose, but Hackman was only ever genuine. He was also prolific, which means that his gift was occasionally squandered in some less-than-stellar films, but we watched them anyway because the promise of a new Hackman performance was worth the time. Now that he's left us for good at the age of 95, those hours we spent watching dreck like "Loose Cannons" or "The Replacements" hardly feel like a waste.

Hackman appeared in all kinds of movies, and excelled at so many different types of roles that he was never closely associated with one particular genre. But there was something about Westerns that perfectly suited his unfussy performance style.

Warner Bros. Discovery has had a rough go of it recently. The newly-formed mega corporation’s decision to callously prune HBO Max’s servers of hours of content has led to mountains of bad PR and billions of dollars in market cap losses. Suffice it to say, a jam-packed list of new HBO Max releases for September 2022 would provide some welcome relief for the “House of the House of the Dragon.”

Unfortunately, HBO Max’s new releases this month are uncommonly light. It’s impossible to say whether this is the result of more Wbd meddling or simply some bad scheduling luck but either way it’s not going to make any executives’ seats less warm. There are only a handful of notable originals this month, led by season 2 of the Spanish language comedy Los Espookys on Sept. 16. That is joined by a pair of documentaries, Escape from Kabul on Sept.

Actor often cast in sleazy, raunchy roles

Susan Tyrrell, who has died aged 67, had all the makings of a cult movie star. Husky-voiced and eccentric, she was a dissipated flower child, somewhat resembling an underground Shirley MacLaine. No wonder she was cast in outrageous roles in Bad (1976) and Cry-Baby (1990), which gained her fans among the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Tyrrell (pronounced Tie-rell), who liked to be called SuSu, was attracted to the bizarre. "I find beauty in the grotesque," she once said, "and in the sweet soul inside someone who has been able to get through their life without being a rat's ass. Such people should be collected, should be swept up immediately and kept in a box of broken people."

One of the broken people she portrayed so vividly was Oma, the pathetic, drunken barfly in John Huston's Fat City (1972), for which she was nominated for an Oscar.