What’s on TV
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017) 9 p.m. on FXX. The new big-screen adaptation of Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” shares an actor with “War for the Planet of the Apes,” but you won’t see his face in either movie: He’s Terry Notary, a motion-capture performer whose movements provided the basis for the digital dog that stars opposite Harrison Ford in “The Call of the Wild,” and who played one of Andy Serkis’s chimpanzee companions in the “Planet of the Apes” movies of the 2010s. “War for the Planet of the Apes,” the most recent one of those, completes the story of Caesar, the chimpanzee revolutionary played by Serkis. It hinges on a rivalry between Caesar and an angry human colonel played by Woody Harrelson. (Caesar spends much of the series proving that he has more humanity than the humans in it, who want to wipe out his species.) “The motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces, often seen in close-up,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times.
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) 5:30 p.m. on TNT. More digital apes and human villains can be found in this Tarzan rethink, which casts Alexander Skarsgard as a version of that literary son of nature. Directed by David Yates, this take on the story is built loosely around history: It pairs Skarsgard’s Tarzan with a fictionalized version of the 19th-century American George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), who publicly denounced the violent colonialism led by King Leopold II of Belgium in Central Africa. The plot pits Tarzan and Williams against Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz), an oppressor in a white suit.
IT’S PERSONAL WITH AMY HOGGART 10 p.m. on TBS and TruTV. The sometimes “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” correspondent Amy Hoggart helps a New York executive develop her sense of humor in the first episode of this new comedy-documentary series, which chronicles Hoggart’s attempts to help people work through common issues. Highlights of the episode include a scene in which an expert breaks down the psychological effects of a goofy knock-knock joke. Its punchline revolves around Sean Connery.
What’s Streaming
WEST SIDE STORY (1961) Stream on Starz platforms; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The Times’s dance critic, Gia Kourlas, wrote an article this week about how Jerome Robbins’s choreography is missed in the current production of “West Side Story” on Broadway. “What Robbins created wasn’t just a series of dances, however peerless,” she wrote, “but an overarching view of how, beyond anything else, movement could tell a story.” See some of that choreography in action in this classic film version of the musical, which followed Robbins’s original Broadway production. This isn’t purely Robbins’s vision, though: He was fired before the film was completed, and shares the directing credit with Robert Wise.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
