Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

clytamnestra Whenever we forget how sexist and cruel the '70s were there are stories like this to remind us: a supposedly serious researcher keeps making decisions with his dick and shows zero interest in the emotional well-being of his study-subject. It starts when a kid-chimp is taken from his mother by force. As nothing says 'grow up to be a well-adjusted adult' like being kidnapped from your loving mother. Then the baby is dumped with the professor's ex-girlfriend (she is a woman you see, and he is a man so he cannot possibly take care of a baby). When she turns out to be a child-neglecting hippie (letting her ape- baby smoke weed, not taking any notes of the experiment) he puts the ape with his new teenage girlfriend. SignLanguage-teaching now begins. This set-up doesn't work out either, but luckily there's finally a proper teacher who teaches the poor ape some rudimentary social skills such as to not bite people (the professor dislikes her, presumably because she's more interested in his assistant's dick). Nim-the-talking-ape is by now world-famous, but he's still a wild and physically strong animal (and an heavily abused one at that) so he lashes out and needs to be put in a cage, with other apes. After a difficult start he finds his turn, with a chimp-girlfriend and a relaxed approach to his sign-language-lessons. With his chance of being 'the guy who made an ape into a human' gone the prof makes a 180 as 'the guy who proved that apes are definitely not human'. What little interest he had in Nim as a person completely gone by now. Nim gets screwed over by humanity again when he and his new ape- family are shipped of to nasty drugs-tests. After lots of activism he ends up in a sanctuary where he lives out his remaining years with some ups and downs.

Love_Life_Laughter Nim was raised as a human, breast fed, given clothing, a human family, a house, bed and toys. In this loving environment he naturally developed a facility for language, was toilet trained, learning dozens of sign language words, and the ability to make sentences. He formed lasting friendships with some student teachers that tried throughout their lives, with the limited power they had, to protect him. Once grown, as part of a natural adolescence that included a period of danger to his teachers as he learned his own strength and looked for a mate, he was relegated to dirty cages, and had a near escape from the animal laboratories of nightmares in which conscious live chimps are immobilized in painful brain experiments. The emotional brutality shown towards Nim, particularly by Columbia Professor Hubert Terrace, is breathtaking. Terrace's propensity to sleep with Nim's female caretakers and act out rather strange family dynamics - first with a former lover who just married someone else, and later with the "next hot new thing" - could keep Freud busy for a long time. The most human character in the movie- loving, caring, expressive, communicative, and playful - was, ironically, Nim. I'm ashamed to be part of a culture that treated such a precious soul to such cruelty over so many years. The twisted power structures that enabled men like Terrace to use Nim as a tool to seek fame, and discard him without a thought like his student amours, rankle to the core. Late in his life, Nim kept trying to escape his cold cage to the house on the property - where he still felt he belonged. One wonders what Jane Goodall would think of our brutality towards Nim. I will never forget the interview in which his loving caretaker brought him to the brutal cages where he was met with a cattle prod by yet another heartless professor. I would like to put the cattle prod right back on him. Nim, on behalf of all feeling human beings, I'm sorry.

The_late_Buddy_Ryan Compared to such superstars of animal linguistics as Alex the talking parrot and Koko the signing gorilla, the late Nim Chimpsky (1973–2000) was very much a lesser light. All the same, his eventful early life has provided filmmaker James Marsh with the material for a fine documentary, as intense and involving as a first-rate fiction film; this one plays like it might have been scripted by Arthur C. Clarke (from a first draft by J.D. Salinger) and directed by Herzog ("Kaspar Hauser") or Truffaut ("Wild Child"). The story begins when Columbia psychologist Herb Terrace prevailed on a colleague (and ex-girlfriend), Stephanie LaFarge, to add a chimp to her already blended family of two adults, seven children and a German shepherd, raise him like a human child (which would include breast feeding) and teach him American Sign Language; the goal was to test Noam Chomsky's well known hypothesis that only the human brain could generate grammatical speech. Nim Chimpsky (get it?) spent a year or two in the loosey-goosey LaFarge household on the Upper West Side—my wife used to see him stumping around the 'hood in diapers with his overprotective minders—then, when it appeared that his sign language skills were being neglected, he was sequestered with Terrace's assistant in a disused mansion in the Bronx and brought down to Columbia for classroom catchup sessions. By this time, he had grown into an unruly adolescent with long, sharp fangs, a short attention span and the strength of many men. When he attacked one of his sign-language tutors and tore her cheek open, Terrace shut the project down, and Nim was banished to the primate research center in Oklahoma where he was born. Terrace added insult to this act of treachery by publishing a book in which he portrayed Nim as a "brilliant beggar" who mimicked his teachers to get rewards—hugs, snacks and the occasional puff on a joint. Except for supervised outings (and a few brief escape attempts), Nim spent the rest of his life behind bars.Since Nim was both an experimental subject and, at least for a few years, a chimp célèbre in his own right, Marsh had plenty of video clips to choose from; only purists will object to a couple of Errol Morris–style reenactments, and the interviews with the participants, thirty-odd years later, are fascinating. Terrace, especially as seen in the archival footage with his slicked-down comb-over and caterpillar mustache, makes a fine comic villain; his self-serving shiftiness contrasts amusingly with Nim's innocent seductions. We can empathize with Terrace's former assistant, Laura Pettito (now apparently a well known neuroscientist, though it isn't mentioned in the film), as she recalls how a brief, much-regretted affair with her boss compelled her to quit the project. Stephanie LaFarge comes across as a good-hearted, spacey 70s mom, the kind of character Dianne Wiest used to play; standouts among the supporting cast include Joyce Butler, a strong-minded alpha female who discouraged Nim from biting (biting her at any rate) by nipping him on the ear; and Bob Ingersoll, an affable Deadhead at the Oklahoma center who became Nim's BF and protector in his later years. The film wisely sidesteps the whole Chimpsky-Chomsky debate about animal communication, a debate that continues to sputter only because the Chomskyites keep moving the goalposts; I think most viewers would agree with something Bob Ingersoll said in an interview (don't think it's in the film) to the effect that the difference between Nim's signing "Stone smoke now!" and anyone else's saying "Dude, let's spark up a fatty!" is pretty much academic.

valleyjohn PROJECT NIM 6 out of 10 This the the story of Nim , a chimpanzee who was taken away from his mother at birth and as part of an experiment , put with a human family to see how would act with learning to sign and living without his own kind. The problem is that the incompetent people in charge of the project cared nothing of Nim and therefore his life was ultimately a really bad one.Herbert Terrace , the head of the project , comes out of this really badly. Not only was he pervert who slept with the young girls who worked with him ( god knows what they saw in him) he also didn't care what happened to Nim. A nasty little man that should be ashamed of himself.The documentary has lots of archive footage of Nim and the many people who worked with him but it still did not have the affect on me that it obviously did on others. Perhaps it's because i didn't really feel for the ape. It bit too many people to feel much sympathy with him.This documentary is described on the poster as Great , Powerful and breathtaking .Sadly, It was none of these.