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Welcome to Kicking the Seat!

Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).

The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar NoéRachel BrosnahanAmy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.

Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was so profoundly disappointing that I had no interest in seeing a third film in what should never have been a trilogy to begin with. The “middle” movie in this re-imagined, new-millennium saga, is a dull curiosity that happened to come out between two brainy, ballsy, stand-alone films. Rise (2011), a cautionary tale about scientific hubris, climaxed with mankind battling artificially evolved primates. The latest film, War (a misnomer of marketing necessity), centers on the last stand between apes and a decimated American military, as represented by OG test subject Caesar (masterfully voiced and motion-captured by Andy Serkis) and a murderous, rogue colonel (Woody Harrelson), respectively. Audiences seeking a predictable, bloody battle of intractable armies may be turned off by director Matt Reeves and co-writer Mark Bomback’s lonesome, winding journey of post-apocalyptic self-actualization. Pity them for digging three graves instead of two.

Logan Lucky (2017)

CHIPS (2017)