And I thought my life sucked.
That is why I no longer fear Hell, that and my lack of belief in its existance, but mostly it’s the Congo weekend that cured me.
Wow. I didn’t know this movie could spark such vitrol. I thought it was awesome. It’s #2 on my list of the year’s best. It’s not a perfect movie–it’s too long, there’s too much slow motion (of course), Brody’s kind of flat, and the score is good but not great–but I was never bored or even less than entertained. I got to see it for free because I reviewed it, but I’d gladly pay money to see it again. I can understand being underwhelmed because reviewers (like me) have inflated expectations, but I don’t get the hate. Basically, if you don’t like Peter Jackson’s other work, you’re probably not going to like this, either. But another critic whom I sat beside at the screening gave Return of the King a bad review and he also put King Kong on his year-end top ten list, so YMMV.
Word on the grapevine says this is what Cheney had in mind when trying to get Congress to authorise the use of torture. And people try to tell me he’s not evil… 
It’s not unrealistic bullet physics–and there’s nothing scientific about it–it’s ridiculous impossibility in terms of gun skill. There was a big deal made earlier about how the kid with the gun had never held one before. It’s not about absolute believability–it’s about believability in context, within the movie’s universe. A world was constructed wherein there was nothing strange about dinosaurs and giant apes stomping around–but there’s no reason a kid who may or may not be old enough to attend college would be able to pick off insects with 110% precision off someone’s face–with no damage to the face whatsoever–the first time he ever pulls a trigger. It makes no sense.
Were there some mechanism for immediate skill mastery presented, that would be one thing. Say that characters could download skills by cellphone ala The Matrix or the shooter was some kind of well-programmed cyborg or an alien with super powers or something, or the shooter were a Bond-like badass international spy–then it would be understandable that he could shoot like that. But there is no such mechanism provided: it’s just some totally human, normal, teenage kid who’s never picked up a gun before. Have you ever tried to fire a gun? I guarantee you that anyone, even James Bond, picking up that gun for the first time would’ve ended up ripping Mr. Mothbait to shreds, probably leaving the insects completely intact.
Sol, I respect you a lot as a poster, and I really mean that. But you’re being really quick to call elitism where there is none.
FWIW, I thought the movie was extremely well thought-out, but far too long. You could watch the entirety of Aeon Flux before they even find the damn ape (I did this at a drive-in theater with my girlfriend a couple nights ago–after our movie ended, I looked to the King Kong screen and they weren’t anywhere near meeting Kong).
And I too thought Brody was one of the most awful casting jobs I’ve seen in a big-budget movie in a while. Jack Black seemed like a good fit at first, but showed no emotional range whatsoever. Whatshisface who played both the cook and Kong was excellent.
It was a joke. The kid even had his eyes closed half the time while he was doing it, but unbelievably he got every single insect every time. Exaggeration and absurdity intended to be amusingly unlikely.
I thought it was funny.
Yes. Within the movie’s fantasy adventure universe, that’s exactly the sort of thing one expects. There’s no reason to expect that a twenty-five foot gorilla (even allowing the existence of twenty-five-feet gorillas) should be dextrous and gentle enough to (without breaking stride) take a 5’4" girl by the hand and toss her onto his back without dislocating her shoulder, either – except that it’s a fantasy movie. There’s no reason to expect that Denham is going to get permits to display said 25’ gorilla in a swank Manhattan theatre, either… but we go with it. Intellectually, we know that it’s physically impossible for the Venture to carry Kong back to the U.S., but we don’t sweat it. We know that the winds at the top of the ESB would make it way too dangerous to walk around in high heels on a 1’ ledge, but we ignore it, because it’s a fantasy. We know that a woman who is tied so securely to posts that she can’t escape is going to be seriously injured if she’s grabbed by the waist and ripped free, but… you get the idea.
In the context of a fantasy adventure movie, especially one rooted in the 1930s adventure mold, you can get away with just about anything. A plucky kid can sneak into a Fokker E.III when the villain has the hero trapped, get it into the air, and use its guns to break the chains binding the hero, who can then disarm the bomb and whup the tar out of the villain. The kid’s unfamiliarity with the aircraft and its weaponry is represented by the wings wobbling a bit, a near miss with an outbuilding and a nervous but determined look on his face. The audience feels increased anxiety as they see the hero in the gunsights – “Oh no! He’s a goner for sure!” But the plucky kid makes the one-in-a-million shot and saves the day. Yes, it is so unlikely as to be laughable, but that’s what a 1930s adventure movie is like.
You might as well complain that it’s impossible for a squadron of SE5a’s to make repeated strafing runs on Kong without hurting Ann, either with a direct hit or from flying glass and stone, and sending her plummeting to her death – never mind the casualties on the ground and inside the Empire State Building and elsewhere.
Kong appears at just about exactly an hour in. Either they started screening Kong after Aeon Flux, or you saw a version that was cut down to 30-45 minutes. 
How does the character of Carl Denham call for emotional range? He hasn’t got any – that’s rather the point. Compared to Robert Armstrong’s Carl Denham, Jack Black’s rendition is a tour de force of profound depth. I mean, there was a moment there where he might… I mean might… have been a bit frightened at the prospect of death. At times there was a hint of anxiety that he might fail… And… at the end… was that… maybe… possibly… a note of regret creeping in? As the character was originally written and performed, he’s pure, unadulterated bravado, uncomplicated by any human emotion.
Jackson’s “King Kong” is a moderately entertaining 80 minute movie strangled somewhere inside a three hour showreel for a special effects company.
The story isn’t complex. Ape meets girl. Ape beats the crap out of Manhattan. Some machine gun fire and it’s lights out for the chimp. Why it should take three hours and a budget stretching from here to the horizon to tell this story is a good question without, I suspect, a very good answer.
The powers-that-be could have ensured that this turned out much better, simply by cutting about $100 million from the budget. When film-makers start out, they have to work within constraints (low budget, no time, no big names want to work with them etc.). This forces them to be creative and to work hard. Then they hit the big time, and have all the money and resources in the world offered on a plate. This makes them lazy and indulgent. This has always been the case, but in the current era of anything-is-possible digital post-production, the problem has worsened because modern animation and special FX are bottomless pits into which to toss money - there’s nothing that can’t be created on screen if someone somewhere keeps giving you millions to spend.
I find myself kind of amused at many of the specific criticisms leveled at this film, and it makes me wonder how many who so utterly despise this movie liked or even lauded Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, against which every complaint here listed could be issued.
Some of the complaints about the realism and physics for instance; such as Ann Darrow’s kinetic and environmental durability, Kong’s apparent invulnerability against the T. Rexs, et cetera, are all pretty flat given the outlandish absurdity of the central figure–a 25 foot tall gorilla that lives on an uncharted island populated by otherwise extinct dinosaurs and giant insects. If one can accept that cartoonish, H.Rider Haggard-esque premise then one can hardly complain about other physical and biological sillyness. Others, such as complaints about the flatness of the characterization and the corniness of the dialog would have more merit, but one has to take into account that this is an attempt to remake a 1930s-era matinee action/horror flick following and expanding upon not only the story but the tone. This isn’t, to make comparison to another film previously mentioned, Hotel Rwanda. It’s more in the vein of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark with its cartoon Nazis, or Goldfinger, with an absurdly diabolical German mastermind and his faithful legions of Korean flunkies. It’s a film about a giant gorilla…of course it’s going to be silly.
More apropos are complaints about the running time, the extent and appeal of the CGI sequences that took up most of the central section of the story, the effectiveness of the stock characters (i.e. whether Jack Black was or was not effective as Denham), and overall, whether the central relationship between Kong and Darrow worked; not as a “realistic portrayal of a primate-human love affair,” but as a hook and motivation for the plot developments (such as they were). To those who found the action sequences boring and the ape-actress relationship unappealing, I can understand the sense of dissatisfaction. Certainly, there were a number of subplots that seemed to be dropped in midstream. But to complain that it wasn’t physically realistic enough, or that the characters weren’t three dimensional and nuanced is a rather laughable complaint. If that was the film you were looking for, I think you stepped into the wrong theater. This was a flick about a giant ape, not a Jane Smiley-penned Focus Pictures arthouse release. I think movie you wanted was The Squid and the Whale, not King Kong.
Many seem to be taking this film a lot more seriously than it takes itself. It’s a popcorn flick in the pure sense of the word; given that level of assessment, I think the movie acquits itself fairly well, and though I daresay it doesn’t stand up to the better members of the genre, I can hardly conceive of it doing the scope of emotional and moral damage many are attributing to it. I get the sense people are piling on to some extent just to pile on and bitch (and given the dearth of good films this year I can sympathize), but by the same token it’s far from being the worst waste of photons to grace screens this year.
Stranger
Folks who are looking for that will have to wait for next year’s release of Sofia Coppola’s brave adaptation of Leigh Kennedy’s Her Furry Face.
…what a load of hogwash. The movie delivered exactly what I wanted, the right mix of emotion, SFX, action, adventure and romance. Why was the movie three hours? So PJ could tell the story he wanted to tell. The Kong that he has had playing around in his head since he was a kid. That he delivered a story that you didn’t want to see, that you thought was too long, that you thought was too SFX heavy, is largely irrelevant. Universal should be congratulated for trusting their director with such a huge budget and letting the movie go three hours.
Your implication that PJ was formerly creative and hard working, but is now lazy and indulgent makes me laugh. There have been few movies as creative as this put to screen, and the team that put this together have been working 10-12 hours straight seven days a week for the last two years. If you can see any obvious differences between the way Jackson approached his movies back in his “braindead” phase, and how he handles them now, I’m sure you can point those out.
Is the movie flawless? Absolutley not. Did the movie go over budget? Yep. And unlike over productions, where the studio ponies all of the money for the overrun, Jackson contributed $20 million dollars of his own money.
And with his statement that the movie is just a “showreel for a special effects company”, ianzin single-handedly lowers the bar for special effects companies and movies world wide. No longer should movies try and do stuff better, like recreate a “note-perfect” 1930’s New York, or create an effect like Kong, who acts so well that due to voter pressure the Broadcasts Critics Association has given him a speciial award. Instead, directors should have to have their visions constrained by tight budgets, be less ambitious in their productions, produce “okay” special effects, and make movies for the “masses.”
Congratulations ianzin, you’ve just advocated more movies like Stealth. It only cost $130 million to make, nearly 80 million dollars cheaper than Kong. It’s only two hours long, so it fits your criteria of a film short enough for an “uncomplex” story. But…
…Stealth only made $31 million back domesticly, and only made $44 million worldwide, meaning that it didn’t make its money back at the box office. It only garnered 13% on the tomatometer, and has a user rating of 4.6 on IMDB. Kong, on the other hand, in just over a week has made 81 million domestic and 83 million worldwide, making a total take of $164 million, just $40 million shy of its production budget. It’s 83% on the tomatometer and has a IMDB viewer rating of 8.1.
…so Kong doesn’t play by the traditional rulebook (it has a long running time, spends time building characters, risky SFX, big budget, and a remake of a beloved classic), turns out to be a hit with the critics and popular with the public, and at this stage almost guarenteed to make a profit for Universal…so…isn’t this a good thing? Don’t we want movie-makers to have more power, not less? Don’t we want movies that are not committee driven and designed?
The original King Kong inspired Peter Jackson to be a filmmaker. It would be a shame if future filmmakers, inspired by Jackson’s version of Kong, get forced to limit thier vision because the studios decide to follow the doctrine of “lowest common denominator” film making that seems to be advocated by so many of the “film experts” on this board…
I saw it tonight. It had some great effects, but damn- there have been governments that didn’t last as long. I spent the first hour wondering “are we ever going to actually see the monkey”, the second hour wondering “When is the black guy gonna get it [because you know he is]?” and thinking “ENOUGH ALREADY! I’ve already seen Jurassic Park 1 and 2. Bring back the monkey” and the third hour wondering “How the hell did they get him in the boat? How did they chain him when transporting him from the docks? Did it just not occur to anybody that they might need a back-up plan in case the chains broke?”. I never felt great sympathy for Kong- clearly from the number of necklaces he’s killed many sacrifices before Ann, he most have killed dozens of people in the movie, and he’s the last of his kind and beset on all sides by gigantic predators, so it’s not exactly like he has a lot to live for, and I’ve the sneaking opinion that one day he’ll wake up in a bad mood and casually fling Ann into the nearest boulder for spite (and it’s not like a relationship between them would work out anyway). I have as much chemistry with Naomi Watts as Adrian Brody did and I’ve never met her.
Technically fab but not a classic. I can’t believe it’s in the Top 250 on imdb.
That’s one of those “fan rush” things, where folks zip home immediately after seeing the film and heap praises all over the film, regardless of it’s merits. The same thing will happen after the next “big” franchise film comes out, and Kong will get bumped off the list.
And my point was, and still remains, so fucking what? The scene wasn’t crucial in terms of story or plot advancement; it was an action sequence. Complaining about it in terms of plausibility is just stupid. Did it work for the movie? Yes. It was exciting, it was fairly quick, and it was funny partly because of its absurdity.
A less imaginative director could’ve made the scene more faithful to real-world 1930’s gun physics and the behavior of giant bugs on a living human. And you would’ve either ended up with the guy being dead from his wounds in less than a minute, or shot to pieces with the gun, or a fifteen minutes of them working out a plan to pry the bugs off and kill them individually without harming the man. Which would get you thumbs up from the amateur entomologists in the audience, but gets you jack shit in terms of a movie where you just want to show creepy crawlies and then be done with it and move on to the next scene.
Which explains why some people are given critical praise and multi-million dollar movie budgets, and others just bitch on the internets.
No, because first, I’m not calling “elitism.” I’m calling “dorkism.”
“Elitism” would be pointing out the movie’s flaws in terms of a movie. “Dorkism” is going off on a hyperbolic tear calling an artistic work a “piece of shit” and then giving the fucking stupidest justifications for calling it so. Some good old-fashioned elitism would’ve been welcome; what we get on the SDMB is just pompous asinine dorkism.
Want to complain about the movie’s pacing? Then talk about it in terms of pacing, and you’ll get some agreement from me, and that leads to discussion. Want to just whine that it was “too long” and you didn’t get to see the monkey soon enough? Then you’ll just sound like a moron with attention deficit disorder.
Want to point out how a character is undeveloped, how a scene doesn’t work in terms of the overall story, how a performance doesn’t work, how a plot point wasn’t sufficiently established? Then you’ll sound like somebody who has an opinion worth debating. Want to go off about some stupid implausibility that did nothing to change the outcome of the scene, but does violate some esoteric body of knowledge that you happen to know about but nobody else particularly gives a rat’s ass about? And then say that that “totally ruined the movie” and made it “a piece of shit?” Then you’ve become just 1 of 10 million other jack-ass dorks on the internet.
It’s not even “suspension of disbelief.” It’s recognizing what the filmmaker’s trying to do with the movie and being smart enough to appreciate it or criticize it on those terms.
…as to some of the other nitpicks…
In regards to Jack Black’s acting, this was the first thing I had ever seen him in, so maybe I’m biased, but I thought he nailed the part. Maybe people who had seen Black’s work in other movies were expecting something else?
How did they get Kong on the boat? This was pointed out on another message board, but apparently if you look closely during one scene with the Captain, in the background is a photograph of the Venture with its own crane lifting an elephant in a cage onto the deck. So even if Jackson called the transition from Skull Island to New York City as the “bravest edit ever”, they put enough thought into the ‘move’ to give us a hint to how they did it.
…the bugs being shot by Jimmy? Just a new riff on an old gag: Han Solo did it when he rescued Lando from the Sarlac, Susan Calvin did it when she rescues Sonny from a rouge robot. Jackson just takes the joke to absurdist levels.
Mysterious body counts? Over at the Kong is King messageboards they have done a count, and everything seems to add up.
http://newboards.kongisking.net/perl/gforum.cgi?post=123881;sb=post_time;so=DESC;forum_view=forum_view_expanded;;page=unread#unread
(There was also a “swamp” sequence that was cut, that explains the deaths of a couple of sailors)
Most of the “problems” that took people out of the movie had answers, but the movie never whacked you over the head with them. I agree with SolGrundy, I don’t see a problem with not liking a film or having problems with pacing, etc, but the vitrol in some of these threads is truly stunning. Apparently, Jackson has grown lazy and indulgent, he can’t control a multi million dollar budget, his co-writers are idiots, the SFX suxxor, the V-rexes aren’t any better than those in Jurrasic Park, and the movie doesn’t measure up thematicly to Hotel Rwanda. Well no shit. :rolleyes:
I can’t speak for the folks who didn’t like Jack Black’s Denham, but I seriously doubt it’s because they were expecting anything different from him based on his other work.
If he has a prevailing note, it’s “Enthusiasic-bordering-on-manic guy with detailed specialized knowledge of the subject of his enthusiasm who aspires to greatness and is doomed to failure because reality doesn’t quite mesh with his self-assessment but is nevertheless a fairly sympathetic and likeable character who easily involves other people in his dreams and schemes.”
Somehow getting a bunch of people onto a beat-up tramp steamer without papers, lousy food, no proper quarters, nobody even knows where they’re going but by god, when they get there they’re going to be RICH and FAMOUS – that’s totally Jack Black material.
“Come on Driscoll, don’t be like that – I know you left a good job behind, you’re not getting paid, most of our party has already been killed, and I got your new girlfriend kidnapped by a giant ape, but it’s still a ROAD TRIP! You’re still with me, right? Sure he is. Skipper! Chart a course for Inspirado.”
That could be said about Empire.
JEEZ! It is a movie! A movie about a giant ape!
I pit anyone that thought seeing a movie about a giant ape was a good idea (apparently it has been done before :smack: ).
Actually I don’t pit the movie or it’s viewers. I pit New Zealand! FOR FUCKS SAKE could “New Zealand” stop giving a shit that some random movie was made here!
PJ is apparently a cool bloke who has evidently done something entertaining on screen (several times) that has made NZers wet their collective undies. IT IS A MOVIE ABOUT A GINORMOUS MONKEY! The last 3 were about short people and some kind of jewellery!
It is SAD that we judge these movies as some kind of national badge of honour.
I saw the Jessica Lange version of King Kong, I was a teenager then. I have NO idea why I saw it then…OH YES, I was a teenager!
It sucked at the time. I am presuming the storyline still involves a giant ape. It seems the movie opened to fairly depressing statistics, YAY.
Why would anyone want to see a story about a big monkey when they already know the monkey dies? And he does some silly shit on the way.
I may be kicked out of the country for saying this but Heavenly Creatures was the last bloody good movie PJ made.
Wait a minute… what kind of a kiwi are you again?
One that got a bellylarf out of me, anyway.
If she’s not going to die as she gets accelerated and decelerated at about 1000Gs, and if kids can pick up guns and target shoot with their eyes closed, why have ANYTHING make sense?
Why have people die when they get stepped on by a brontosaurus? Why have people die when they fall off a log? Why have a guy die when a spear goes through his chest?
The movie might be about something fantastical, but the reason that fantasy works is because we’re forced to consider a 25 foot ape IN OUR PHYSICAL WORLD. THAT’S what makes it interesting. He’s in our world, playing by our rules. A 25 foot ape doesn’t take me out of the picture. A 5’, 100 lb. woman surviving being bashed to the ground 50 times by said ape DOES.
That said. . .
Good thread. I love movie arguments. I’m with some of the people on both sides. I LIKED the whole first act. I thought the anticipation of getting to the Island was almost better than being there. I liked all of the slow motion, and the “blur cam” than Jackson uses.
I thought KONG was an excellent character. He showed a touch of humanity without being too cheesy – and yes, that beautiful stuff would have been cheesy in the wrong hands, like a Spielberg – but he was still monkey to the bone, brother. And spectacular CGI.
I thought the Man/Boy thing gave the movie nice pauses, but it felt a little shoehorned in, and the dialogue was atrocioius.
*I can come too, mr. Hays, right?
No, sorry Jimmy, stay here.
But, I’m brave too Mr. Hays.*
Besides, that, I found the action on the Island to be overkill. Dino flee, dino-ape fight, bug fight, ape-bat fight. The dino-ape fight was rocking, but interminable. And if the dino’s bites to the arms aren’t going to do anything, do make them bite him. Butt him. Grab him. Something. But if a dinosaur with 3 foot long teeth aren’t even going to break the skin, come up with a different attack plan.
If anyone is on the fence about going, I’d tell them to stay home. If you’re pretty psyched to see a big monkey dance on screen, you’ll probably be satisfied, but bring a cushion.