Nobody wanted to tackled this one, eh? Well, I can tell you what Larry has been up to: getting a sex change and calling himself Lana. Not that it’s my business or anyone else’s, of course, just FYI.
The Magnificent Seven
A Fistful of Dollars
Alien (more of an uncredited ripoff than a remake, but hey)
Ben-Hur
The Ring
Evil Dead 2
Shall I go on?
Anyway, it’s been 70 years since the last memorable Kong. We have the technology, we have the movie making techniques, we can make him better, stronger. I say, long live the king! IOW, I want a giant monkey movie using motion capture, CGI, and I don’t want a cheap kong knockoff, I want the real deal.
…that’s really unfair-he never just said “hey, lets do a remake!” Jackson wasn’t just a fan of the movie-its his obsession. Here is Harry Knowle’s account of being shown the original model from the King Kong movie…
This is the movie that Peter Jackson needs to make. Its like the bugbear on his sholder that won’t go away. He tried to make the movie in 1996, but that other ape movie, Mighty Joe Young, scared away the investors. The movie is based on the original-and Jackson has already promised not to tone the movie down to “21st century political correctness.” So this isn’t just any remake-for Peter this is extremely personal.
Please say it’s not so. I have nothing againest Bloom, but the guy always seems to be a pretty boy and little more. LOTR had him as an Elf with kind of a dainty air to him, Troy had him as a sniveling little coward who starts a war, POTC he was a pip squek in comparison to pretty much everyone else. I can’t see him as Bond
The parts where Kong, who is eventually portrayed as the good guy, takes the girl captive, strips her naked, and starts killing people? Some of those scenes got edited out of the standard late-night version…
That’s what bothers me. If the original King Kong really was THAT great of a movie (and it was!), then why does it even need to be remade at all? Pearl Jams’ Yield is my favourite album of all time, but I have no desire to re-record it myself, trying to stay true to the original, because the original is already there for me and everyone else to enjoy.
99 out of 100 times, when a movie is remade, it either makes a joke out of the original, or just draws attention to how much better the original was. I haven’t seen either versions of The Thing, but from what I’ve heard, that’s one of the few exceptions, and I’ve personally never seen a remake which I enjoyed more than the original. If there’s one thing I would like to see changed about Hollywood 2004, it would be for people to stop doing remakes and start making ORIGINAL ideas instead
No, that’s not politically incorrect (though the edits were more because they were a bit graphic). I’d say the non-PC elements are the general depiction of the natives of Skull Island–standard African-exotic-types (war paint, grass skirts, unga-bunga talk) who are in awe of the blonde woman and run around in a willy-nilly panic when Kong escapes.
In regard to “if the movie was that great, why remake it”:
One reason, which Jackson has pointed out, is that a lot of kids just won’t watch really old, black and white films. My daughter (12 years old) loves the Marx Brothers movies we’ve introduced her to. Most of her friends won’t watch them tho, or any “old” movies, esp in black and white. So one thing Jackson said he wants to do is bring the experience of King Kong to a generation that is missing out on it.