Thanks for posting those, Brian. Newsweek’s review is extremely encouraging, to say the least. I’ll listen to the audio at home tonight.
I feel like I did when we first started discussing the LOTR movies on these boards, months if not years before they were being talked about much in other media. This was the first place I got intimations that those films were going to kick butt, and where I first started getting excited about seeing them.
Another POV re: PJ as god or satan:
I pretty much loathed what he did with LOTR. Contrary to many, with each movie I liked it less and less, though I confess to wanting to own the full DVD series just to see if replacing the cut scenes and deleting the spuriously added scenes would help. . .
I feel that he made a fan-boy spectacle of the film, missed the depth, and created a shallow eye-candy version of a series I loved.
Of course, critical and popular acclaim says otherwise, so it’s clear that I’m the weirdo (big effing suprise there).
However, King Kong is a different project, with different roots, made for different reasons. It’s not an adaptation of a several-thousand-page dense fictional work, but a new movie based on an older movie, using modern techniques, greater resources, and better tools.
I never saw the appeal to the original KK (though admittedly, I’ve never watched it) . . . I was never a “gigantic-monkey” kinda guy (I was too busy reading about Nazgul and Orcs), but I can’t wait to see this. The trailers have me totally hooked and I am eagerly anticipating the chance to see this on the big screen.
Best line in a review ever:
I think it says something about Peter Jackson that he was willing to devote his resources, and those of his staff & his effects company, to working on the Lost Spider Sequence. That he basically said “let’s do this, just for fun.” Like they didn’t have enough to do…
What an absolute geek, in the most positive sense of the word. You gotta love it.
If the movie runs three friggin’ hours, I think we can assume that the pacing is pretty much screwed up already. I, for one, don’t have high hopes.
I’ve read, more than once (including something in the new DVD), that the scene was cut because it was too graphic. It had been shown to one test audience and people, it seems, threw up. I just got the DVD and haven’t watched the special features, maybe it is addressed in there as well.
I don’t see how that follows.
Well, Titanic was over 3 hours…
Errrr…exactly what kind of church was this?
King Kong died for your sins! 
Seventh Day Anthropoids
It was a mormon church in Provo, Utah, 1981. A very conservative church in a very conservative, and at the time sheltered town.
One of the things that makes the original work is its breakneck pacing. Events blaze along at such a pace that you never have time to ask yourself if any of this is plausible.
I just don’t see how that sort of urgency can be done in a movie that runs three hours. Jurassic Park, which was an efficient thrill machine, ran 2 hours 7 minutes, and even at that shorter running time, towards the end I was just wishing that they’d get it over with. A movie I love, The Rocketeer, runs one hour forty-eight, with never a dull moment; my thesis is that just over an hour and a half is the best length for action movies.
One of the things that makes the original work is its breakneck pacing. Events blaze along at such a pace that you never have time to ask yourself if any of this is plausible.
I just don’t see how that sort of urgency can be done in a movie that runs three hours. Jurassic Park, which was an efficient thrill machine, ran 2 hours 7 minutes, and even at that shorter running time, towards the end I was just wishing that they’d get it over with. A movie I love, The Rocketeer, runs one hour forty-eight, with never a dull moment; my thesis is that just over an hour and a half is the best length for action movies.
I have to chime in as someone who saw the preview a couple weeks ago in the theater. At the time, I can remember thinking, “This looks like positively the worst movie ever made.” I didn’t initially even realize the trailer was for King Kong, nor that it had been made by Peter Jackson. I thought it was a piece of typical Hollywood schlock, with expensive special effects and crappy acting. Jack Black looked particularly implausible in whatever role he’s playing. Anyway, I’ve never even seen a Peter Jackson movie, so I’d have no expectations on that score, personally. But count me among those planning to give this one a miss.
Naomi Watts will be on one of the late night shows tonight. Unfortunately, I forget which one - maybe Conan O’Brien? I’m assuming she’ll talk about the movie and that some good clips will be shown, so I’ve tivo’d it to record.
I don’t know why the previews excite anyone.
Why? Because the monkey looks cool. All right. I thought the dinosaurs looked like shit. . .they looked worse that the ones in Jurassic park and that was, what, 12 years ago. The movements looked comic-book goofy like the original Spiderman and like Hulk.
The CGI dinosaurs had that amateurish quality where their advance towards the camera doesn’t quite match their “size expansion” so the depth of them is all wrong.
Beyond that, what’s exciting about the previews? Movie shoot on creepy island, girl tied up, gorilla in New York. If they weren’t telling you “Award Winning Director Peter Jackson” is there really anything to get you pumped? Have you been jonesing to see Jack Black in a more dramatic toned-down role? You a big Naomi Watts fan? Adrien Brody? Sure he’s good. . .is he exciting enough to get out out of the house?
There’s nothing in the preview to indicate that the writing and dialogue are interesting, or that the plot goes anywhere interesting. I get the sense that the movie is sort of in a purgatory between trying to be big gorilla action, and meaningful human interaction.
So, two theories about the preview:
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It’s actually pretty weak and they couldn’t show us much except some pretty pictures.
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It’s actually very strong and they know that it will succeed on it’s merits so they don’t need to give anything away.
I hope it’s 2. I do. I’ll see it anyway. It’s playing at my favorite local cinema. I’m just saying that I’ve seen the preview on the big screen a couple times now (most recently last night at the same theater) and I’m not that excited by it.
You know: Morons. 