I’m not going to find a cite, but I’m pretty sure PJ originally wanted Fay Wray to utter the infamous last line. Alas, she died before that could happen.
Brian
One of his early scripts has been floating around on the intenet for awhile. At the end of the script he has an “old woman” step forward to deliver the final line. It was evidently intended to be a cameo for Fay Wray. It is too bad that she died before he could shoot it that way.
Didn’t he rip somebody’s head off and throw the rest of the body away as the crew was escaping Skull Island? At least, that’s what it looked like to me.
Some of my favorite movies are chick flicks in macho drag. My favorite Western, Rio Bravo, is a movie I always describe as a “chick flick in cowboy drag.” It was Howard Hawks’s masterful response to* High Noon* (which he thought was ridiculous because no Sheriff worth his salt would go begging around town to put other people in harm’s way to do HIS job), in which John Wayne and Dean Martin must learn how to emotionally support each other before they can vanquish the bad guys.
I have other examples, but I really have to pee.
One question.Andy Serkis as the cook.Was he Popeye?
Yes, as in tear off with his mouth. Not your average vegan, I assure you. That pile of skeletons from past sacrifices in the area he first brought Ms. Darrow says omnivore to me.
I was off by 5’ on the height though. I must’ve been referring to that deleted Vaudville dance scene number with Ann & Kong in stiletto heels doing an Adults Only striptease act.
You mean kinda like this?
Kong Homer: So, when are we gonna, you know?
Ann Simpson: Soon, I just need to work on my yoga excerises a bit more.
Oh if the older versions made you cry, you’d better bring TWO boxes of tissue for this one. I was amazed at how emotional I felt towards the end, knowing that our hero was about to die.
I can’t wait to see that on the DVD!
I’m not being a pill, I’m paying the man a compliment. He took a story that everybody knows, made a chick flick/action adventure out of it, drummed the hype to unseen proportions prior to its December release. It’s the Titanic formula all over again.
And here I’ve been avoiding “chick flicks” for years, fool that I am! I’d never realized that they featured so many giant centipedes. Somewhere I’d picked up the idea that the genre eschewed elements such as dinosaur wrestling. Still, better late than never; first thing tonight, I’m hitting the local Blockbuster to rent Fried Green Tomatoes.
Great things about the movie:
Not only does it succeed marvelously with its presentation of Skull Island, the archetypal lost world bursting with fantastic monsters and lost civilizations, the movie also manages to resurrect the rough-edged, sprawling glory of Depression-era New York City, which is just as mythically charged in its way. During the postcard-like versimilitude of the city scenes with their exuberant color and vitality, I was reminded inexorably of Jack Finney’s novel Time And Again.
The Skull Islanders, as befits the inhabitants of such a gloriously savage land, are the most cinematically native of any native islanders ever to exist in cinema. They’re so native you can’t even believe it. Transplant them to anywhere else in the world, and they would still manage to be more native than the actual natives. They must have a secret native formula which combines the juices of various native plants to produce some sort of Pure Essence of Native, which they consume regularly at their native ceremonies. Man, were they native.
The Venture, and its crew of mysterious outcasts: again, Peter Jackson’s eye for classic cinematic tropes conjures up the trampiest tramp steamer ever to raise anchor for Singapore. It’s easy to imagine this gang of roughnecks sailing anywhere in the world, conducting whatever shady business that requires them to maintain such a fearsome onboard arsenal, then breaking port minutes ahead of the local authorities.
Jack Black’s take on Carl Denham: a marvelously controlled portrayal of a manic character, rather than the manic performance I’d been dreading. Black presents Denham as a man for whom reality is never enough; he is the Epic Rhapsode as master bullshit artist, so convincing that he even fools himself. Denham believes that he is an ironclad cynic, but he is in reality the most gullible dupe of his own incessant mythologizing; he simply does not understand that life, unlike film, cannot be revised or cajoled at a whim. In his blindness, he’s more dangerous than Kong, and just as innocent of the damage he unintentionally inflicts.
And… there is Kong himself, of course. Kong is just Kong. It’s eerie; seven decades after his first classic cinematic rampage, his tragic fall and inarguably final demise, here he is once again, and somehow it’s the same Kong. It’s true that he doesn’t look quite the same as he once did, but then who would after all that time? His fur isn’t quite as lively anymore; he’s got a few more scars. In the first movie, he was all fire, blood and thunder; a young Turk born of a film industry only just starting to explore its enormous raw potential, which Kong embodied perfectly. Here was something the like of which audiences had never seen before, pure fantasy given life and weight, voice and emotion; the Eighth Wonder of the World. Today, he’s no longer a novelty in the genre he helped found, but his return performance shows the subtlety and confidence of a veteran performer, able to balance the gravitas of an aging statesman with flashes of unselfconsciously clownish humor.
Peccadillos:
In his tribute to the original film, Peter Jackson was clearly trying to pay homage both to its status as a milestone of special effects and as a tale with the power to sway emotions. Although the new film succeeds in both respects, I felt it would have been improved still further by a leaner approach to some effects setpieces, and an expanded exploration of some of the plot threads Jackson’s script introduces. The original **King Kong ** is famous not so much for its special effects, but for the way in which those effects were used to create a character the audience can believe in and care about. The brontosaur stampede was awe-inspiring eye candy, but in a decade the technology will be old hat; I’d rather have had that time used to flesh out Ann and Jack’s love affair, or learn where and how Denham got the map, or see more of what Kong represents to the villagers, or gain more insight on Bruce Baxter’s unwilling transfiguration from actor to hero. In the end it’s the characters rather than the effects that matter: Jackson should have trusted his heart more.
So… what happened to the scene from the trailers, the one where Denham is directing Ann on the beach? “Scream, Ann… scream for your life!” Not a major quibble, but still, I thought that bit was pretty effective-- especially Denham’s response: *"…Herb, get the camera…" *
Even allowing for the fact that this movie features a three-story-tall ape who fights dinosaurs… even taking that into account, there are still moments that cross the line between “Wow, that’s really incredible!” and “Okay, that’s just ridiculous.” The Running of the Brontosaurs scene is the most conspicuous of the trangressors here, though not the only one by far. Even if we don’t know precisely what a gigantic primate might or might not be capable of, most of us have a fairly intuitive grasp of what a normal human being could reasonably hope to survive and what they couldn’t. Evidently the laws of physics on Skull Island incorporate some cartoon principles. Though I can’t remember the source, I believe there’s a maxim of fiction writing which states that you may ask your reader to accept an impossible event, but not an implausible one.
There’s a Wilhelm in this movie. Wilhelm needs to stop now. I’m immersed in the movie, totally wrapped up in the events unfolding onscreen, and then along comes Wilhelm to jar me out of my reverie and remind me that, yes, I am actually watching a movie after all. Wilhelm isn’t an homage or clever in-joke anymore, if Wilhelm indeed ever was; Wilhelm is a distraction that lessens my enjoyment of movies. In fact, screw Wilhelm.
Kong’s ascent of the ESB. This is the one bit that everyone remembers, or knows about even if they hadn’t seen the movie. Ask someone to name any scene from the movie, and I wager that chances are most people would say, “King Kong climbs the Empire State Building.” They may not know the name of the island he came from, the name of the ship that brought him back, or the names of any of the characters, but this much people do know, dammit: King Kong climbed the Empire State Building. Yet in the new movie, this Herculean ascent is practically over before it begins. Kong arrives at the ESB, starts to climb, and bare seconds later he’s at the top! Jesus Christ, Jackson; what was up with that decision? For god’s sake man, couldn’t you have dropped a lizard fight, a couple centipede scares, or half a minute from the Rex duel to highlight Kong’s titanic effort to reach the summit? Where the hell were the searchlights?!
The Line. In fairness, this may not have been entirely the fault of the actor or director, except maybe indirectly; my unreasonable anticipation is at least as responsible. But Jack Black gave the character of Carl Denham such remarkable versimilitude; and it was all but a given that he was going to have the last line, and it was going to be The Line. And this is where everything in the movie should have converged, in that one line. Denham fashions the line as he does every other statement, as if it were displayed in a glittering marquee in his own mind: Airplanes? Mere, prosaic airplanes killed Kong? Nonsense; literal, common lead cannot slay a god! And so Denham starts to reply, and in the midst of his statement he realizes that he’s stating the plain truth; he suddenly understands why Kong died, the *real * reason. His retort starts out as a pronouncement, and ends up as a revelation; at last, myth and reality have merged, and he sees his role in it clearly for the first time. And in that instant, Carl Denham no longer has anywhere to hide.
On preview, I see that my list of problems is longer than my list of likes. That’s just me, though; often I’m more disturbed by minor flaws in otherwise great things than by gaping defects in stuff I don’t really care about. In case you couldn’t tell, I really liked this movie. Well done, and many thanks, Peter Jackson!now get busy on The Hobbit you lazy slacking Kiwi bastard
I kind of doubt this; Kong is never depicted as eating any kind of meat, from the spoils of his own kills even down to the insects and bat-creatures that share his home. From Kong’s treatment of Ann at that point, it seemed pretty clear to me that the other sacrifices died from Kong’s unfortunate case of “Lennie Syndrome.” Recall how he was flailing her around incautiously at that point. Alone of all the sacrifices, she ulitmately escapes death by treating him not as a god to be feared, but as an audience to be wooed.
Opps; I note that I successfully managed to omit the actual specific, objection behind this portion of the screed; basically, I felt that this final line should have been delivered with something approaching the emotional quality I outlined above, and Black’s actual reading came across a bit flat in comparison.
Still… given his overall performance in this movie, I find it amazing that this is the same guy from the MTV Music Awards easter egg on the **Fellowship of the Rings ** DVD.
At the time Fay was filming Kong, she was also filming a second movie for RKO. (“The Most Dangerous Game,” IIRC.)
You know, this latest remake is all well and good, but it could never capture the grandeur and majesty of the 1976 remake of King Kong.
I mean, who can forget that hauting moment in the 1976 remake when Jessica Lange cries, “You God-damn chauvinist pig ape!”
The Simpsons did do a great parody of the original King Kong in which Marge ended up marrying the ape. Very funny.
“He’s not dead!”
“No, but his career is. I remember when Al Jolson ran amuck at the Winter Garden and climbed the Chrysler Building. After that, he couldn’t get arrested in this town.”
Not to mention the scene in which Dwan (yeah, her name was D-W-A-N) is all wet and Kong uses his breath to “blow her dry.” It was obviously intended by the filmmakers to be tender/erotic, but it just made us think, “Good lord, how bad must Kong-breath smell?”
I loved the new Kong, which I saw this afternoon. The NY Times’s reviewer gives a great discussion of what I liked about it. The biggest quibble I had was that I thought the fight scene between Kong and the T.Rexes went on too long; it felt right, and well-paced, and then when they fell down among those vines, and it kept going, it just felt like too much; I felt irritated by that point. The fight among the vines is an awesome idea, and I thought it was incredibly cool, but I wasn’t ready for it just then.
This is a nitpick, though; overall I loved the film.
I loved it. It didn’t feel too long, if anything I’d have liked to see a bit of the sea voyage home.
I assume that Driscoll and Ann would have fleshed out that rather flat relationship on the 6 week journey home…otherwise the ending just isn’t plausible.
And yes, it looked to my husband and I as if Ann was going to jump.
You did miss the last love story though…between Jimmy and Mr Hayes. Not sexual or anything, but a definite love there.
Adrien Brody’s nose is the most wonderfully asymmetric thing ever…thank og the legions of Hollywood plastic surgeons haven’t got their hands on him!
The “giant vampire crickets” are wetas, the most iconic of NZ creepy-crawlies {check out the picture gallery if you’re squeamish about insects}, and after which Jackson’s effects studio was named. A nice Kiwi touch.
I was disappointed in the film.
No, I’m not rushing to come in here and say how I was disappointed or here to pick nits.
I could have cut an hour from the film. Easily. Did we really need or want to see shots of the guy shoveling coal into the boilers on the ship? Or see the pistons start to move? No. How many times did he cut to slow-mo to ‘build tension’ or to drag out the movie? You know why there were three t-rexes? Because Jackson couldn’t fit four of them on the screen. Many things were just excessive.
Besides Kong just brushing off being bitten on the arm by a T-Rex, (Multiple times) the most annoying part was the extended 'quiet reunion in NYC between Kong and Ann". That was just stupid. One, it stopped the action during the actual action climax of the movie. Two, it was made by someone that doesn’t know NYC very well at all. It’s what? 10 pm? There is nobody on the street? There are no sirens wailing? What did the NYPD just give up? Ice skating in Central Park with a bunch of fake trees around the pond. And how in the hell did Ann not get whiplash?
Don’t come in here and tell me I have to suspend my disbelief. You don’t do f/x to that level to ask the audience to suspend their disbelief. I believed Kong, and I believed the dinos right up to the part where being bite by a t-Rex doesn’t do any damage to Kong.
Kong is worth seeing and you should see it in a theatre. In fact, it is the best two hours of movie I’ve seen in a long time, but unfortunately, the movie is three hours long.
I read that differently than you. I saw a man who was trying to keep up his carnival-barker routine but who suddenly realized that it was all his fault and thus could not put the same kind of gusto into his pronouncement. The line is flat because Denham no longer believes his own bullshit.
Of course, it could have just been a bad line reading, or a bad directoral choice. But that was how I interpreted it, and a girl sitting behind me at the preview screening I attended blurted out “It was all Jack Black’s fault!” in her outside voice right after he said The Line.