Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Tuesday, December 13, 2005 Kong is all wrong Kong In Love The new King Kong would be spectacularly awful if it weren’t so tedious and boring. It stinks. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. It’s long. It’s Kong in love. See Kong in love. He moons longingly. Kong skates. Kong sings. Kong dances. Kong whirls like Fred Astaire walking a foot off the ground in love. Music swells romantically for Kong in love. Watch the sunset with Kong. Watch the sunrise with Kong. Snuggle up in his fur or against his bosom. Ah, so sweet. Kong in love. Kong destroying New York, but wait, here comes Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). She catches his eye. Walks in slow motion toward him through the haze in a thin white dress on a winter’s night. Kong waits expectantly, gazes longingly at her. -- Yes, it’s her, the one, true blonde that I love. My dear, my darling comes to me. In the midst of all this madness; this crazy, crazy, world, ah, my lover comes to me. . . Whenas in silks my Julia goes. / Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes. / Next, when Kong casts his eyes and see / That brave vibration each way free; / Oh how that glittering taketh me! I worry about spoiling the movie so if you have no idea happens in King Kong, do not read this review unless you trust my word that this is a horribly bad movie; one of the worst. Peter Jackson must be a real jerk because he shows such contempt for humanity and takes so much pleasure in treating people like so many matchsticks to be tossed away (literally) to death as nothings, mere bagatelle no one will miss. He wants us to fall in love with Kong as Kong falls in love with Beauty and feel sorry when humans kill the murderous beast. Of course, you’ll have to wait three hours for the beast to die. His death is as bad as the hammiest actor who ever played Hamlet. You’ll be pleading at that point, saying DIE ALREADY you stupid cartoon!! The movie is a joke. Peter Jackson, the director, takes himself so seriously that he actually thought he could improve on the original which was a silly but fun movie to begin with. Nor is it for children. The scenes on Skull Island with the natives are horrific. Well, I guess they were in the original when Kong chomps on a bunch of the natives. That wasn’t nice, but nothing like the Heart of Darkness which Jackson invests in the tale, as if people are supposed to know Conrad’s novella apart from Apocalypse Now by Coppola. Jack Black plays Carl Denham, a hard luck movie producer/director and is not as bad as I thought he would be. There is a very long series of events of exposition which occur before we ever get to Skull Island where Kong is. We are bored for an hour and a half before anything happens. There is a great deal of back story to explain all the major characters as if we care. We don’t. Please, get on with it already. Then they take forever to get there, but wait! They don’t get there. But wait! The island calls them, they can’t escape it. Jack Black has a map of long lost Skull Island. It blows out of his hands while on deck. Why do important papers always get blown away in movies out of people’s hands as if they don’t care to hold on to them? It doesn’t matter, though, because the island beckons them. It draws them. It has magic and force. They can’t escape it. Now we are on the island and we will have action sequences that go on and on and on like Energizer Bunny. Had enough? Nope, here comes some more. If more is better than even more and more must be best. Ever tried to run away from a stampeding herd of brontosauruses? Think they might miss stepping on you as you ran under their bodies? Wrong. They will miss you. And when they crash in a huge train wreck of a pile up, think you might not get squished? Wrong again. You’ll walk away without a scratch if you’re important to the plot. But if you’re cast like a crewman number three on Star Trek for an Away Team, you’re history, of course. Kong, after taking the Beauty for his own, swings her around in his fist like a little rag doll over and over but “non dolor est, Pitie.” (It doesn’t hurt, Pitius. Sorry, obscure ancient Roman allusion. Google it. You‘ll love the story.) I thought Terrence Malick was self-indulgent, but he has a soul mate in Peter Jackson. Then there’s the Kong battle with T Rex. Three or four of them. He fights them on the plain. He fights them on the mountain. He fights them in the canyon and he fights them in the air. He drops Beauty a number of times only to catch her. Count on Jackson to repeat an action many times. Then giant insects attack Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and he has them shot off his body while gyrating around in frenzy by a guy with a Thompson submachine gun. Easy that. Beauty, having been saved by Kong wants to return the favor when he’s on top the Empire State building, because Beauty, you see, loves Kong. It doesn’t matter how many people he kills in his rampages, he really means well and is good at heart. Jackson is so intent on trying to manipulate us into loving Kong as well, that he goes into overkill in trying to create sympathy. But he fails by trying way too hard. In the original, we are a bit sorry when Kong dies. Here, we can’t wait for him to reap his eternal ape reward. And he doesn’t even die well. Not the marvelous thump, thump, thump down the terraces of the building, but a dying fall like a sigh into space. So sad. Oh, poor Kong. (Thank God it’s over., Now I can go to the bathroom!) This movie stinks. It reeks. It’s awful. It’s offal. It’s odious. It’s ordure. Do not waste a dime on this dog. posted by Mark Butterworth | 10:43 AM | |
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