The Passion of the Kong!
King Kong. Very cool, even if the inevitable, agonizing end was drawn out far too long for me to feel good about watching it.
Every new scene brought something breathtaking to the screen.
Andy Serkis gives a haunting performance as Kong -- there truly was a beautiful creature in there. And at no point was Kong like a human in an ape suit. I never doubted that he was a wild thing. The animators rendered him with real sincerity, and not so much affection that they forgot he was an animal, or made him, god forbid, childlike.
I would not have expected that even Peter Jackson could pull a movie of any depth out of the original which is, let's face it, memorable to us only because of the monsters. The acting in the original was laughably bad, even for the time. The effects are now remarkable only for their era, and what fondness for it there is derives solely from nostalgia. This movie succeeds where the first only suggested -- it fulfills the promise of spectacle that early epics always threatened to provide. And it doesn't just do it through effects, though that's the big stick here. The directing is good, the cinematography is lovely, and the acting was adequate and in places quite good.
It is a period piece, which means it's also scripted as a period piece, especially right at the beginning and right at the end. There's just a touch of "Gosh, Mister" going on there. Nevertheless, the characters were believable. Even Adrien Brody, who has a nose like a Tibetan triple-edged dagger and whose left and right eyebrows appear to have been switched, managed to exude some strange and powerful form of charisma that covered up the fact that he looks . . . really, really weird. And even though she is also profoundly not my type, Naomi Watts has a haunting, beautiful fragility that is simply heartbreaking to watch. She handled the physical parts with real guts, and threw herself into the acting with everything she had. Serkis may have sold Kong's part with his convincing rendition of a giant ape, but it was Watts' performance that gave that ape meaning.
All that said, some of the action scenes were so over-the-top that they failed to be scary. It delivered a few surprises, some first-rate gross-out, and a lot of spectacle, but two of the centerpiece island pieces were so overdone that they were more something to goggle at than something to react to. Both the brontosaur chase and the multiple carnosaur attack were excellent at first, but went on just a little too long to be believable. They became funny in an almost slapstick way. I will say this for stop-motion: it kept your scenes short and to the point.
The remaining sequence, the spider-pit sequence, was just icky, and I can't evaluate it for scary. My skin was crawling too much for me to evaluate it for quality.
Still, the whole is quite good. As theferrett points out, you will either buy into the bond between ape and woman, or you won't. I bought it, so I'm erring on the high side. The convincing relationship between woman and beast was enough to redeem the movie's infelicities.
NOW.
I will rant about movie theaters.
What the blue-balled blistering hellfuck is wrong with people? It's a 3+ hour movie, so okay, get up to pee. I'm a championship withholder, but I understand that for most it's almost impossible to endure the drive to the theater, the wait for the movie, the previews, and then the whole movie without taking a whiz. But if you have to go five times? SIT CLOSER TO THE EXIT. Bitch had a bladder the size of a walnut. And she was not alone.
And why the fuck can't people come into a theater and sit down? Must they stand and point and argue over seats for three whole previews? And then, when they're seated, finally lunge up to go get snacks as soon as the movie starts; snacks they devour noisily?
And I want to know what circle of Hades that utter crap they call music is piped in from. That shit they play before the previews that is called "entertainment" the way "blinding, white-hot agony" is called "discomfort."
You know how there are songs that you like, songs that are just sort of there, songs you dislike, and then, finally, songs that you actually hate? Songs that you don't just switch the radio off of, but you actually call the radio station in rage every time it comes on (or am I the only person who has ever done this)?
I have found a new one. It's been played before every movie I've seen at that theater, and I hate it more than I have hated a song since . . . oh, EVER. It's that fucking "Popular" song from the motherfucking "Wicked" Broadway thing. I gather the song is probably supposed to make you hate the character singing it. Good musicals always have the song that makes you loathe the loathesome person; to wit: the Gaston song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. A perfect specimen of its breed.
This abortion goes above and beyond. It doesn't merely make me hate the character. It makes me hate the singer, everyone associated with the song's writing, production and distribution, those people's relatives, their pets, their neighbors, and the people who failed to instill the crushing sense of shame within them that might have led to one or two of these people killing themselves, which might have led to the song never having been recorded, which would have led to me never having to hear the goddamn thing in the first place.
If you took some sort of high-tech scan of my brain while listening to that song, then did another while a nine-inch iron railspike was being pounded into my auditory canal, you would find that the patterns of brain activity matched precisely. That is how shitty that song is, and how much I hate it. I hate that squeaky, nasal "tee hee" style of singing with such a burning passion that for years I didn't watch musicals for fear of encountering it. When I tell you that a snakebitten rat shrieking out its last is more tuneful and pleasing, I hope you will believe me. The squeals of rabbits fucking are more appealing.
I was literally writhing in uncontrollable pain -- ask spacezombie, who was there -- but to get up and leave would have been to admit defeat in the face of the conjured specters of every white-toothed cunt in high school who thought she was better than everyone else because no matter how many loads she took in the ass, or how many beers it took to get her there, she had more money than me and was a size three, which made her "pop-yew-lurrrrr." Fucking two-faced, alcoholic whores. THAT is what that girl's voice reminds me of.
None of which would be so bad if the fucking thing weren't such an earworm. Arrrrgh!
Every new scene brought something breathtaking to the screen.
Andy Serkis gives a haunting performance as Kong -- there truly was a beautiful creature in there. And at no point was Kong like a human in an ape suit. I never doubted that he was a wild thing. The animators rendered him with real sincerity, and not so much affection that they forgot he was an animal, or made him, god forbid, childlike.
I would not have expected that even Peter Jackson could pull a movie of any depth out of the original which is, let's face it, memorable to us only because of the monsters. The acting in the original was laughably bad, even for the time. The effects are now remarkable only for their era, and what fondness for it there is derives solely from nostalgia. This movie succeeds where the first only suggested -- it fulfills the promise of spectacle that early epics always threatened to provide. And it doesn't just do it through effects, though that's the big stick here. The directing is good, the cinematography is lovely, and the acting was adequate and in places quite good.
It is a period piece, which means it's also scripted as a period piece, especially right at the beginning and right at the end. There's just a touch of "Gosh, Mister" going on there. Nevertheless, the characters were believable. Even Adrien Brody, who has a nose like a Tibetan triple-edged dagger and whose left and right eyebrows appear to have been switched, managed to exude some strange and powerful form of charisma that covered up the fact that he looks . . . really, really weird. And even though she is also profoundly not my type, Naomi Watts has a haunting, beautiful fragility that is simply heartbreaking to watch. She handled the physical parts with real guts, and threw herself into the acting with everything she had. Serkis may have sold Kong's part with his convincing rendition of a giant ape, but it was Watts' performance that gave that ape meaning.
All that said, some of the action scenes were so over-the-top that they failed to be scary. It delivered a few surprises, some first-rate gross-out, and a lot of spectacle, but two of the centerpiece island pieces were so overdone that they were more something to goggle at than something to react to. Both the brontosaur chase and the multiple carnosaur attack were excellent at first, but went on just a little too long to be believable. They became funny in an almost slapstick way. I will say this for stop-motion: it kept your scenes short and to the point.
The remaining sequence, the spider-pit sequence, was just icky, and I can't evaluate it for scary. My skin was crawling too much for me to evaluate it for quality.
Still, the whole is quite good. As theferrett points out, you will either buy into the bond between ape and woman, or you won't. I bought it, so I'm erring on the high side. The convincing relationship between woman and beast was enough to redeem the movie's infelicities.
NOW.
I will rant about movie theaters.
What the blue-balled blistering hellfuck is wrong with people? It's a 3+ hour movie, so okay, get up to pee. I'm a championship withholder, but I understand that for most it's almost impossible to endure the drive to the theater, the wait for the movie, the previews, and then the whole movie without taking a whiz. But if you have to go five times? SIT CLOSER TO THE EXIT. Bitch had a bladder the size of a walnut. And she was not alone.
And why the fuck can't people come into a theater and sit down? Must they stand and point and argue over seats for three whole previews? And then, when they're seated, finally lunge up to go get snacks as soon as the movie starts; snacks they devour noisily?
And I want to know what circle of Hades that utter crap they call music is piped in from. That shit they play before the previews that is called "entertainment" the way "blinding, white-hot agony" is called "discomfort."
You know how there are songs that you like, songs that are just sort of there, songs you dislike, and then, finally, songs that you actually hate? Songs that you don't just switch the radio off of, but you actually call the radio station in rage every time it comes on (or am I the only person who has ever done this)?
I have found a new one. It's been played before every movie I've seen at that theater, and I hate it more than I have hated a song since . . . oh, EVER. It's that fucking "Popular" song from the motherfucking "Wicked" Broadway thing. I gather the song is probably supposed to make you hate the character singing it. Good musicals always have the song that makes you loathe the loathesome person; to wit: the Gaston song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. A perfect specimen of its breed.
This abortion goes above and beyond. It doesn't merely make me hate the character. It makes me hate the singer, everyone associated with the song's writing, production and distribution, those people's relatives, their pets, their neighbors, and the people who failed to instill the crushing sense of shame within them that might have led to one or two of these people killing themselves, which might have led to the song never having been recorded, which would have led to me never having to hear the goddamn thing in the first place.
If you took some sort of high-tech scan of my brain while listening to that song, then did another while a nine-inch iron railspike was being pounded into my auditory canal, you would find that the patterns of brain activity matched precisely. That is how shitty that song is, and how much I hate it. I hate that squeaky, nasal "tee hee" style of singing with such a burning passion that for years I didn't watch musicals for fear of encountering it. When I tell you that a snakebitten rat shrieking out its last is more tuneful and pleasing, I hope you will believe me. The squeals of rabbits fucking are more appealing.
I was literally writhing in uncontrollable pain -- ask spacezombie, who was there -- but to get up and leave would have been to admit defeat in the face of the conjured specters of every white-toothed cunt in high school who thought she was better than everyone else because no matter how many loads she took in the ass, or how many beers it took to get her there, she had more money than me and was a size three, which made her "pop-yew-lurrrrr." Fucking two-faced, alcoholic whores. THAT is what that girl's voice reminds me of.
None of which would be so bad if the fucking thing weren't such an earworm. Arrrrgh!