Twenty good minutes out of “King Kong”
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I finally rented the DVD of the recent “King Kong,” and I’ll say what a reviewer said about “Mission Impossible III” — it’s not as terrible as you think.As I remarked back here, I felt somewhat vindicated when this latest “Kong” didn’t do as well at the box office as projected. I won’t go over my reasons again, but suffice to say what I didn’t think was worth $7 each and a 90-minute round trip (yep, my town is that small) was certainly worth putting on the queue at Netflix.
And y’know — there are some darn good points to it. The effects, of course, are fabulous. And it is just plain beautiful to look at — that’s the Peter Jackson touch, I suppose, but I really don’t know. Besides that, there are two scenes that I thought were worth watching the entire movie for.
One is the stupendously choreographed brontasaurus stampede. Jurassic Park gave a quick sense of what it would feel like to be the size we are in the middle of them being the size they are, but this one fills in a lot of the details.The other payoff for me was the scene where the relationship forms between Ann Darrow and King Kong. If you’re already rolling your eyes, I don’t blame you. All three of the movies have had this basically stupid plot to work with. Somehow you have to buy into there being some reason that the giant ape doesn’t just think of another human sacrifice as food. And, even more tenuously, in the last two versions of the movie you’re supposed to believe that the giant gorilla and blonde lady make some connection with each other.
The 1933 movie didn’t explain why that would happen and didn’t even try — those were the days! The 1976 movie tried for a ludicrous personal bond — for really regrettable lines in movies, can anything beat Jessica Lange asking Kong “What’s your sign?”! The third movie gives a subtle but masterful demonstration of animal expression and body language to show a power shift that then resolves into a bit of a stand-off, at the end of which both enormous primate and diminutive human are just watching each other without knowing who’s in charge anymore. It seems to me that someone must’ve made a real study of how apes broadcast all the things they need to communicate to each other, because the gestures and expressions are significant without ever being anthropomorphised.
In the first movie, it was a shrieking bathing beauty that killed the Beast. In the second, it was sex. (The 70′s. What can you say?) In this last one, it’s not a beauty, but Beauty itself. Both Kong and Darrow look at a sunset in the jungle and in New York, and she says, “Beautiful.” And he looks at her and she says it again: “Beautiful.” For that shared moment of beauty to be the thing that changes both of them, that makes him a little more human and her a little less lonely, is both believable and wonderful.
So definitely worth the rental fee. But you can still skip the first hour unless you’re a Jack Black fan.
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I’ve not seen it (it was rented at our household, but I seem to remember finding a book more interesting at the time. Or maybe it was during Lent and I was at a Presanctified?) Anyway, I have to admit, the costuming in this one looks wonderful.
And Greg also noticed that the lighting was wonderful. Probably most people won’t go out of their way to see good costuming and lighting, but hey, if you’re renting it anyway, you might as well enjoy those aspects.
There is a reason Kong’s expressions seem so ape-like. Andy Serkis (Gollum in Lord of the Rings), who played Kong for the motion capture, actually went overseas, against Peter Jackson’s wishes and without his knowledge, to live with and watch gorillas in the wild. An amazing performance.
Wow. I’m blown away just thinking that there was a human actor behind all that. Let alone that he went to that much trouble to try to get the performance right. This actor’s got an interesting list of credits.