Kong not king

  • King Kong critiqueGreg told me yes­ter­day that King Kong has been falling off sharply at the box office, and my reac­tion was some­thing like “Yippee!”

    I don’t know why exactly. I have noth­ing against giant ape movies per se, and when I finally remem­bered who Peter Jack­son was, I was will­ing to buy into some of the mega-hype about this movie.

    But it is still, at bot­tom, King Kong. I like the orig­i­nal 1933 movie, but part of what I like about it is that it is the orig­i­nal. When it was made, there was noth­ing like it being done, and some of the cre­ative spark comes through and gets you through all those plas­ticene moments where you can almost see the thumbprints of the prop guys mov­ing dinosaur parts around.

    And then Dino de Lau­ren­tis re-made it in 1976 and … well, no. He didn’t re–make it; he re–killed it. He threw King Kong off a higher build­ing not only cin­e­mat­i­cally but actu­ally. He made such a bad movie, using the pow­er­ful twin gas­bombs of movi­ola pre­ten­tious­ness and sup­pos­edly mod­ern themes like big­otry, that when I heard some­one was doing King Kong again, I was just sur­prised. I assumed that it would be like a nuclear test­ing ground that every­one stays away from for a cen­tury or so.

    I don’t know any­thing about Peter Jackson’s ver­sion, and maybe it would be a pity if it doesn’t do well. But the other rea­son I have for want­ing it to fail is that I want all­l­lll of the Amer­i­can movie-going pub­lic to keep con­sis­tently pound­ing the mes­sage home to an enter­tain­ment indus­try that insists on pre­tend­ing to be deaf: We don’t want re-packaged, re-done, re-processed sto­ries that were hardly worth telling 20 or 40 years ago. Not because we’re obsessed with moder­nity and loathe any­thing five min­utes old, but because you’ve insulted our intel­li­gence by giv­ing us noth­ing but that, and you’ve shown your­selves to be com­pletely out of touch.

    I think the rea­son that peo­ple are start­ing to just tune out movies like this is that out here in the audi­ence, we all have the feel­ing that the inter­est­ing sto­ries, the true myths, are hap­pen­ing all around us or are about to hap­pen. And the one thing that would really be piti­ful is if the entire gigan­tic indus­try devoted to telling our sto­ries was too lost and self-absorbed to notice it.

    And what are those mythic sto­ries that are going on right now. Well, how about this one:
    Iraqi voter
    I didn’t have time to post any­thing about it on Thurs­day, but when I went to Yahoo news look­ing for an update about the elec­tions in Iraq, this photo caught my eye. “An Iraqi woman waited to vote …” started the cap­tion, and the rest had scrolled off. But that made it seem more amaz­ing. An Iraqi woman waited to vote.

    Imag­ine if this entire nation, which was believed once to be the site of the Gar­den of Eden, begins right now to look out of that black veil that has been thrown over it for cen­turies? I’m not say­ing a lit­tle whiff of the demo­c­ra­tic process has that power. I guess I’m just say­ing that any­thing, even some­thing like an elec­tion, may be enough to break the ter­ri­ble suf­fo­cat­ing grip that they have been in and free up the peo­ple to peer out and see what they see. These are the areas of the world that once brought great advances in math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence. Then Mohammedism threw a great shroud over them, and they have lived in sus­pended ani­ma­tion for over a mil­len­nium, their cre­ativ­ity sti­fled and their great­ness snuffed out. What if the light dawns in a dark­ened place?

    What movie could pos­si­bly hold a can­dle to that?


    Related posts:

    1. Schi­avo and Jack­son aftermath
    2. C-SPAN run. Run, SPAN, run.
    3. Is Hol­ly­wood “a very Chris­t­ian town?”
    4. After Kat­rina

    December 17th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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