Hot monkey love
December 25, 2005 | 12:00am
There are moments in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong that soar, and there are moments that sink. Then there are the moments that elicit unintentional laughter.
Like when fledgling actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who seems as smitten with the 25-foot Kong as he is with her, indulges in a little Central Park ice- skating duet.
I sat in the darkened theater, praying that a snowball fight would not be next. (Date montages can be so corny.)
Still, you’ve got to hand it to Jackson, the New Zealand director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for sticking close to the original 1933 plot, even while updating it – and doubling its screen length to three hours in the process.
It takes cojones the size of – well, King Kong’s – to take on a movie classic that has become a cultural icon.
Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis tried in 1976, moving the final battle to the World Trade Center Twin Towers, which had just opened. That movie lacked crucial empathy, though: it was obviously not made with the handcrafted care of a movie fan.
Jackson is a big fan of the original, and he goes back in time with this remake, digitally evoking the New York City of the Depression Era.
Most of it works, though Jackson seems as mindful of his duty to the past as he is to his obligation to present-day box office. He knows he must keep raising the ante, as his Kong is competing not only with the original, but with his own LOTR trilogy and the gazillion effects-driven theme park rides that we have come to expect from Hollywood.
Like the original, King Kong spends about a third of its time heading toward Skull Island, where Kong is the uber-ape of a forgotten island teeming with prehistoric creatures. A third is spent on Skull Island, then the final third cuts to New York, where down-and-out director/impresario Carl Denham (Jack Black, in good form) presents the ape on Broadway.
Jackson is determined not to veer away from the original plot, so he instead amplifies everything for modern audiences, including the motivations of Denham, the good-guy efforts of playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) which necessarily pale in comparison to the big ape’s every move, and the many dynamo dinosaur encounters on Skull Island, which are turned up to "11."
For the slow first hour, Jackson sustains a creditable mood of anxiety: even if you’ve seen the 1933 original, you can feel the apprehension building aboard the Venture, which has been chartered by Denham to visit an uncharted island in the South Pacific.
The arrival on the island is shot through an eerie fog, and the natives, when we meet them, are as scary as any creatures dreamed up for Lord of the Rings.
As the megalomaniac film director, Black sinks his teeth into the plum role of Denham. His consuming zeal to "get the film" whatever the cost is no doubt a bit of soul-searching and mirror-gazing on Jackson’s part, but it also comes across as the film’s second meatiest role.
Watts, as the off-Broadway hoofer recruited by Denham to star in his latest adventure flick, does more than her usual stuff, not only looking as glamorous as Fay Wray, but turning in a curiously gothic reading of Darrow’s character. She declares early on that she doesn’t believe in love stories, saying her specialty is making people laugh, not cry. This comes in handy when she essentially has to "tame" the not-too-friendly Kong by, among other things, performing her juggling act.
Yes, juggling in front of Kong. It sounds stupid on the page, but it almost works on the big screen. This is because the new Kong, based on cutting-edge computer imagery, is more expressive than either the stop-motion model of 1933 or the hairy-suited actor in the 1976 version. Andy Serkis, LOTR’s Gollum, plays the ape as a bona fide alpha male, though one with a tender heart. This Kong knows he’s the swinging dick of the Island, and he lets his lady know it, too. No wonder Ann has a hard time connecting with the flawed human characters of Driscoll, Denham and movie pretty boy Bruce Baxter. Once you’ve gone ape, it’s hard to go back.
Her character does seem quite taken with the big lug, not only because her every move away from Kong’s mighty grip puts her face-to-face with another disgusting species of Skull Island. No, she just gets more out of hanging with the big gorilla than she does with most other guys. In today’s parlance, she "gets" him, and he seems to "get" her.
Trying to graft an intelligent love story onto the 1933 script (itself based on "Beauty and the Beast") is a bit like asking Adam Sandler to do Shakespeare. Bad idea. As a modern viewer, I couldn’t quite "buy" the literal love between Ann and Kong, so I had to think of it on various allegorical levels to make it go down smoothly.
Barring the physical incompatibility, there’s just something not quite right about a New York gal who has eschewed human male (or female) companionship for primate love, but Watts just about pulls it off. She is a sad soul, someone who feels love is doomed, and that’s the only way to swallow this whopper. (Thank God, Jackson excised an earlier ending to his script, which had Ann singing the machine-gunned Kong a lullaby before he tumbles off the Empire State Building.)
The alpha male thing works, too, because Kong himself is presented as a misfit, one who is lonely on his exalted island perch, secure in the knowledge that he can kick the ass of most things – except love.
Like a lot of remakes of classics, watching the new King Kong is almost like viewing a palimpsest: you can’t help recognizing the layers of reference underneath. As with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake, several shots here are direct homages to the original, including long shots of Kong scaling the Empire State and an epic battle with a tyrannosaur. We thus simultaneously experience the new product, while constantly being reminded of Jackson’s awareness of his source. But the original King Kong was itself basically a roller-coaster ride, a popcorn movie featuring state-of-the-art special effects and scale-model work of the day. Same with the new version.
What doesn’t work quite so well is the updating of Denham’s character. Whereas in the original, Denham was more a symbol of American pluck and ingenuity – thus making his final reading of the line (after being told "Well, looks like the airplanes got him") that "No, ‘twas beauty killed the beast" an apt off-the-cuff assessment showing Denham would always bounce back and spin the story his way – Jack Black’s reading of the crucial final line simply falls flat.
Partially this is because, in the age of media saturation, Denham just stands for too many despicable things. His stated goal of "giving everyone a peek at the mysteries of the world for the price of admission" seems manipulative and reductive, as it should. But we are also expected to root for his determination to turn lemons into lemonade. It doesn’t quite work. Maybe it’s simply because, in 2005, you can’t imagine Jack Black saying "It was beauty killed the beast" with a straight face.
Like when fledgling actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who seems as smitten with the 25-foot Kong as he is with her, indulges in a little Central Park ice- skating duet.
I sat in the darkened theater, praying that a snowball fight would not be next. (Date montages can be so corny.)
Still, you’ve got to hand it to Jackson, the New Zealand director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for sticking close to the original 1933 plot, even while updating it – and doubling its screen length to three hours in the process.
It takes cojones the size of – well, King Kong’s – to take on a movie classic that has become a cultural icon.
Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis tried in 1976, moving the final battle to the World Trade Center Twin Towers, which had just opened. That movie lacked crucial empathy, though: it was obviously not made with the handcrafted care of a movie fan.
Jackson is a big fan of the original, and he goes back in time with this remake, digitally evoking the New York City of the Depression Era.
Most of it works, though Jackson seems as mindful of his duty to the past as he is to his obligation to present-day box office. He knows he must keep raising the ante, as his Kong is competing not only with the original, but with his own LOTR trilogy and the gazillion effects-driven theme park rides that we have come to expect from Hollywood.
Like the original, King Kong spends about a third of its time heading toward Skull Island, where Kong is the uber-ape of a forgotten island teeming with prehistoric creatures. A third is spent on Skull Island, then the final third cuts to New York, where down-and-out director/impresario Carl Denham (Jack Black, in good form) presents the ape on Broadway.
Jackson is determined not to veer away from the original plot, so he instead amplifies everything for modern audiences, including the motivations of Denham, the good-guy efforts of playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) which necessarily pale in comparison to the big ape’s every move, and the many dynamo dinosaur encounters on Skull Island, which are turned up to "11."
For the slow first hour, Jackson sustains a creditable mood of anxiety: even if you’ve seen the 1933 original, you can feel the apprehension building aboard the Venture, which has been chartered by Denham to visit an uncharted island in the South Pacific.
The arrival on the island is shot through an eerie fog, and the natives, when we meet them, are as scary as any creatures dreamed up for Lord of the Rings.
As the megalomaniac film director, Black sinks his teeth into the plum role of Denham. His consuming zeal to "get the film" whatever the cost is no doubt a bit of soul-searching and mirror-gazing on Jackson’s part, but it also comes across as the film’s second meatiest role.
Watts, as the off-Broadway hoofer recruited by Denham to star in his latest adventure flick, does more than her usual stuff, not only looking as glamorous as Fay Wray, but turning in a curiously gothic reading of Darrow’s character. She declares early on that she doesn’t believe in love stories, saying her specialty is making people laugh, not cry. This comes in handy when she essentially has to "tame" the not-too-friendly Kong by, among other things, performing her juggling act.
Yes, juggling in front of Kong. It sounds stupid on the page, but it almost works on the big screen. This is because the new Kong, based on cutting-edge computer imagery, is more expressive than either the stop-motion model of 1933 or the hairy-suited actor in the 1976 version. Andy Serkis, LOTR’s Gollum, plays the ape as a bona fide alpha male, though one with a tender heart. This Kong knows he’s the swinging dick of the Island, and he lets his lady know it, too. No wonder Ann has a hard time connecting with the flawed human characters of Driscoll, Denham and movie pretty boy Bruce Baxter. Once you’ve gone ape, it’s hard to go back.
Her character does seem quite taken with the big lug, not only because her every move away from Kong’s mighty grip puts her face-to-face with another disgusting species of Skull Island. No, she just gets more out of hanging with the big gorilla than she does with most other guys. In today’s parlance, she "gets" him, and he seems to "get" her.
Trying to graft an intelligent love story onto the 1933 script (itself based on "Beauty and the Beast") is a bit like asking Adam Sandler to do Shakespeare. Bad idea. As a modern viewer, I couldn’t quite "buy" the literal love between Ann and Kong, so I had to think of it on various allegorical levels to make it go down smoothly.
Barring the physical incompatibility, there’s just something not quite right about a New York gal who has eschewed human male (or female) companionship for primate love, but Watts just about pulls it off. She is a sad soul, someone who feels love is doomed, and that’s the only way to swallow this whopper. (Thank God, Jackson excised an earlier ending to his script, which had Ann singing the machine-gunned Kong a lullaby before he tumbles off the Empire State Building.)
The alpha male thing works, too, because Kong himself is presented as a misfit, one who is lonely on his exalted island perch, secure in the knowledge that he can kick the ass of most things – except love.
Like a lot of remakes of classics, watching the new King Kong is almost like viewing a palimpsest: you can’t help recognizing the layers of reference underneath. As with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake, several shots here are direct homages to the original, including long shots of Kong scaling the Empire State and an epic battle with a tyrannosaur. We thus simultaneously experience the new product, while constantly being reminded of Jackson’s awareness of his source. But the original King Kong was itself basically a roller-coaster ride, a popcorn movie featuring state-of-the-art special effects and scale-model work of the day. Same with the new version.
What doesn’t work quite so well is the updating of Denham’s character. Whereas in the original, Denham was more a symbol of American pluck and ingenuity – thus making his final reading of the line (after being told "Well, looks like the airplanes got him") that "No, ‘twas beauty killed the beast" an apt off-the-cuff assessment showing Denham would always bounce back and spin the story his way – Jack Black’s reading of the crucial final line simply falls flat.
Partially this is because, in the age of media saturation, Denham just stands for too many despicable things. His stated goal of "giving everyone a peek at the mysteries of the world for the price of admission" seems manipulative and reductive, as it should. But we are also expected to root for his determination to turn lemons into lemonade. It doesn’t quite work. Maybe it’s simply because, in 2005, you can’t imagine Jack Black saying "It was beauty killed the beast" with a straight face.
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