Contradicting Popular Opinion
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks:King Kong
An aside, I saw the trailer for Mission Impossible 3 before Kong. Phillip Seymour Hoffman versus Tom Cruise. Are they gonna have a climactic battle where they outgay each other?
Now, before anybody gets all up in arms or whatever, lemme explain. As a whole, King Kong (2005) scores favorably in the all important sucks-to-rocks ratio of movies. So to appease the zealots, I will start out with the good things about new Kong.
1. T-rex fight- any movie where a giant ape gives a snap-mare to a mutant T-rex before ripping off his tongue is okay by me. Was it over the top? Yes, but as the Devil once said, “Nobody pays to see under-the-top.”
2. Giant insects- the giant bugs were a nice touch. That probably got the biggest audience reaction of the night. The squirming was audible. Admittedly though, there were a couple of “I’m fighting nothing in front a blue/green screen moments.”
3. A lack of movie stars- Big name stars in this flick would’ve been distracting. Personas tend to get in the way of storytelling and escapism. As it stands, Jack Black was a little too Jack Black in the picture. (I have recently watched Saving Silverman.) The rest worked out pretty well though. I didn’t think about Orange County when I was looking at Tom Hank’s kid, or Damn Mosquitos from Blade II while watching the sea captain.
And I liked the guy from “Early Edition” as the movie star.
Now onto what sucks.
As everyone and their mother is saying, the film is too f*cking long. Sequences are longer than they need to be. Shots are longer than they need to be. Sub-plots exist and are subsequently dropped. In order to stay awake, I had to think about other things.
Some things Kennedy was thinking during KONG
– Isn’t Driscoll supposed to be an adventurer? They made him a playwright? The hell? I can freely blame the writers for making the writer the hero, right? Fran and Philippa I blame you! Neil Simon wouldn’t ever go through this shit over a chick.
– Stupid in-joke alert- Fay is in Cooper’s movie.
– Orange County Boy is totally big black guy’s bitch! Well, they are on a ship. Like they say in the Navy, “there are no wrong holes.” “Any port in a storm” and all that such-and-so.
– Goddamn, Adrien Brody has a huge nose. Does that make me an Anti-Semite? Just curious.
– How are the natives making lava? Let’s make lava by the fire. Gonna make lava to you woman; gonna lay you own by the fire.
– So, in movies, Tyrannosaurs are like the giant monster equivalent of Nazis? You need a bad guy, how bout Nazis? No? How bout a T-rex?
Nazi T-rexes would be the ultimate movie villain. I can see it now Carnosaur 4: the Beast with Hitler’s Brain..
-This movie sure features a lot of outrunning. I wish I could outrun an Apatosaurus.
– I wonder if anybody has ever told Peter Jackson about subtlety…
-The camera got busted. Hasn’t Jack Black already shot more than one roll of this place?
– No way that Mutant-Bat is flying anywhere carrying both human leads.
– Kong is probably hot all the time. Elephants have big flat ears which increase their surface area allowing more heat to escape. Other large animals tend to be aquatic. A big monkey would probably sweat up a storm. Gorilla sweat right? We share about 95 percent of our genetic material, I’d have to imagine that they sweat.
– I wonder how they moved the unconscious Kong…
– Monkey Sit and Spin!? Movie!
– So Kong is about 5 times taller than a normal gorilla, which wold give him roughly 25 times the surface area and 125 times the volume. Assuming his density is the same as a regular gorilla and that a regular gorilla is about 400 pounds, that would make Kong about 50,000lbs. So twenty-five tons. Potential Energy is equal to (Mass) x (Height) x (Acceleration due to gravity). How high is the Empire State Building? A bit under 1000 ft? Oh wait, I’ve been doing everything in English. (mass) x (g) = weight, and I have weight, so wouldn’t that make the force of Kong’s fall about 50,000,000 foot-pounds?
– Nobody seems to mind to much when King Kong roars right in front of them. Shouldn’t Naomi Watts cover her ears occasionally or something. My instinct is to cover my ears when a macaw yells.
– So, Kong is the hero of the flick? I understand that the movie is called King Kong, but I feel like he should be our sympathetic villain. I feel manipulated. Kong is shown as brutal and vicious when fighting Dinos, but Jackson seems to soften the blow when Kong is fighting the humans. Why would Kong make such a distinction? Kong should be a tweener, not a face, ya know?
Making a better Kong!
Kong feels bloated because it is bloated. It is 80 minutes longer than the original. The problem is that Peter Jackson is too much of a fanboy, and not enough of a director. He lingers on everything too long.
I can fix this movie. I can bring it in well under two hours. Here’s what we do:
1. Cut the slow-motion. There is way too much slow-motion. (Most slo-mo in most movies in unwarranted. It’s f*cking fascist and patronizing directing. “Here is where you need to be paying attention! C’mon guys!”) Cutting the slo-mo out of Kong will save a good chunk of audience life.
2. Cut the early vaudeville shit. We can meet Ann when Denham meets Ann. It makes her more interesting. We are introduced to a father figure and a bunch of characters that don’t freaking matter.
Lose them
We don’t need to see Watts’s act the first time through. We would know that she has done vaudeville from her lunch with Denham. They mention it then. We see some of her vaudeville act on the ship, we see more with Kong.
3. Cut the producer shit. It’s the Depression, everyone is desperate. We don’t need a lot of back-story as to why. We’ll get the desperation of Denham and crew on the ship, when the cops are after him AND when he hires shoplifting Ann off of the streets.
Basically, what numbers 2 and 3 amount to is starting the movie with Denham meeting Ann. Both characters seem a little shadier this way, and it saves us a lot of dilly-dallying.
The audience came to see a monkey damnit!
4. Cut some of the ship scenes down. We don’t find out about the mysterious origins of Tom Hank’s kid, we don’t need to know that that mystery exists.
We don’t need to be beat over the head with all the Heart of Darkness shit, either.
5. Cut Driscoll’s comedy play. We heard that shit the first time.
6. Cut Monkey-Sit-And-Spin. We don’t need that shit.
QED: you have a more manageable movie already. Trim down a couple more sequences, a couple more shots of “people looking”and we’re on to something!
“But wait, Kennedy!” you might be saying. “Won’t you be getting rid of key motivation scenes?”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
As a person who has studied screenplays inside and out, and as a person with a degree in psychology, let me tell you something about Kong: Most of the characters already seem psychotic. They do crazy things for no discernable reason.
Tell me exactly, what is Adrien Brody planning on doing when he gets into the Taxi? Why does Naomi Watts keep climbing ladders?
Other than Kong, Denham, and the “Early Edition” none of the characters have reasonable motivation for most of the film. The two human leads come off like lunatics.
Even the actions of the mutant bats seem neither logical nor consistent.
But no, I’m telling you, I could cut this thing into a tight 105 minutes.
We’d still be left with a bunch of silly stuff, but we’d have less time to question it. I’d have you out of the theaters before asking questions like:
Why would a skinny playwright be such a good tracker in an unknown jungle?
Why would a skinny playwright be so competent with weapons?
Why would a skinny playwright be such a good driver, especially in 1933?
Why would a skinny playwright be able to so easily shake off a horrendous car crash decades before seatbelts and airbags?
How do natives make LAVA?!
How does Denham know that the creature is named Kong?
Why would a T-rex attack a tiny human when he has already got such a delicious big lizard?
Why do the bats follow Driscoll to attack Kong?
Why does the Sea Captain keep on rescuing these losers?
The ape seems to love Ann like Lucard loves a bunny; what are Ann’s intentions towards the ape?
How does Kong fall off the Empire State Building without hitting anything on the way down?
Wasn’t I clean-shaven when I go to the theater tonight? Where did this beard come from?
