HelenE-3
Se unió el sept 1999
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Distintivos3
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Calificación de HelenE-3
Merian Cooper's 1933 King Kong is a monster of a movie about making a movie. Carl Denham wants to film a giant ape on an unknown island, but audiences want to look at girls, so he takes Ann Darrow along. For Denham, Kong is the wonder of the movies and Ann is there to lure audiences; but she is also the beauty that subdues the beast, not just Kong, a monster from the id, but Jack Driscoll, a tough sailor with a bit of an ego who protects her from Kong so that they can lived happy ever after. Driscoll represents the ordinary guy in the audience as he might like to see himself; Kong is the scariness of an idea that gets loose and arouses the masses. For RKO, scariness, horror, was profitable: King Kong was a blockbuster and saved the studio. Its stunning effects and imaginative scope hit a more visceral spot than Universal's arty, European monster movie, Frankenstein. Kong lined up with Moby-Dick as an icon for distinctively American grandeur and ambition.
Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong is also a monster. It is more than three hours long and overloaded with visual effects, emotional punches and resonant allusions. Jackson seems to want to reproduce the imaginative pleasure of the original for an audience that doesn't necessarily know it. But Hollywood now belongs to the world, and there is no problem with Jackson making the bulk of the film in his native New Zealand. Indeed, the film has a deep-rooted joke about a deranged director taking American-based actors to a godforsaken island in the south Pacific to make a movie of grandiose ambition. Jack Black's Carl Denham is styled as Orson Welles, but shares Jackson's porkiness and, as he is making the same monstrous movie, his obsession.
This film knows it's a remake of Cooper's -- Fay Wray's unavailability is mentioned, two actors perform a brief scene lifted verbatim, snippets of the original music well up-- but something more complex is going on. The depression-era New York of the 1933 movie was reality into which Kong intruded. Jackson's 1933 New York is as much a place of the imagination as Skull Island, Kong's terrifying home: after an opening montage of zoo animals and starving people, the skyline rises pearly and organic, more Neuschwannstein than modernity. Colours are warm and muted, comforting even when the subject matter is chilly, and, yes, reminiscent of Disney's first animated features. This is 1933 as seen from today. The characters too are warmer: Ann is an earth mother, talented in Vaudeville and with aspirations to cutting-edge straight theatre -- Naomi Watts is luminous as Ann, something like a blue-collar Emma Thompson; Jack is her ideal playwright, as glamorous as Eugene O'Neill, who did the tramp steamer thing in his youth, and almost as unlucky in the movies as Barton Fink. Kong too is a different beast, a realistic gorilla who happens to be twenty-five feet tall. We now love gorillas for being a bit like us, part toddler, part old lady. He's still frightening, but mainly because he doesn't know his own strength, and is a touch possessive about Ann.
And the sexual politics of the plot is upturned: taking off from Denham's "Arab proverb", Jackson's team provide another spin on Beauty and the Beast, with some help from Disney's quasi-feminist reading and some of the poetry of Cocteau's. After a prelude where she is let down by a fatherly but battered older guy, Ann "ought" to be in love with Jack, but somehow their wordless gazes and verbal fumblings aren't enough to convince her that he won't, like everyone else, let her down, even after he's rescued her from Kong, assisted by a passing pterodactyl. But she forms a bond with the beastly Kong, whose language skills are negligible but who thwacks dinosaurs for her and takes her for a romantic skate in Central Park. Another battered, and obviously lonely, older guy, he doesn't let her down. When they gaze into each others' eyes, we are clearly meant to see mutual nurturing, even if Kong wreaks mayhem the rest of the time. When Kong dies, falling off the Empire State Building, Jack is magically there and she is finally ready to gaze into his eyes for real.
Within the linked arcs of the original plot and the fairytale, there is some thematic colour. For example, the First Mate, Hayes, nurtures Jimmy, a previously feral boy who steals a copy of Heart of Darkness and a pen, and who will probably end up a writer. There is also a lot of fun, above all a wonderfully naff dinosaur pileup, some stomach-churning creepy-crawlies, and Kong's action sequences. The new material is done roughly in 1930s style, without much backstory and closure, but the script and performances are good enough to carry it off. The various characters on the ship that sails to Skull Island are like those of a war film, and Ann and Jack's romance begins like a screwball comedy, although Jack is more like the cultivated chaps who come through as adventure heroes, played by Robert Donat or Ronald Colman in the later 1930s; Adrien Brody, in spite of an expressionist-looking track record in films, has the style and substance as Jack to make you wish Ann-and-Jack was a complete story, not just a context for Kong.
So it is all rather overdone, but that's the point. You may want to scream at times, but the only sensible thing to do is to let Kong sweep you off your feet, and weep for him.
Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong is also a monster. It is more than three hours long and overloaded with visual effects, emotional punches and resonant allusions. Jackson seems to want to reproduce the imaginative pleasure of the original for an audience that doesn't necessarily know it. But Hollywood now belongs to the world, and there is no problem with Jackson making the bulk of the film in his native New Zealand. Indeed, the film has a deep-rooted joke about a deranged director taking American-based actors to a godforsaken island in the south Pacific to make a movie of grandiose ambition. Jack Black's Carl Denham is styled as Orson Welles, but shares Jackson's porkiness and, as he is making the same monstrous movie, his obsession.
This film knows it's a remake of Cooper's -- Fay Wray's unavailability is mentioned, two actors perform a brief scene lifted verbatim, snippets of the original music well up-- but something more complex is going on. The depression-era New York of the 1933 movie was reality into which Kong intruded. Jackson's 1933 New York is as much a place of the imagination as Skull Island, Kong's terrifying home: after an opening montage of zoo animals and starving people, the skyline rises pearly and organic, more Neuschwannstein than modernity. Colours are warm and muted, comforting even when the subject matter is chilly, and, yes, reminiscent of Disney's first animated features. This is 1933 as seen from today. The characters too are warmer: Ann is an earth mother, talented in Vaudeville and with aspirations to cutting-edge straight theatre -- Naomi Watts is luminous as Ann, something like a blue-collar Emma Thompson; Jack is her ideal playwright, as glamorous as Eugene O'Neill, who did the tramp steamer thing in his youth, and almost as unlucky in the movies as Barton Fink. Kong too is a different beast, a realistic gorilla who happens to be twenty-five feet tall. We now love gorillas for being a bit like us, part toddler, part old lady. He's still frightening, but mainly because he doesn't know his own strength, and is a touch possessive about Ann.
And the sexual politics of the plot is upturned: taking off from Denham's "Arab proverb", Jackson's team provide another spin on Beauty and the Beast, with some help from Disney's quasi-feminist reading and some of the poetry of Cocteau's. After a prelude where she is let down by a fatherly but battered older guy, Ann "ought" to be in love with Jack, but somehow their wordless gazes and verbal fumblings aren't enough to convince her that he won't, like everyone else, let her down, even after he's rescued her from Kong, assisted by a passing pterodactyl. But she forms a bond with the beastly Kong, whose language skills are negligible but who thwacks dinosaurs for her and takes her for a romantic skate in Central Park. Another battered, and obviously lonely, older guy, he doesn't let her down. When they gaze into each others' eyes, we are clearly meant to see mutual nurturing, even if Kong wreaks mayhem the rest of the time. When Kong dies, falling off the Empire State Building, Jack is magically there and she is finally ready to gaze into his eyes for real.
Within the linked arcs of the original plot and the fairytale, there is some thematic colour. For example, the First Mate, Hayes, nurtures Jimmy, a previously feral boy who steals a copy of Heart of Darkness and a pen, and who will probably end up a writer. There is also a lot of fun, above all a wonderfully naff dinosaur pileup, some stomach-churning creepy-crawlies, and Kong's action sequences. The new material is done roughly in 1930s style, without much backstory and closure, but the script and performances are good enough to carry it off. The various characters on the ship that sails to Skull Island are like those of a war film, and Ann and Jack's romance begins like a screwball comedy, although Jack is more like the cultivated chaps who come through as adventure heroes, played by Robert Donat or Ronald Colman in the later 1930s; Adrien Brody, in spite of an expressionist-looking track record in films, has the style and substance as Jack to make you wish Ann-and-Jack was a complete story, not just a context for Kong.
So it is all rather overdone, but that's the point. You may want to scream at times, but the only sensible thing to do is to let Kong sweep you off your feet, and weep for him.
I saw this at the London Film Festival in 1995 or 1996. The print had been lovingly restored from sections scattered around the world, including some from archives in Moscow. Somebody near me said "I'm really looking forward to this", which was understandable, since the director, as Michael Curtiz, later made some jolly swashbucklers and Casablanca, and the LFF had previously come up with several almost unknown silent masterpieces, including Jacques Feyder's Visage d'enfants.
Well, the pianist was superb and the voice-over translator (no time to translate the German titles) produced some splendid characterization. But about ten minutes in, people realised that the film was incredibly bad, and they didn't even know when it would be over as it hadn't been projected complete before. Watching it felt like existentialist hell. Which was fair enough as it's meant to be a study of sin and remorse. A young man is tempted by sex, drugs and stuff, but he falls asleep and dreams of the biblical story of the destruction of the cities of the plain, which are a bit like Vienna and populated by his low-life pals. When he wakes up, he repents. I think the sin stuff is meant to be alluring and you're meant to think that the director has been clever framing it in a moral tale. Instead, you get the idea that sin is a lot less interesting than, maybe, a novel by Jane Austen.
It's really a very substandard knockoff of Intolerance, possibly of interest to design specialists.
Well, the pianist was superb and the voice-over translator (no time to translate the German titles) produced some splendid characterization. But about ten minutes in, people realised that the film was incredibly bad, and they didn't even know when it would be over as it hadn't been projected complete before. Watching it felt like existentialist hell. Which was fair enough as it's meant to be a study of sin and remorse. A young man is tempted by sex, drugs and stuff, but he falls asleep and dreams of the biblical story of the destruction of the cities of the plain, which are a bit like Vienna and populated by his low-life pals. When he wakes up, he repents. I think the sin stuff is meant to be alluring and you're meant to think that the director has been clever framing it in a moral tale. Instead, you get the idea that sin is a lot less interesting than, maybe, a novel by Jane Austen.
It's really a very substandard knockoff of Intolerance, possibly of interest to design specialists.