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OT: Kong: Skull Island(With Some Psycho Material)

posted 8 years ago by ecarle (14979)
13 replies | jump to latest

March , 2017 and Kong: Skull Island is here.

This is posted in anticipation of probably seeing it.

Leaving aside two tons of Japanese Kong knockoffs(often fighting Godzilla and other creatures), we've had three King Kongs:

The 1933 original, a blockbuster in its time(24 hour a day showings to long lines), a masterpiece of stop motion photography, and very much the forerunner to today's special effects-ridden blockbusters (with a fair share of Psycho-like terror for 1933 customers, some of it edited from release prints.) Simply put, a classic. And in the Psycho tradition: big box office, fans of all ages, AND landmark cinema.

The 1976 remake, set modern day, in which a cool cast(hero Jeff Bridges, villain Charles Grodin and talented-out-of-the-gate female ingénue Jessica Lange) was defeated by this being a "Man in a Monkey Suit Movie," with paltry action(one silly fight with one fake giant snake) and the horrendous decision to insert a "giant immobile King Kong robot" into the picture for promotional purposes(I used to drive by the old MGM lot and SEE that robot in 1976 before the movie came out, and I couldn't imagine it would be believable. It wasn't.) However, the 1976 version did have a good script, and did insert the idea of the damsel in distress crying her eyes out and trying to save Kong's life at the end.

The 2005 big budget Peter Jackson remake, which rather combined the best of the original(CGI in for stop motion) and the 1976 remake(mucho tears at the end as Naomi Watts tried to save Kong from getting shot.) The 2005 King Kong is my favorite movie OF 2005, but with caveats: I'll never watch the first hour again(thank god for DVDs) and most of my love for it stems from the final NYC sequences(Kong single-mindedly tearing up a theater to get to his rival Adrian Brody; the tear-filled and vertiginous Empire State Building finale.) Indeed, the Jackson Kong splits into three acts which I approach differently: Act One(getting to the island), WAY overlong and torturous to the audience, an indulgence; Act Two(plenty of animal fight action on the island, a great fight of Kong versus TWO T-Rexes, and a new version of the censored "giant spider pit"masscare of many heroes -- but ultimately, too much of a good thing) and..Act Three(all good, all memorable.) Jackson's Kong took the 2005 film back to the 1933 setting(good) and went for quality A-list stars(Naomi Watts -- very good here; Adrian Brody in his recently-Oscared eccentricity; and Jack Black, not quite able to pull off dramatics, but actually quite the rotter in the old Armstrong role.)

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Comes now Kong: Skull Island, and the reviews are so-so, though one noted "this is 10 times better than Jurassic World" and the big selling point for me is that this baby is set in : 1973.

One of my favorite years. Though in this film, that year has been selected for its Vietnam allegory(and reality as a backdrop to the plot). Some of the print ads and evidently some of the scenes in the movie reference "Apocalypse Now"; characters are named Marlow and Conrad.

And quite a cast. OK, so Brie Larsen follows up last year's Best Actress win with a popcorn CGI blockbuster. So did Charlize Thereon and Halle Berry, as I recall. And more people will see this on its first day than saw "Room" ever. This is the proper Oscar then blockbuster launch for an actress today.

Tom Hiddleston brings a mix of Marvel cred and serious actor chops. Samuel L. Jackson(a villainous military man) and John Goodman are "brand name support." (But then so were Martin Balsam and, in his time, Thomas Mitchell.) And some guy I can't name from Wolf of Wall Street(the yacht captain who mumbled "we'll run into some chop" that turned out to be The Perfect Storm) is always good.

But reviews say the guy who steals the show is Human Cabbage Patch Doll John C. Reilly as a displaced WWII vet stuck on Skull Island for 28 years. Good for him. He's been around a long time, but seemed to have faded recently. "He's back."

Anyway. A-list cast. Good character guys. Plenty o' creatures for we "young at hearts"(look, others can pick their commix, I'll go with the second coming of Harryhausen.)

We shall see.

PS. This Kong, though set in 1973, is evidently rigged to meet up with the new Godzilla we got just a few years ago(in that underwhelming one with Bryan Cranston) and create a Marvel/DC universe clone for monsters. Meanwhile, Universal is looking to gear up a new generation of its monsters with Tom (unkillable) Cruise this summer in "The Mummy"(co-starring Russell Crowe as "Dr. Jeykll.")

[–] Doghouse (447) 8 years ago

ecarle said:

"The 2005 big budget Peter Jackson remake, which rather combined the best of the original(CGI in for stop motion) and the 1976 remake(mucho tears at the end as Naomi Watts tried to save Kong from getting shot.) The 2005 King Kong is my favorite movie OF 2005, but with caveats: I'll never watch the first hour again(thank god for DVDs) and most of my love for it stems from the final NYC sequences(Kong single-mindedly tearing up a theater to get to his rival Adrian Brody; the tear-filled and vertiginous Empire State Building finale.) Indeed, the Jackson Kong splits into three acts which I approach differently: Act One(getting to the island), WAY overlong and torturous to the audience, an indulgence; Act Two(plenty of animal fight action on the island, a great fight of Kong versus TWO T-Rexes, and a new version of the censored "giant spider pit"masscare of many heroes -- but ultimately, too much of a good thing) and..Act Three(all good, all memorable.) Jackson's Kong took the 2005 film back to the 1933 setting(good) and went for quality A-list stars(Naomi Watts -- very good here; Adrian Brody in his recently-Oscared eccentricity; and Jack Black, not quite able to pull off dramatics, but actually quite the rotter in the old Armstrong role.)"
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From the GMTA Dept: the title line of my 5/1/06 IMDB review of the Jackson Kong is "Too Much Of A Good Thing."

Selected excerpts:

- What it does do, it does well enough, but simply too much: too many prehistoric creatures; too many battles with same; too many chases and credulity-stretching hairbreadth escapes, and way too many closeups requiring Naomi Watts to stare soulfully at Kong or goggle-eyed at something else offscreen.

- Aside from overstatement and over-length, a key area in which this film goes wrong is in the presentation of Carl Denham himself. Gone is the gung-ho, go-anywhere-do-anything adventurer played by Robert Armstrong. In his place is Jack Black's mercenary, manipulative and downright dishonest little weasel, one step ahead of the law and not above a little shanghai-ing to serve his ends. Though not without its amusing moments, courtesy of Black, this unfortunate characterization renders this Denham ultimately unsympathetic. While Armstrong's was certainly guilty of less-than-altruistic motives, he didn't exhibit Black's almost sadistic determination at Kong's capture. And when the final, famous "T'was beauty killed the beast" line is spoken, Armstrong's delivery is both rueful and showmanlike; coming from Black, it sounds only as though he's disgusted at losing a meal ticket.

- I don't remember who it was who said, "Less is more," or "Simplfy, simplify, simplify," but they're sentiments to which Jackson and company should have given some consideration. And, sorry, but 3 hours and 7 minutes is just too damn long for Kong.

Lest it sound I was too down on the enterprise, I did find many praiseworthy elements in it, but I'll spare you further excerpts of my characteristically verbose prose, other than on the following point: we do diverge on the Ann Darrow/Kong relationship. What I said 11 years ago was:

- I'd make the argument that the original approach makes Kong a more tragic figure, inasmuch as he goes through so much for Ann without ever having the satisfaction of his affections being returned in any way.

The '33 Kong's devotion to Ann puts me in mind of Monty "Pru" Clift's From Here To Eternity articulation of his devotion to the Army: "Just because you love something doesn't mean it has to love you back."

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ecarle said:

"OK, so Brie Larsen follows up last year's Best Actress win with a popcorn CGI blockbuster. So did Charlize Thereon and Halle Berry, as I recall. And more people will see this on its first day than saw "Room" ever. This is the proper Oscar then blockbuster launch for an actress today."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Is it worth noting in passing on Theron's own pre-Oscar simian reboot, 1998's Mighty Joe Young (also featuring the recently-passed Bill Paxton)?

But post-Oscar projects are something that have given rise to academic (pun acknowledged but not intended) reflections on career trajectories, especially as it concerns first-timers. The film biz being what it is, a performer's next deal is usually signed and sealed even as he or she embarks on the performance that later earns them the trophy, but would Sinatra have committed to the low-budget Suddenly had he known the aforementioned FHTE would bring home the gold? Joanne Woodward to No Down Payment? Rex Harrison to The Yellow Rolls-Royce? Matthau to A Guide For the Married Man? Liza Minnelli to voicing Dorothy in the animated Journey Back To Oz? Hackman to The Poseidon Adventure? And so on.

[–] Doghouse (447) 8 years ago

Being a typical-in-some-ways American male, I resist reading instructions. Is there a word limit on posts here? I think I'm just beginning to catch on to that possibility as an explanation to yours, ecarle, often appearing in segments (all this time, I'd assumed they were further or afterthoughts) when I discovered my above comment had come to an involuntary end. For a minute, I thought my keyboard had gone gershtunken.

Although you had little use for them, I find I miss the formatting options - quote blocks; bold and italics; preview; etc - IMDB provided, and am still sort of casting about for a comfortable way in which to conform to the MovieChat parameters.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

"The 2005 big budget Peter Jackson remake, which rather combined the best of the original(CGI in for stop motion) and the 1976 remake(mucho tears at the end as Naomi Watts tried to save Kong from getting shot.) The 2005 King Kong is my favorite movie OF 2005, but with caveats: I'll never watch the first hour again(thank god for DVDs) and most of my love for it stems from the final NYC sequences(Kong single-mindedly tearing up a theater to get to his rival Adrian Brody; the tear-filled and vertiginous Empire State Building finale.) Indeed, the Jackson Kong splits into three acts which I approach differently: Act One(getting to the island), WAY overlong and torturous to the audience, an indulgence; Act Two(plenty of animal fight action on the island, a great fight of Kong versus TWO T-Rexes, and a new version of the censored "giant spider pit"masscare of many heroes -- - - - - - - - - - - -

From the GMTA Dept: the title line of my 5/1/06 IMDB review of the Jackson Kong is "Too Much Of A Good Thing."

---

Oh! as when I wrote:
but ultimately, too much of a good thing) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- What it does do, it does well enough, but simply too much: too many prehistoric creatures; too many battles with same; too many chases and credulity-stretching hairbreadth escapes, and way too many closeups requiring Naomi Watts to stare soulfully at Kong or goggle-eyed at something else offscreen.

---

Well, this was what was odd about Jackson's King Kong to me. I had found the LOTR films(and I haven't seen them all) way overlong and overstuffed, but I figured the material demanded that. When I saw what Jackson did to the stark simplicities of the 1933 Kong I realized..."No, wait, Peter Jackson's got some delusion of grandeur problems. And terrible issues of overlength and pace."

That said, I felt that the fight between Kong and two T-rexes(and their plummet from branch to branch down a ravine) was at once a spectacular "on steroids" version of the one-on-one match in the original AND a stinging put down of the paltry snake fight in the 1976 film(which reminds me: a LOT of 1970's films REJECTED spectacle, and everything from Star Wars to today rejects that. CGI overkill is the name of the game.)

Selected excerpts:

- Aside from overstatement and over-length, a key area in which this film goes wrong is in the presentation of Carl Denham himself. Gone is the gung-ho, go-anywhere-do-anything adventurer played by Robert Armstrong. In his place is Jack Black's mercenary, manipulative and downright dishonest little weasel, one step ahead of the law and not above a little shanghai-ing to serve his ends.

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Oh! As when I wrote:

and Jack Black, not quite able to pull off dramatics, but actually quite the rotter in the old Armstrong role.)"

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I guess GMTA...which I only understood after reading the letters three times. D'oh!

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Though not without its amusing moments, courtesy of Black, this unfortunate characterization renders this Denham ultimately unsympathetic. While Armstrong's was certainly guilty of less-than-altruistic motives, he didn't exhibit Black's almost sadistic determination at Kong's capture.

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Well, this seems to be the conscious decision of Jackson and his screenwriters and...there it is. To watch funnyman Jack Black(so often associated with that Nickelodeon kids awards show where people get "green slimed") turn into such a destestable character was...well, something. Norman Bates-ish, I guess , or Bruno Anthony-esque: the good guy actor going bad. And yet not bad ENOUGH...he's not punished at the end.

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And when the final, famous "T'was beauty killed the beast" line is spoken, Armstrong's delivery is both rueful and showmanlike; coming from Black, it sounds only as though he's disgusted at losing a meal ticket.

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True. My basic thought was: "Oh, he's not that good an actor to pull off the line."

I came away with newfound respect for Robert Armstrong.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

- I don't remember who it was who said, "Less is more," or "Simplfy, simplify, simplify," but they're sentiments to which Jackson and company should have given some consideration. And, sorry, but 3 hours and 7 minutes is just too damn long for Kong.

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In re-viewings of Jackson's Kong over the years, I have solved the problem of 3 hours and 7 minutes by skipping pretty much everything until Kong shows up.

And this leads me to a "re-review" of my Favorite Personal Movie of thing.

Its entirely the case that in some years, the "favorite" thing isn't the entire movie, but rather a significant PART of the movie which I find emotionally impactful.

Example: The Dark Knight, in which every scene with Heath Ledger's Joker is a winner, but most of the other scenes with Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhardt(misused as TwoFace; as someone wrote "the movie needs either more of TwoFace, or less of him) and the egregiously miscast Maggie Gyllenhaal...not so much. (Bonus points for Joker-free scenes with Caine and Freeman, too compelling greats.)

With King Kong, I was amused ENOUGH by the animal fights in the second half to find it entertaining(with the Kong/T-Rex fight the standout) and I just enjoyed the entirety of the NYC final scenes. The idea of Ann NOT being on stage with Kong -- its another woman(great twist.) The idea of Kong PERSONALLY wanting to kill Brody as a PERSONAL rival -- with Brody bravely exploiting that to lead Kong away from people. And the Empire State Building finale -- the emotion of the 1933 original's finale(which made me cry as a kid) taken up a level in emotion and dizzyiness.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

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"OK, so Brie Larsen follows up last year's Best Actress win with a popcorn CGI blockbuster. So did Charlize Thereon and Halle Berry, as I recall. And more people will see this on its first day than saw "Room" ever. This is the proper Oscar then blockbuster launch for an actress today."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Is it worth noting in passing on Theron's own pre-Oscar simian reboot, 1998's Mighty Joe Young (also featuring the recently-passed Bill Paxton)?

---

I did not recall that. I think the post-Oscar movie for Thereon that I was thinking about was Aron Flux or whatever it was called, just as Halle Berry followed up her Oscar with a Bond movie(for which she was indeed signed before winning, and Pierce Brosnan would NOT allow her above the title with him), and then "Catwoman."

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But post-Oscar projects are something that have given rise to academic (pun acknowledged but not intended) reflections on career trajectories, especially as it concerns first-timers. The film biz being what it is, a performer's next deal is usually signed and sealed even as he or she embarks on the performance that later earns them the trophy, but would Sinatra have committed to the low-budget Suddenly had he known the aforementioned FHTE would bring home the gold? Joanne Woodward to No Down Payment? Rex Harrison to The Yellow Rolls-Royce? Matthau to A Guide For the Married Man? Liza Minnelli to voicing Dorothy in the animated Journey Back To Oz? Hackman to The Poseidon Adventure? And so on.

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What a great list of reminders that the film business is a business and that actors are often signed way in advance on their next movies.

THAT said, I think there have been cases where an Oscar winner has elected to "go box office" AFTER winning the Oscar, using the Oscar to charge a higher fee, which, in a big box office movie, can be even higher. I would expect Brie Larsen is getting her biggest payday ever for Kong.

Speaking of Gene Hackman in 1972. He won the 1971 Oscar for Best Actor for The French Connection a few months before a 1972 thriller called "Prime Cut" came out...pitting Hackman against Lee Marvin a Midwestern mob tale. Suddenly, the movie had TWO Best Actor Oscar winners and...Hackman looked like the newer, hotter, bigger star than Marvin.

And: the actress named Marcia Gay Harden(I think) won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar just as she accepted a new TV show with Richard Dreyfuss(an Oscar winner, natch.) And: the show tanked quickly.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

Nothing much else in 2005 got me in that "mainstream man" way, although these two came close:

Spielberg's War of the Worlds. This was the big one at summer, with Kong the big one at Christmas. Great scenes of total alien annihilation of humans(their first emergence and attack; the scene with the ship, and a chilling image of the war machines methodically spraying people into dust as they lurched down a hillside...as you and I would spray ants -- and I say, death should always be painless.) Unfortunately, WOTW was made superfast by SS, and you can feel it. Many disjointed scenes and a climax that arrives too quickly and perfunctorily at the end. It also dragged down into some real weird downer crap in the Tim Robbins sequence.

The other 2005 film that has crept up on me to best Kong(maybe) is...Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City." The first one. And almost entirely because of the first sequence with Mickey Rourke so spectacular as Harv. Or is it Marv. In any event, he looks like "Kirk Douglas crossed with a tank"(one critic's words) and in the bar scene in which Rourke is joined by co-stars from the other episodes Clive Owen(boy was HE great), Jessica Alba and the late, sadly great Brittany Murphy(whose Sin City performance was a marvel of sexy weirdness) -- well, that scene is what tough guy noir on steroids looks like to me. (Plus Rourke's voiceovers all through the sequence and his request to the bartender: "Shots and a brew, and keep 'em coming!")

I dunno. Give me a coupla years and Sin City may move to Number One for 2005.

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- I'd make the argument that the original approach makes Kong a more tragic figure, inasmuch as he goes through so much for Ann without ever having the satisfaction of his affections being returned in any way.

The '33 Kong's devotion to Ann puts me in mind of Monty "Pru" Clift's From Here To Eternity articulation of his devotion to the Army: "Just because you love something doesn't mean it has to love you back."

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An excellent comparison of the relationships. I think it is true in the original Kong that one reason we are so damn sad when he gets shot down at the end is that the woman in question only and constantly screamed at the sight of him. That can be painful on a guy.

BTW, my personal "favorite film of ( )" list isn't comprehensive on the 30's and 40's, but if it were, King Kong the original is my favorite of 1933....and clearly better as an all around movie classic than the Jackson version. "My list works in mysterious ways."

Which reminds me: why isn't Van Sant's Psycho my favorite of 1998? In some ways, it could be and should be. Van Sant's Psycho shares with Jackson's King Kong, the Coens True Grit, and the recent Magnificent Seven a kind of fealty to the original that allows echoes of the original to carry through to today (in ways that the modern Charade and Manchurican Candidate did not.) And hey: the remakes of King Kong, True Grit, and Mag 7 are my favorites of those years.

Well...I LIKE Van Sant's Psycho. Even with all that goes wrong with it, it most certainly is a version of Hitchcock's Psycho. To see the camera move in 1998 as it did in 1960 (say, for instance, gliding down the row of cars at California Charlies) was to almost feel like Hitchcock had "risen from the dead" to direct one more time. But my favorite of 1998 is SS's Saving Private Ryan.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

Being a typical-in-some-ways American male, I resist reading instructions. Is there a word limit on posts here?

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Yes. 5000 words.

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I think I'm just beginning to catch on to that possibility as an explanation to yours, ecarle, often appearing in segments (all this time, I'd assumed they were further or afterthoughts)

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Ha. Oops. I should have explained. I will now.

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when I discovered my above comment had come to an involuntary end. For a minute, I thought my keyboard had gone gershtunken.

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When MINE come to an involuntary end, a warning pops up: "You must submit posts of 5000 words or less."

And hence, I've begun using (MORE) to break up the posts.

Odd: on some other boards here, this has not been the case. It lets me post longer. I expect someone told them to watch out for that guy on the Psycho board. Hah.

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A separate and more irrititating issue has been the tendency of some posts to simply disappear off the screen in their entirety even if I have copied them for safety. This seems to occur when I post from a different location. So I've stopped doing that. Oh, well...its not like my thoughts are immortal for all time. But to watch a post just suddenly dematerialize..it hurts.

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Although you had little use for them,

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I tried, I really did. But it never worked right for me, rather than SEEING bold, I would "read" bold, and I couldn't make out my own excerpts. At least I use the CAPS for emphasis. Sometimes instead of seeing " I see "quotemarks" or something in the sentences, too.

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I find I miss the formatting options - quote blocks; bold and italics; preview; etc - IMDB provided, and am still sort of casting about for a comfortable way in which to conform to the MovieChat parameters.

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I think they keep working on improvements. I like the "jump to most recent post feature" -- did they have that on imdb?

(END)

[–] swanstep (2715) 8 years ago

Nothing much else in 2005 got me in that "mainstream man" way[/quote]
Haneke's Caché (2005) is a must-see! So good.
[quote]King Kong the original is my favorite of 1933

KK is probably most people's choice from 1933 (I think I've officially chosen 42nd St before but on a lot of days that's probably going to strike me as nuts!). Still what's most impressive about 1933 is its breadth of incredibly pleasurable films compared to previous years. Suddenly you've got Kong, you've got The Invisible Man, you've got probably the 3 best Busby Berkeley Musicals, you've got Stanwyck burning up the screen in Baby Face, you've got the best Marx brothers film Duck Soup, you've got Cukor doing a great, fluid Little Women (and Cukor's second for the year, Dinner At Eight, isn't bad either), you've got Rogers and Astaire together for the first time in Flying Down To Rio, you've got peak, free-love Lubitsch with Design For Living, you've got the first draft of Kane-style complex narratives in The Power and The Glory, and so on. The whole year in other words feels pregnant with the future of the industry, and at least 20 films can still be watched with great pleasure.

Why should 1933 feel like a watershed? I think the deep reason is that the transition to sound had been difficult technically, and for a few years in the early '30s sound was present but often pretty bad, dialogue was unnatural (and Hollywood frantically brought in people from Broadway to try to address the problem), acting styles were evolving but still uncertain, and cameras that had gotten very mobile by the end of the silent cinema mostly had been much more locked down for a number of years (to allow recording of sound that mostly couldn't be used anyway!). 1933 is the first year when almost everything out of Hollywood is looking better, sounding better, just kind of gelling; the new medium's finally locked and people are back to making the best movies they can, telling the most entertaining stories, and so on. America and the World might be in the middle of a Depression, but Hollywood is now starting to boom.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

So I have seen Kong: Skull Island.

Not bad.

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Sitting there "at my age" watching yet another CGI movie , this one in the monsters on a rampage tradition (as opposed to comic book heroes and Sci/Fi fantasy) I felt a LITTLE too old for this. But not really.

I am reminded that there is a retired California politician of some reknown named Willie Brown. He was a State Legislator from San Francisco for decades, the Speaker of the State Assembly for many years and the Mayor of San Francisco for a few more; now he's a power broker/lawyer Democratic party powerhouse.

Well, Willie has a weekly column on political matters in the SF Chronicle, and each week, he finishes it up with a brief movie review (he loves movies; a LOT of politicians love movies -- recall President JFK getting Spartacus stopped and rewound at a DC movie theater when he came in; or President Nixon watching Patton over and over and bombing Cambodia accordingly.)

Anyway, rich political power broker Willie Brown has written positive reviews in his recent columns about "Logan" and "Kong" and -- hey, if HE can keep liking these movies at his age, I can keep liking these movies at mine. He's in his 70's.

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And the cast for Kong IS tip-top. I covered them in my OP. In fact, a LOT of what I covered in my OP(which I gleaned from reading a few reviews) is exactly what was delivered by this Kong when I actually saw it. The quality of those actors; the cool soundtrack of 60's/early 70's tunes(no disco!), a certain stylistic nuance to the first half hour of the film in establishing the times(1973), the locales(Saigon and other Vietnam locations; DC) and the characters quite well before sending them off to meet Kong. No surprises...but good stuff.

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A few words about: Shea Whigham. I believe that is the actor's name. I don't know what else he has done, but I recall at Xmas 2013, he submitted great cameos to two major films: American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street. I especially remember him in WOWS as the rich Leo's cowed yacht captain, who deadpanned about a voyage into rough seas: "Um..yeah..we could do that. We'll run into a little chop. Break few dishes maybe. It'll be OK. We'll batten down the hatches, um." Total low key deadpan. Hilarious(given that the payoff is a Perfect Storm that sinks the yacht). And he is good looking in some specific way yet also FUNNY-looking in some specific way.

He gets a line like "Um...we'll run into a little chop" in Kong. He's a military man(under Samuel L.'s command) who survives Kong knocking down a fleet of military helicopters and killing half the men aboard.

When one other soldier screams at Whigham about the giant ape carnage ("What the hell did we just go through?!!) Whigham replies in deadpan yacht captain calm:

"It was an unconventional military encounter, yes." JUST the way he spoke in WOWS. I laughed hard. I'll bet somebody asked him to play the part the same way.

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The casting of Shea Whigam reflects a certain quality control to Kong Skull Island that sounds in the rest of the cast. I'm learning Brie Larsen's face -- it is harder, less distinctive face than , say, Emma Stone's -- but I'll get it down eventually. She's good in the movie, expressive, better than her part deserves -- and uh, she has a good chest. Women stars, what are you going to do?

Tom Hiddleston's been making moolah as the chief baddie in Thor and the Avengers movies, nice to see him given a heroic tough guy role. He worked out, he has muscles, he had command -- looked a bit too much like Michael Fassbender, though. Who looks a bit too much like Kevin Kline.

Samuel Jackson and John Goodman hold up the "quality character actor" end of the story(along with the unsung Richard Jenkins early on as the US Senator who finds funding for this mission.)

And John C. Reilly DOES steal the picture as a WWII pilot learning from the new visitors what happened since his plane crashed on Skull Island in 1944. (That 1944 crash opens the movie, and a great credit sequence takes us from 1944 to 1973 via film clips and newsreels of the Presidents in between and reminds us just how much slam-bang history America had in those years.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

By keeping the story and characters on Skull Island, this Kong feels a bit more like the original Jurassic Park, with the same basic set-up: a quest to get from one end of the island to the other to be found by a rescue ship. We aren't going back to New York City, and (no spoilers here, I don't think), Kong is going to live to fight another day.

In fact, that DOES prove important if you stay until AFTER the end credits are concluded. Suffice it to say that we are then given the set up for movies that will be made (Marvel/DC style) for years(decades?) to come: Kong, Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and that other one from our collective childhood are going to rock and roll, together and apart. The last thing we hear before the screen goes blank is Godzilla's wonderful industrial strength trumpet of a holler.

Consider where the movie business is taking us, now:

The Marvel juggernaut rolls on(with the Avengers, the X-Men and the wacky Guardians of the Galaxy as linchpins, and Spiderman immortal.)

The DC universe is good to go(next up, Wonder Woman and Justice League)

Comes now Kong, Godzilla and the gang. (Hey, how many studios OWN King Kong? RKO? Paramount in '76? Toho for the old "King Kong vs Godzilla"? Warners in this one.)

And for summer, Tom Cruise in The Mummy will launch a contemplated Universal monster revival. (Russell Crowe is Dr. Jekyll; Johnny Depp is a rumored Invisible Man.)

The movie business is surely not the business it was when Hitchocck had to come up with a new idea every year!

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I mention this business about Kong being fitted into a larger "universe" because I don't get it: "Godzilla 2014'" set present day. Kong is set in 1973. What, is somebody gonna time travel?

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Meanwhile , back at the plot: after Kong knocks down all the military helicopters, the survivors end up in two groups: One group of soldiers led by mad Samuel and power-mad John Goodman, and another group that's "all good guys"(Hiddleston, Brie, and eventually jolly old John C. Reilly).

Getting the two groups together and then off the island becomes the plot line. Various creatures eat and kill various characters along the way(quite gorily in some cases; this is not for kids, except hell, I''m sure kids dig on gore, too.)

Some critics have noted that given how giant creatures keep popping up to menace and kill the protagonists, this is a paeon to the 50s/60's Ray Harryhausen classics, "7th Voyage of Sinbad"(1958) "Mysterious Island"(1961) and "Jason and the Argonauts"(1963) I say -- yes indeed. A few views of the very giant Kong match up to the giant Bronze statue "Talos" in Argonauts, and the big creatures are "Mysterious Island" quality. Recall that those Harryhausen films were big hits(and all with Bernard Herrmann scores!) "Everything old is new again."

Kong himself is nicely set up as the protector of the indigenous humans on the island; he has taken it upon himself to fight and kill the meaner creatures that might kill the people and so he IS King. A benevolent King; a beloved King. Its nice character development. Except Samuel L. wants to kill Kong off. (He's gonna WIN this war!)

Its 12 years since the Peter Jackson Kong, I can't say this new one is much more of an effect, but he is certainly EQUAL to the Jackson Kong, with great emotion in his face and great definition to his fur and muscle package. And this Kong...cries.

It occurs to me that shuffling Kong off into the Toho universe of giant lizards and insects will make him the putative "hero" of the contemplated series. Fair enough.

Though Kong: Skull Island is about the effects, the kills and the monster fights at heart, I think it scores higher than Godzilla 2014 because it truly does have a great cast. "Overqualified" they may be, but I'm sure they were paid well, and they deliver. In fact, come the end credits, we get not only the post-credits universe-launch, but a surprisingly touching scene of purely human emotion, without a CGI monster around at all.

Its a good entertainment made better by a great cast. I figure Willie Brown and I will keep turning up at these things in the Golden Years.

[–] swanstep (2715) 8 years ago

Just watched Kong - Skull Island. Maybe OK if you're 10 - it really did remind me of *sub*-Harryhausen things that I only vaguely remember from when I was a kid called things like 'Land That Time Forgot' and starring Doug McClure (a kind of cut-rate Robert Wagner who was kind of a cut-rate James Dean) - but as an adult it's 2 hours of your life you're never getting back!

Too many head-slapping moments for me. E.g., I'm not normally that sensitive to continuity errors but this movie was Michael-Bay-like in its level of disregard basic contintuity standards. We get a *good* view of how many choppers and what types that are on the ship as it approaches the storm around the island - 6 Vietnam-era Hueys, one bigger navy Sea Stallion, and one two-rotor Chinook troop-transporter. After takeoff, however and flying into the clouds the number of Hueys has literally doubled to 12. Reading around online, if you count all the crashes and wrecks through the initial fight with Kong then apparently at least 15 choppers are destroyed!

And the mechanics of the pickup at the end of the film are obscure. Where did those 'refuel team' choppers come from. The ship is a repurposed tanker not an aircraft carrier that can bring up more aircraft from below deck. The ship's decks were cleared....there were no choppers left behind in reserve. (Joke: they were hidden along with the other 6+ mystery Hueys!)

Now, glaring continuity problems aren't the end of the world, but they're normally a symptom of wider problems. People who don't care about continuity dialogue, performances, actions that make sense, and the like. And so it proves with K-SI.

E.g. 1. We see Tom Hiddleston's character supposedly be a bad-ass
in a bar near the beginning of the film. I've now backwards-and-forwards freeze-framed my way through that sequence and I *still* don't know what happened, what the super-cool action that the character did to end the fight was or was even supposed to be?!

E.g. 2. Most of the big boneyard action scene made no sense, from what the rules were supposed be (explosive fumes that cigarettes can ignite that some characters know about but don't tell others; poison gas that's potent one moment and can be ignored for the rest), to what they were supposed to be carrying (the unimpressive lizards creatures attack and suddenly one of the soldiers has some sort of high-calibre weapon with a tripod mount; later Brie Larson's character will do serious damage to a big lizard with a *flare gun* when even the smaller lizards are pretty impervious to high-calibre fire) to the extreme joke, taking photographs nonchalance of the characters in that setting right before the action starts, after all they've been told repeatedly by John C. Reilly's character that they *do not* want to be in this sector of the Island.

And so on and so forth. Most of the dialogue is tortuous. I felt especially sorry for Sam L. Jackson and John Goodman. Both those guys have been in lots of good movies with good dialogue and they *must* have known that that this stuff was not good. How tempted I wonder was Sam L. to run the script by QT for a weekend to do at least a dialogue polish; QT after all had a Kong-speech in Inglorious Basterds, he'd probably have been interested!

I'm happy for John Goodman that he's at a more healthy weight these days, but sad-to-say it seems to be costing him some of his on-screen mojo. His character felt weight-less, and his death came and went...

Brie Larson hardly made any impact at all, hardly had any character to play. They seemed to want to pump up her breasts to solve any problems in this direction, which was silly and pointless.

Lots of cribbing of shots and songs from Apocalypse Now and Platoon... but none of the supposedly meaningful lines in the script about war seemed to add up to anything. Was there an actual idea behind any of that?

I hated hated hated all of the heavily manipulated color throughout the film. And this Kong seemed to me a big step-backwards from Jackson's Kong, which at least did move and feel like a very large gorilla. This Kong walked like a guy in an ape-costume.

Super-duper corporate movie-monster-universe-promising post-credits scene. How depressing. More of this dreck to come. Lots more.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

Nothing much else in 2005 got me in that "mainstream man" way[/quote]
Haneke's Caché (2005) is a must-see! So good.

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I'm not a good one on promises, but I will try. I will try! (So often , movies recommended to me prove to be great and why did I wait, anyway?)

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[quote]King Kong the original is my favorite of 1933

KK is probably most people's choice from 1933

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I think that's true and..."that's exactly my point." If one lacks a true grounding in the movies of the 30s(that would be me), the movies that "stick out" are the Big Ones that survived the decades as Big Events. I'd say that's two from the 30's : King Kong and The Wizard of Oz. At least in the fantasy/genre category. GWTW is the behemoth of the decade(and doomed to continuing pariah-hood given its racial themes.) And I've certainly read about how great 1939 was (but heh, so was 1973!)

Anyway, I lack grounding in the 30's in general and 1933 in particular, and thus what comes next from you, swanstep, is educational:

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(I think I've officially chosen 42nd St before but on a lot of days that's probably going to strike me as nuts!).

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I think I saw that in the 70's at a revival house. Busby Berkeley? I liked it.

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Still what's most impressive about 1933 is its breadth of incredibly pleasurable films compared to previous years. Suddenly you've got Kong, you've got The Invisible Man, you've got probably the 3 best Busby Berkeley Musicals, you've got Stanwyck burning up the screen in Baby Face, you've got the best Marx brothers film Duck Soup, you've got Cukor doing a great, fluid Little Women (and Cukor's second for the year, Dinner At Eight, isn't bad either), you've got Rogers and Astaire together for the first time in Flying Down To Rio, you've got peak, free-love Lubitsch with Design For Living, you've got the first draft of Kane-style complex narratives in The Power and The Glory, and so on. The whole year in other words feels pregnant with the future of the industry, and at least 20 films can still be watched with great pleasure.

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You've convinced me! I've seen Duck Soup and The Invisible Man.
I'll see more. I've got some years. (I am starting to get a more clear sense of my retirement years. At least the indoor part. I'll be walking a lot outdoors, too.)

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Why should 1933 feel like a watershed?
1933 is the first year when almost everything out of Hollywood is looking better, sounding better, just kind of gelling; the new medium's finally locked and people are back to making the best movies they can, telling the most entertaining stories, and so on. America and the World might be in the middle of a Depression, but Hollywood is now starting to boom.

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I like that analysis. From later on in film history, we see other "transitional periods" -- from 30s/40's fancies and WWII propaganda to the wised-up Postwar noir period; the slow collapse of the Hays Code in the 1958-1963 period followed by its elimination come 1968(with a wobbly 1969-1973 to figure out what to do with the "R" rating other than cussing and rape scenes); the "reversion to youth and a TV mentality" that came with Spielberg/Lucas and TV moguls taking over the studios...the rise of indiefilm. Etc.

So who's to say that 1933 had EXACTLY the same kind of era-shift growing pains going on. Silent into sound was a BIG deal..as Singin' in the Rain taught us.

As for the Depression, everything I've read and everything my parents told me convinces me that the still relatively cheap price of a movie (actually a DAY at the movies; double features, newsreels and cartoons) was the quickest way to FORGET the Depression, and a lot of folks partook. Remember Woody's great "Purple Rose of Cairo"?

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I'm weak on "pre-code films" but I realize it was in the 30's that a certain frankness and sexuality was removed in favor of church-controlled censorship and repression. King Kong itself seems to have some of that pre-code frankness; I've seen the "cut scenes"(aren't they now PERMANENTLY back in the movie?) which include Kong munching on a native and tearing off Fay Wray's clothes. I would expect that Kong's killings were almost "Psycho-like" in their shock, with the sexual stuff being well...kinda sexual. (Plus: In NYC, Kong grabs the wrong girl and lets her fall to her death as an afterthought.)

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Thank you for the insights into 1933, swanstep. 1963, I remember. Much earlier than that, not so much.

[–] swanstep (2715) 8 years ago

A little more on 1933. I recently got around to seeing the box-office champ for 1932, von Sternberg's Shanghai Express w/ Marlene Dietrich as the most famous prostitute in China, 'Shanghai Lilly' (Her immortal line: "It took more than one man to change my name to 'Shanghai Lilly'.")

SE is nicely shot and Dietrich is a new sort of beauty and presence at the time (her acting's not much but you can't take your eyes off her), but the male lead is unbelievably boring and there's neither much of a plot nor any truly sparkling dialogue. (Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) has a similarly stiff and unconvincing male lead who makes you long for Cary Grant who'll get these roles in a few years time, but the dialogue *does* sparkle.) There's also no suspense at any point, no real action, no exciting score of any kind. And in its visual worship of Dietrich in repose, often smoking in profile, SE still *feels* as though it *wishes* it were a silent film. What were people getting out of SE at the time? Maybe people were buying tickets mainly for the newreels and the cartoons and because there weren't many other affordable entertainment options. SE becoming the biggest hit of its year feel like a bizarre fluke, perhaps a little akin to The King's Speech making $500 million worldwide a few years ago. What?

Obviously one's view of SE *now* can't help but be prejudiced a bit by the great largely train-based comedies and thrillers and thriller-comedies that come along shortly after from Hawks and Hitchcock and Preston Sturges.

But trying our best to set all that *extended* hindsight aside, consider just the change to 1933. The box-office champ is now King Kong, a movie that can't stop giving pleasure, that's witty, spectacular, action-packed, suspenseful, a little kinky. There's really every reason in the world for someone to buy a ticket to that movie, and KK richly deserved all the money it made.

And while Dietrich probably is twice the beauty and star that Miriam Hopkins ever was, in Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933) Hopkins is in a partially train-based movie with sparkling dialogue, has incredible chemistry with Gary Cooper and Fredric March, and you can't conceive of DFL as anything other than a sound film. DFL is sophisticated/Wilder-ish rather than screwball (which will show up fully-blown the next year with It Happened One Night and Twentieth Century) but no matter, it's on fire. Hopkins is a smart sweetheart, and when you watch DFL and her in it, you feel fully that a template for a large part of the future for entertainment (both movies and TV really) has arrived.

Film in 1932 feels effete and uncertain for the most part. Film in 1933 rocks across the board, and is primed to be *the* dominant popular art-form for the next 20+ years.