Finding King Kong
Mrs. Blogger is sitting across the room from me watching Finding Neverland, the story of how J.M. Barrie wrote "Peter Pan". Barrie is played by Johnny Depp (as gentle as Jack Sparrow was wild). A hundred years ago he was a London playwrite, fairly successful but looking for something...different. Running into a group of kids at the park brought him into relationships that led to his greatest work. The movie is personal, touching, frequently sad, often funny, and well worth watching. I'd give it 4 popcorn boxes, if I had any popcorn.
King Kong, on the other hand, is extravagent and over-the-top. Hey, it's about a 40-foot monkey, right? The story is the same as it has been since the original, 70 years ago: people discover a southseas island with primitive people who worship - or fear - a statue of a giant ape. When they explore, they find the monkey maximus and hatch the plan to take him to New York, show him off, and make a fortune. All goes well until everything gets out of hand, people get stomped, and the air force has to be called out to get Kong off the Empire State Building.
This version is well done. There's some backstory, to help us understand and - in most cases - like the human characters. They're more than just charicatures. The blonde heroine is sweet and pretty, the movie producer is just hammy enough, and everyone else does a nice job of filling in the edges.
The star, of course, is Kong. He's great. He's massive. He's the Ultimate Ape. He's the King. The special effects that made him are pretty phenomenal. How they do that is beyond me (if it wasn't, I'd be doing it, too; you'd see my name on the screen and between films I'd be living in a villa in Tuscany, surrounded by vineyards and eating saltimbocca). He's huge, ferocious, heroic, and sympathetic. There's a great scene where he plays on a (thickly) frozen pond in Central Park. You cheer for him against the fighter planes, and when he takes the final fall it's a tear jerker.
And of course, there's the spooky, jungley island inhabited by primitives and prehistoric beasties.
It turns out the prehistoric beasties are the film's only real problem. The director lets his characters fall from danger into deeper danger, unbelievable crisis after unbelievable crisis. Now, I know what you're thinking - "He's complaining about unbelievability in a movie about a 40-foot ape in a prehistoric world??" - but, yeah, that's where I'm at. It's not that those things couldn't, in that world, happen; the problem is the way the stack up so conveniently (or, inconveniently) to turn this into an "action" picture. After brontosauri, murderous raptors, vampire bats, carnivorous lizards, centipedes, spiders, giant grasshoppers, and weird swamp worms, I was bored with the excitement.
The movie was good and about three hours long; it would have been better at 2:45. 3 popcorn boxes (if I had any popcorn).
These two movies remind me that all of God's creatures - from child-like playwrites living melancholy lives to giant monkeys - have a story. Being somewhere between the two, I guess there's one in me, as well.
King Kong, on the other hand, is extravagent and over-the-top. Hey, it's about a 40-foot monkey, right? The story is the same as it has been since the original, 70 years ago: people discover a southseas island with primitive people who worship - or fear - a statue of a giant ape. When they explore, they find the monkey maximus and hatch the plan to take him to New York, show him off, and make a fortune. All goes well until everything gets out of hand, people get stomped, and the air force has to be called out to get Kong off the Empire State Building.
This version is well done. There's some backstory, to help us understand and - in most cases - like the human characters. They're more than just charicatures. The blonde heroine is sweet and pretty, the movie producer is just hammy enough, and everyone else does a nice job of filling in the edges.
The star, of course, is Kong. He's great. He's massive. He's the Ultimate Ape. He's the King. The special effects that made him are pretty phenomenal. How they do that is beyond me (if it wasn't, I'd be doing it, too; you'd see my name on the screen and between films I'd be living in a villa in Tuscany, surrounded by vineyards and eating saltimbocca). He's huge, ferocious, heroic, and sympathetic. There's a great scene where he plays on a (thickly) frozen pond in Central Park. You cheer for him against the fighter planes, and when he takes the final fall it's a tear jerker.
And of course, there's the spooky, jungley island inhabited by primitives and prehistoric beasties.
It turns out the prehistoric beasties are the film's only real problem. The director lets his characters fall from danger into deeper danger, unbelievable crisis after unbelievable crisis. Now, I know what you're thinking - "He's complaining about unbelievability in a movie about a 40-foot ape in a prehistoric world??" - but, yeah, that's where I'm at. It's not that those things couldn't, in that world, happen; the problem is the way the stack up so conveniently (or, inconveniently) to turn this into an "action" picture. After brontosauri, murderous raptors, vampire bats, carnivorous lizards, centipedes, spiders, giant grasshoppers, and weird swamp worms, I was bored with the excitement.
The movie was good and about three hours long; it would have been better at 2:45. 3 popcorn boxes (if I had any popcorn).
These two movies remind me that all of God's creatures - from child-like playwrites living melancholy lives to giant monkeys - have a story. Being somewhere between the two, I guess there's one in me, as well.
posted by David Hardesty | 1:54 PM
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