6/11/2006 11:53 PM
posted awhile ago
Revisiting King Kong
King Kong, if you'll remember, was nominated for and won Best Sound, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects. In keeping with what I hope will be the tradition of this group, let's discuss this, one of this year's winners. I just watched it all the way through. I saw part of it once before, but I missed the whole first hour and fell asleep somewhere in the second. So, I thought I should give the movie a chance when I'm more prepared to watch it.
Ok, King Kong...King Kong. This is what? The third iteration?
My immediate thought, knowing the Oscar winners, was that yeah, the sound and visual effects were pretty damn good. I suppose the vfx were better than in Narnia. Nice blend of actor and CGI, what with the ape and all.
But the movie itself? Longest.movie.ever. Ok, not the longest but one of the rare long movies when I actually notice the length. I couldn't even make it through this viewing without stopping and starting it later. Peter Jackson is a meticulous director. He is brilliant at the details and has a fine team of effects designers at his disposal. But everything was so protracted in this movie. There were so many endlessly extra scenes, and even the scenes that were familiar, like the famous climb to the top of the Empire State Building by Kong, were lengthened such that they took forever!
I think Pete and the rest of the folks did a good job in that they did the source material justice. This movie was better than the 80s version with Jeff Bridges too, with the painstaking focus on the interrrelationships between man, beauty, and the beast. But...
The original King Kong is #43 on the AFI 100 Greatest List. I remember the original being much shorter. The key questions for this movie are:
1) What did you think of this movie?
2) How does this movie compare to its predecessors, especially the original? Discuss...
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