Am I the first to see this, or the only one who cares to post?
First, I would pay to see Kong and Glick in a jelly-donut-eating contest. I did like Clifford, despite it being terrible, so I ought to give Jiminy a shot, too.
Second, I did enjoy Jackson’s film. The first hour is all glorious romanticized Hollywood-pictures-of-the-’30s crap–Black is manic, Watts is luminescent, the filmmakers glory in deep-focus recreations of NYC, there’s vaudeville depicted, there’s a vaudevillian tone. It’s fun. Then there are some amazing, exciting, even surprising action sequences on the island. And the ending does recapture some of the elegaic melancholy of the original. The graphics are what they’re cracked up to be; the film is certainly too long, maybe by a good hour; I wish it was loopier (more like early Jackson than LOTR-ambitious-Jackson). But it’s certainly fun in many ways at many times, and never dragged.
But.
The only thing I wanted to bring up was the tremendous discomfort I felt when Jackson introduces the island’s human inhabitants. My friend and I afterward said we both tried very, very hard to read this imagery as ironized, a recreation of ’30s-era “natives” with some reflexive deconstruction or blah-blah… but we couldn’t. It struck us both as almost nostalgically racist. The “natives” return when Kong hits Broadway–in a staged extravaganza of dancing and ooga-booga chanting in front of the chained ape, and there the “blatant” racism seems merely to reiterate, not quote or challenge, the earlier vision.
Jackson et al. seem to know that their love of and desire to recreate/reinhabit the original will restage racist imagery, but their efforts to sidetrack it are weak at best–a heroic black first mate who talks to his young (white) protege about Heart of Darkness is soon dispatched by beasties, as are the other more-cartoonishly-non-white sailors.
David Edelstein and other critics have addressed the racist imagery, but they seem uncertain of how much to dive in–and then get knocked around in readers’ responses. But I didn’t see it as a minor issue–not a Jar-Jar Binks distraction–but a problem so severe that it undercut my pleasure in the film.
the “natives” issue is there in the lord of the rings films as well. there jackson successfully updates the books’ gender limitations but goes out of his way to make the orcs into aboriginals (the books, as i recall, don’t really describe the orcs very much). ditto with his treatment there of the eastern and southern men who fight alongside sauron.
hope to see this one soon.
Just returned from this one. I hope to comment in more depth a little later, but I’ll add a few thoughts for now.
I misread Mike’s post and went into the film thinking that Carl Denham was going to bring some of the natives back from Skull Island and force them to do a “native” dance for the “Eighth Wonder of the World” show. I was very puzzled. I realize now that the natives literally disappear from the film after Jack and the crew come to rescue Ann. Where are they when they capture Kong? Not that I wanted to see them again. Like Mike, I found the whole thing painful to watch. In some ways, Jackson’s attempt at “realist primitivism” is worse than what Mike rightly calls the “ooga-booga” stuff of the stage show. The camera lingers unnecessarily on “spookified” natives whose facial expressions best those of Willie Best. I agree with Mike that one’s pleasure is undercut. I think my pleasure in viewing Preston Sturges’s films is undercut in the same way (SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS and (especially) THE PALM BEACH STORY. Capra never pulled that shit).
I think it would have been perfectly fine to do KING KONG without natives. Who would miss them? And I doubt Jackson would suffer much from fans who would cry “treason.” There’s a good 20-30 minutes gone from the film there.
And drop the brontosaurus stampede. It was boring and visually uninteresting.
Andy Serkis was wonderful. I can’t wait for the DVD to see how they managed to capture his performances (I think they showed us how he did Smeagol in the bonus materials of the Lord of the Rings DVDs, but I don’t recall). Serkis gives us an ape who is more in touch with his emotions than Brody’s Jack, and it made for some deeply moving scenes (one of my favorites is when Kong throws a tantrum when Ann stops performing for him).
Last thought: the three stories (Denham’s, Hayes’s and Captain Englehorn’s) don’t blend very well together. And Bruce Baxter’s sudden burst of (offscreen) heroism is dopey.
Ahh, I’m pooped. More later. I need to check Pigskin Pick’em results.
Did King Kong need to be remade? This version is so faithful to the original, that it is hard to see it as more than an opportunity to deploy an awful lot of CGI. If it is going to be remade every thirty years or so, it would be nice if each adaptation told us something about the age in which it is made. Given the (horrendous) scenes with the natives, I hope that is not true.
On the basis of Kong and LOTR, does Peter Jackson see any role for women in movies other than gently shimmering while men go off to do battle on their behalf?
My son kept wondering why nobody was excited to see dinosaurs on the island. He asked if people in the 1930s didn’t know that dinosaurs were extinct.
Your son is hilarious; I half-thought the same thing myself, since the dinosaurs are what I loved in the original. But no one really expresses any wonder at all, once they get through that gate/wall. Then again, Spielberg may have used up all the seeing-dinosaurs-and-wonderingly-staring shots. There just aren’t any left.
That’s my quantity theory of filmmaking. There are only so many of certain kinds of things to go around. Exceptions: holiday family scenes of vague discomfort turned to whimsical appreciation. There is an infinite supply of those.
Chris, did your son enjoy this? Had he seen the original? I wondered as I watched if I’d have been more wondrous as a kid; I recall–perhaps nostalgically, rather than realistically–falling in love with Kong 1, as a boy of maybe 7. It began my infatuation with monsters and monster movies. (My brief fling with that kid from Mask ended the infatuation. Ah, young love–so bittersweet. So lovely, until the bighead buys it, and your hopes are dashed.)
I think Herzog should have remade this one, too.
Jay has seen all three Kongs and his preference ordering as of 11.30 last night was I, III, II. He is a much bigger fan of monster movies than I am. [The kid is fucked up: he doesn’t get the frisson of joy that should go along with Chow Yun-Fat, Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson firing a sleek automatic pistol while rolling and diving — or am I the one who is fucked up?]
Of course, as a 12 year-old, he is also a cynic. He hated the long scenes of Naomi Watts looking longingly into Kong’s eyes, and loved the bug swamp, especially the human-eating leeches. And to his credit, he kept identifying moments when it would have been appropriate to kill off little Jimmy, the cabin boy. Christ, he was irritating (“why did Marlow keep going up the river, Mr. Hayes?”).
Naomi Watts looking longingly into Kong’s eyes??!! What are the logistics of that relationship? Has anyone considered this film an allegory of miscegenation, in which, of course, the transgressive black male needs to be shot down? The nerve of that black boy and even worse, the shameful harlot returns his affections! Call the Klan! Those gorillas should have stayed in the South (the jungle) where they belong and not presume to come into the big cities, which they were doing in masses in the 1930s.
as for me, I’m waiting for the big screen adaptation of Kafka’s Report to an Academy, especially for the realization of the final scene where the crippled academicized ape takes refuge with his little half-wild chimpanzee. now that’s romance!
Rotpeter–a Steven Sondheim musical.
hasn’t that been the standard critique of king kong from the beginning?
yeah, like the racist island thing is a big revelation!
Stop the Presses! Representation of “Natives” a caricature!!
Read all about it!
no, the racist island thing is not a big revelation, but that jackson doesn’t apparently ironize it or problematize it in any way is a big disappointment.
though as i think about it, i don’t think i actually have encountered reviews of the films that point to the miscegenation narrative in the social terms you cast it in: actual movement of black people to northern cities in the 30s. most of what i’ve seen is just the generic “white women longing for dangerous black men” thing. then again, i haven’t actually read any serious criticism of the films–just the reviews.
Pauline Kael–I’m told, via David Edelstein–talked about Kong as guerilla/gorilla, as incarnation of Black male sexuality, in her review of the ’70s version. But otherwise, not much around that I’ve seen. But Chris would know, since he’s sleeping with her corpse.
I think the point is adaptation: what is reimagined, in this version, rather than just repeated with new cgi bells and motion-capture? Chris nails it: not much. I did enjoy the film, but I’m frustrated that it doesn’t do much interesting. (I could say the same about Bad News Bears, which I mildly disparaged elsewhere–there seems to be a tedious fidelity to the original, so… why bother?)
I brought up the racist natives mostly because it was surprising to see such thoughtless repetitions. And because I liked the film even less as a result.
my remarks about black migration to Northern cities was a rather lame attempt at sociological-ideological analysis. I think both the points about the portrayal of the natives and the allegory of miscegenation are accurate—and not very new–because King Kong both old and new is a rather simple text. perhaps it might be more interesting to view it as having something to say about human-animal relations? though I don’t really know what that might be–but it seems odd for a mainstream film no matter how fantastic to suggest sexual relations between a giant primate and a human female. I bring this up because I’m thinking of Kafka’s animal stories, several of which involve apes–and not merely as stand-ins for humanity but as an Other who is both recognizable and completely inaccessible. I don’t know much more to say about it, as I haven’t seen the film yet…but like every other American sucker I’ll be putting down my 8.50 soon. maybe I can escape from the MLA long enough for a matinee. Then again the MLA provides all the bestial spectacle one might need….
Has anyone seen the film Max, Mon Amour? It’s by Nagisa Oshima, who also did Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses. I have not seen it, though I know it deals with a love affair between a woman and a chimpanzee.
“Has anyone considered this film an allegory of miscegenation, in which, of course, the transgressive black male needs to be shot down?”
Kong isn’t the black male. He’s the male. It doesn’t matter if he’s black/white/gray/yellow. Who cares? He’s that portion of our dangerous, brutal sexuality which we’ve locked away from ourselves as civilization has rolled on. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’ve read that Kong is even less sexualized then he was in the original. So what does that say about the last 75 years and our evolving view of sexuality? It seems to me that with each successive death of Kong, that portion of our sexuality dies a little more.
Kong’s affiliation to the jungle, where the scenes feature black “natives,” as well as the long tradition of denigrating black men by animal names like “gorillas” and “apes” pretty much make Kong a black male, not an a-racial male figure. Not to mention the long tradition of forbidding relations between black men and white women as particularly offensive to “racial purity.” A white man with a black woman is just plain fun, while a black man with a white woman is cause for lynching. So I can’t agree with you, Joshua, that the film is only about sexuality–it seems to me to be concerned with a particular sexual/racial relationship.
plus my dangerous, brutal sexuality has never been locked away, and is fully alive.
just got back from it. it didn’t feel very long to me. until they got on top of the empire state building and my fear of heights kicked in and i looked at my watch to discover that there was still 50 minutes left. what the hell, i said to myself, and began to wonder, as my palms got sweaty, if i should leave or walk to the back of the auditorium. then it turned out that my watch had stopped, and the film ended not too long after.
i learned one very important lesson from this film: if you’re in a fetid swamp and gigantic toothy maggots emerge to eat your friend’s corpse, leave it to them and run; don’t beat at them with a twig.
enjoyable, on the whole; though i also wish he’d left the ooga-booga native stuff out. the sequence at the end when the natives are recreated in the broadway spectacle was supposed to be ironic, i think, but the irony for me lay in the fact that it wasn’t very different from how jackson dressed up the “real natives” in his film. the lit. professor in me also wondered if there was a stand-alone edition of “heart of darkness” in the early 30s (it was originally published in serial form in a magazine alongside adventure narratives)–i don’t know if there was, but i told myself that since there certainly weren’t gigantic gorillas in the 30s i didn’t need to overthink the historical accuracy part.
Geez – Am I the only one who loved the natives? Wished they were in the film more? Wish Jackson would just keep going with this? These savages weren’t as comical as the ones Jackson had at the beginning of Dead-Alive (Did anyone else catch the reference to the Sumatran Rat Monkey in the hold of the ship?), but then again nothing Jackson does is as funny as it used to be.
You people need to lighten up. I bet Morgan Freeman LOVED the savages. Cosby too.
Why not talk about mistreating animals if you’re going to get all PC? Or maybe be upset that the woman considered showing her breasts in a burlesque show for money? Or that the policies of Hoover led to the depression that and men living in shanties? Why didn’t Jackson address these issues with more of the patronizing hind-sight you demand of him?
Yeah, I saw the Sumatran rat-monkey. Had me hoping for some gratuitous violence, but it wasn’t to be. Nor the sense of humor, alas.
I wish the natives had been portrayed with even a semblance of wit. I would engage with your comment about “patronizing hind-sight” but it is not only incoherent, it’s merely there to get a rise–so nyah nyah. I do, however, wish that Naomi Watts and Kong had engaged in the kind of 13-year-old-straight-boy’s-fantasy-of-breast-play I loved so much in Mulholland Drive‘s “lesbian” scene.
Yeah, its a bit earnest in here. That being said, I bemoaned the one-man minstrelsy show in Willie Wonka (as played by Deep Roy) and nobody could care less. I’m wondering if the same responses would be generated if Jackson had chosen to depict the natives as extremely white (imagine albino natives dancing the ooga-booga). Of course, then we would have another round of big black ape frightening the white man reactions. The natives were scary and it was a disconcerting sequence (on a variety of levels), but it didn’t pull me out of the movie. If anything, I felt sorry for them and their fear of Kong (and I imagine a lot of south sea islanders made a decent wage for a week or three). I too would have liked to have seen more of them (where the hell did they go). As we drove home from the film, which I enjoyed very much, we tried to figure out the nationality/ethnicity of the natives. My brother remarked that they looked like white people dipped in a very dark vat of make-up (he remembers some of them having blue eyes but I did not). Maori? Australian aboriginals? CGI?
Now, it is hard to critique a film whose most psychologically complex and sympathetic character is the big gorilla himself (the rest are mostly one-dimensional, albeit fun, caricatures). Serkis is damn impressive in his dual roles. The scene on the frozen pond was a sheer delight (how does one read the whiteness there) as is the sunset scene on Skull Island and the Anne performs vaudeville routine for Kong. Those are just really lovely.
I enjoyed it, never got bored, never felt insulted but, in the end, the trailer was much better.
It was interesting that the noble black man, taking care of a boy who looked a tad older than Tom Hanks’ son, AND the Chinese man were both killed off within moments of each other.
Don’t forget – the first four monkeys shown in the movie all have WHITE hair.
You guys should chew on that for a while.
Jeff’s calling us earnest? Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. I oughta twist my lucky irony ring for some perfect sarcastic rejoinder about Sister’s Wee Wet Pants or Doggone Arty Inn or whatever it is he enjoys, but instead I’ll be nice. He did get me a copy of Together, after all. Happy Kwanzaa, Jeff!
Meanwhile, Mauer, doing his best to piss us off… la plus ca change. Which is French for “Gotta do better than that, my sickly consumptive compadre!”
For the record, crude cartoonish stereotypes blatantly ignoring historical injustice and/or uncritically repeating vicious depictions from the past that I do find funny:
–Foster Brooks, Mayberry’s Otis, et al.
–Dave Chappelle’s crack addict
–South Park’s Timmy
–anything with the Irish. Fuckers.
Jeff–aren’t you always earnestly bemoaning the lack of female input here (despite several women solicited for their participation and withholding it for some reason!) now we’re “earnest” for discussing race in King Kong. oy!!
Mark–we demand “patronizing hind-sight??” so any portrayal of race should be taken positively (or for granted) for fear of going “all PC?” have you been listening to talk radio or something? Too much PC is a problem–as I see from my job search and the breathy reverence with which everyone uses the term “diversity,” meaning of course diversity in race, not in outlooks on the university or class or mostly any other matter–but discussing the portrayal of race in a movie which seems to beg for it is just reasonable analysis, no? on a lighter note, I love that movie Dead Alive, too.
mark is barely functionally literate so we’ll forgive him. but jeff should know better. the problem is not that the natives are black/dark or that they’re afraid of kong, but the ways in which they are portrayed. surely there’s some options between this and noble savages who welcome the white folk and critique anthropology with them.
and deep roy’s performance in charlie and the chocolate factory was an example of minstrelsy? how so?
big deal – I used the wrong words.
You know what I mean.
For some reason you want Peter Jackson to correct societal ills, prejudices and ignorance NOW in a movie being made about the 1930s. Not just a movie – not even a new movie – but an homage to the original 1930s film, which also featured savages on the island, and dancing in the stage show. As Jeff points out with the possibility of albino natives, there was nothing Jackson could have done that would satisfy those who see racism around every corner. John says no one would have missed the natives if they were left out entirely.
I would have. The first scenes with them were toally creepy and one of the only thrills in the whole film not to rely on SFX. Some other people I talked to would have missed them (including people who wrote published articles & reviews about the movie, not just my racist friends).
Disney would most likely leave out the Red Indian song in a musical animated remake of Peter Pan, which is a shame, b/c it’s a good song. I just don’t see how white-washing the past helps anyone now or leads to tolerance and understanding. That’s it from me on this. In the words of the Red Indian (who I think was Reynolds) I will speak no more forever.
You know, I don’t think there’s a one of us–except maybe Arnab, who’s iffy (and, psst, Indian!, but more pinko than Red)–who is into the p.c. whitewashing you ascribe to our discomfort with neoKong’s retro-natives. This isn’t a movie about the ’30s–lord knows I’d love one. It’s a movie as you say a line later about a ’30s movie. But it’s not even interested in movie history, per se–it’s interested in the original spectacle, the romances of the original. What I tried to suggest in my earliest post was: yeah, I too idealize the original, for a number of glorious reasons. But I look to that idealization with (I hope) more interesting adult eyes; when I rewatch the original, I don’t grimace at the portrait of the natives, nor do I merely grin. My love for the film–like my love for _Huck Finn_–is attentive to its glories despite, even because of the way it’s so firmly rooted in its times and places.
But in remaking Kong, Jackson didn’t do stop-motion animation. I actually was initially pissed about this. What is wondrous about that first film is the blatant artifice of its beautiful figurines. Did we really need, I wondered, a more ‘real’ Kong? It’d be like revising Charlie Brown to have a more lifesize head–what’d be the fucking point?
Yet I bought–and loved–the updating of style and effects to new gee-whiz standards, because the film both nostalgically returned to *and* reimaigined the creation of “wonder” through these creatures, that landscape. He did it all new, which brings us back to:
the natives. I didn’t find ’em scary, or wondrous. Frankly, they got LESS screen time than in the original, and were far less indicative of the original’s intriguing sense of a community circling in fear and awe around this creature. They were there to punch our buttons, just like the new gee-whiz 3-T-Rex-fx fight. So why the fuck “homage” the racism, but reconstruct the monsters? Makes no sense, and your argument why doesn’t fill in the gaps for me.
I will scream yet have no mouth. Wait. I’ll just cut and run from this, too. I did appreciate the fighting back–and your (and Jeff’s) point(s) of view. I just flat didn’t agree with ’em.
er, mark–according to your argument a remake of a film must somehow maintain even the most questionable aspects of a film–as though it’s necessary and not a decision to re-make certain films and as though those films have less an obligation to the time during which they are actually made than to the time they fictionally represent. If I remade the Marx Brothers A Day at the Races (is that the one) it would somehow be necessary to include the long sequence of singing darkies, wallowing happily in their servitude and poverty? And, as Mike points out, King Kong isn’t about the 30s, it’s a totally fictional imagining from a contemporary viewpoint, mixed with the viewpoint of the original 30s film, of the 1930s. And I don’t expect anyone to have a message meant to “correct” societal ills (which would be an absurd idea of what art’s relationship to society is), I just hope they don’t consciously or unconsciously adopt an ideology that perpetuates those problems. of course, as with my comments on munich, I could be talking out of my ass–as I’ve yet to see it. but maybe I’ll adopt a policy of talking only about movies I haven’t seen.
After seeing Kong this weekend, I’m tempted to say that it’s meaningless–that its racial politics, however retrograde, have little impact because they are so dated themselves, that the conventionality of the film negates any controversial element. I am also tempted to come closer to Mark’s position regarding the “natives”–that making them simultaneously both fearsome and clearly afraid of Kong takes the sting out of their portrayal somewhat (they are not to be trifled with obviously and they do not share anything with the racist imagery that accompanies Kong’s performance on Broadway.) Nevertheless, ultimately, I think the film is entertaining enough but uninteresting–a fairly bloated self-important genre piece. I mean, 3 hours?? The Magnificent Ambersons gets mangled, so too Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Major Dundee–but Peter Jackson gets to squander so much time and money on a remake whose special effects have already been pretty much shown up by the earlier Jurassic Park and Jackson’s own Lord of the Rings. The film is so painfully overproduced that it stomps over the question “why bother?”
But, despite its general inoffensiveness, it does have one unsettling aspect–the fetish for realism. the original had power because of the strangeness of the stop-motion animation and the alienness of Kong—this film strives to be detailed and to document his every facial expression. The result is to make him as “human” as possible. The effect is to sentimentalize Kong much more than in the original version. Is this kind of thing, and Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 12, what we should continue to expect from independent directors who make it big?
How does the conventionality of the film (or any film) negate its controversial element? Isn’t its “datedness” just costumery?
not so much its conventionality as the exhaustion this conventionality demonstrates–it’s just hard for me, though maybe not for others, particularly black others, to get very worked up about its representations in such a hermetic context, especially when those elements have some definite ambiguity to them–as Mark pointed out in the portrayal of the island people. The controversial element is also cancelled for me by the fact that Kong is the only human character and he is a racial/species other.
and where is the large gorilla genitalia? if you’re gonna give me some CGI realism, then don’t step away from the truth, peter
I love your blog, thnx for sharing your thoughts :) But boy I hate that Mauer moron. He gets no discount whatsoever.
I suddenly have the desire to buy discount office furniture…
And I don’t say this often enough, but I’m very fond of John Bruns. He makes Jake Busey seem tan, but good god his eyes–they suck me in like nothing other than Starship Troopers and absinthe. I’ll never forget our one night together. That little slice of heaven, no pun intended, will suffice in this long, hard, death-bound life.
I see that mauer’s confession brought this thread to a screeching halt. Oh discount office furniture, why is it that I always attract morons?