1. World Trade Center. After 9/11, it’s not there anymore. So far as I understand, if they are going to build anything to replace it, it won’t be a twin tower replica (though if it were up to me - !!! – I’d say rebuild them just as they were as a big FUCK YOU to Al Qaeda). So this movie is a good way to see it, albeit at night with a big ape, a beautiful woman, a screaming guy in a beard, the National Guard, and a few Vulcan-equipped attack helicopters. Just the way I remember it.
2. Dinosaurs. Where are the dinosaurs? Just Kong, a big snake, and that’s it. No fake brontosaurus, no fake stegosaurus, no fake T Rexes, no fake pterodactyl. No one gets gruesomely eaten by a monster, just chucked off the log into a ravine – not even any giant spiders. That was kind of a letdown.
3. Jessica Lange vs. Fay Wray vs. Naomi Watts. Fay Wray was extremely average. ZZZZ. Naomi Watts is certainly much prettier, but of the three, Jessica Lange was by far the hottest and most interesting. Her backtalk to Kong was hilarious. Even Kong couldn’t resist playing with her boobs. Her acting and "presence" alone give this movie a big plus vs. both the others, each of whom serve as barely competent "woman" for the role, as if they were temps filling a part-time secretary position. Lange adds something special, beyond simply being pretty and screaming.
4. PETROX!! Charles Grodin’s Fred Wilson character was also a laugh. That may have been his best performance in any movie - especially since he usually plays dull, quiet unassertive nonentities. The stiffs in 1933 were cast to type and incredibly dull. Jack Black was fairly good as Denham in the Peter Jackson remake, and Adrien Brody is spectacularly miscast as a heroic adventurer - of all of these, the overambitious Petrox dude steals the show.
5. Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges). Although he came off as a snotty know-it-all sometimes, I still liked his character. He was certainly more interesting than Bruce Cabot (1933) or Adrien Brody (2005). Coupled with Lange and Grodin, it's as if the absence of dinosaurs was offset by much more livelier and interesting human characters.
6. Another Odo Sighting. Rene Auberjonois, aka "Clayton" on "Benson", Father Mulcahy in the film version of "M*A*S*H", and many other places, was Petrox’s witty geologist. Just who the Federation needed on Deep Space Nine.
7. Media Circus. In each movie, Kong was perfectly quiet and cooperative in his "escape-proof steel cage" until the bastards of the press started causing trouble. If they had left well enough alone there probably wouldn’t have been any unpleasantness later on. Kong could have continued his country-wide tour, earned lots of bananas, and lived happily ever after. Maybe he could have written a book (ghost-written, I imagine). Now we’ll never know. I blame the media.
8. VHS. In 1980 we bought our first VCR. After deciding the "Beta vs. VHS????" question in favor of VHS (didn’t everybody?), we went up to the PX at S.H.A.P.E., Belgium, and bought an RCA VCR, something HUGE – twice the size of a current machine and 50 lb.; we ended up calling it the "Dinosaur" years later. And the first tape we bought: KING KONG (1976). We still have it – both the tape and the VCR. Come visit our museum of obsolete equipment, also featuring an Apple //e (with its massive 128k memory capacity).
9. Dino de Laurentiis. Not only did he produce this version, he also produced "Serpico" (mentioned earlier in my blog) and "Conan the Barbarian" (also mentioned earlier in my blog), as well as "Flash Gordon" (1980), "Dune" (the 1984 version with Kyle McLachlan as Paul Atreides and Sting as Feyd-Rautha), and "Maximum Overdrive" (1986), the Steven King film with an AC/DC soundtrack.
So there’s more than meets the eye even with an otherwise mundane remake.
No comments:
Post a Comment