fangirlish glee, teehee!
Thursday, 22 December 2005 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtNews from the front, people! King Kong not only rocks, it shambles, lopes, swings from trees, beats its big ape chest and bellows. It's a great, hairy, galloping, excessive B-movie, made with love, respect and a wonderful attention to detail; and if you can't get away with excess in a B-movie homage, when the hell can you? And, in sharp contrast to most of the reviewers, I didn't have a problem with the length; it has a script good enough and pacing well-judged enough that three hours doesn't feel like it.* Peter Jackson is god. Well, a god. A sort of hobbitish, much-thinner-than-he was, bespectacled geek god. Much indepth analysis, with spoilers, follows.
I am fast coming to the realisation that a large chunk of the famed Jackson directorial film-fu is, in fact, a supernaturally sensitive ability to cast well. This was one of the defining features of Lord of the Rings, and the Kong casting is faultless. I was agreeably surprised by the depth Jack Black can achieve as an actor, having only seen him be an asshole in High Fidelity; his character in Kong is interestingly, desperately, hopelessly flawed and self-destructive, and you can't help liking him even while you loathe his guts. Naomi Watts has that perfect vintage movie-star glow, and Adrien Brody is growing heavily on me in the quiet, sensitive, angsty stakes. There is also a truly wonderful minor role played by Andy Serkiss, as the horrible ship's cook, whose grotty dog-end cigarette remains firmly fixed in his mouth even during a brontosaurus stampede. He's one of those actors who vanishes into his role, and not just when he's being animated.
This being a Jackson film, it has the usual quotient of amazing visual set-pieces; in fact, visually, it stuns. The opening set-piece is a Depression-era New York montage, and caused me to wriggle in my seat in sheer retro happiness; it also does very, very interesting things to the rest of the film on a thematic level, to seat it in that terrible desperation. Skull Island is more of a monsterfest, although as an environment it's both beautiful and creepy; the savage islanders were quite terrifying, not just because of the body piercings and brutality, but because of the vertiginous, sliding, nightmarish, fragmented way in which the encounter is filmed. The jungle adventures have an amusingly ironic take on pushing the envelope, so that encounters are almost immediately upstaged by another one with something bigger, nastier or more numerous. Some of it, frankly, was gratuitous, although even the horrible crawling bug-scene was leavened with humour, and there's a nasty satisfaction in seeing the ship's cook, purveyor of noisome grey glop to the unfortunate masses, vanish into a seething soup of mud and giant leeches. Heh. Besides, this is a B-movie. There's no such thing as gratuitous monsters in a B-movie.
Above all, however, this movie grabbed me not only because it's an extraordinary treatment of an extraordinary myth, but because it's framed, sensitively and lovingly, as a tragedy. The myth part is easy; King Kong is one of the great, enduring myths of the twentieth century, distilling into a couple of symbols a metric buttload of Western fantasies, angsts and fears about, basically, sex. Kong himself is the atavistic icon of masculinity, in the most stereotypical and primitive sense: all strength, physicality, territorial possessiveness, even size. The myth's power is in its ability to insist that even this grossly extreme view of masculine power is also vulnerable, endearing and capable of a slightly goofy emotional fidelity which is ultimately his destruction. Even with this he forms a sharp and very cruel contrast to his equally reductionist counterpart, the playwright Jack Driscoll, Anne Darrow's human lover, who is all intellect, sensitivity and civilisation. He's doomed: even with the death of the big ape, he will never satisfy Anne Darrow, because he can't save her from multiple giant flesh-eating dinosaurs; in every sense, he simply isn't big enough. (The Freudian subtext is perfectly plain). She, of course, is the extreme symbolic exemplar of passive womanhood, defined solely in terms of her beauty, fragile blondeness, and her ability to enthrall the male without doing anything so unfeminine as act; she is clearly there to respond to all this testosterone with fluttered admiration, heaving bosom fetchingly displayed. All of this should be tickling my subliminal feminist rage, but curiously it doesn't, I think because the myth is so aware of its own excesses, and equally so determined to demonstrate the inescapable fact that these reductionist symbols are doomed to tragedy. Tarzan and Jane, while embodying similar contrasts, are somehow a lot more offensive.
The myth is one framed in gender terms, but in fact for me the film's main tragic effect is in its demonstration of the horror inherent, not in male/female relations, but in human/animal ones. The tropes of the civilised versus the barbaric are very interesting, summed up neatly in Anne Darrow's pratfalls to amuse Kong: the upright, civilised human descending into the animal antics of the body. The tribespeople who sacrifice Anne to the monster are a fascinating exercise in unredeemed brutality, a depiction of the absolute antithesis of civilisation in terms that are cheerfully and wantonly politically incorrect. What becomes interesting is the extent to which the obsessed director and the scary animal-collecting ship's captain become, in the end, worse than the savages: they are self-absorbed money-grubbers, carelessly betraying everything Kong stands for because they are simply incapable of appreciating it. The scene with a captive Kong displayed to a glittering New York crowd in the midst of a vulgar, trashy theatre display, is brutally cruel.
Of all the characters in the film, Kong himself, ultimately, is the most human, not only because of the visual effects which construct him, but because in the end he is the only character capable of unflawed moral operation. He is beautifully created and animated, his enormous face and body amazingly, endearingly expressive. (Naomi Watts has commented in an interview that acting with Andy Serkiss was easy because, despite the weird body-suit, he clearly was Kong in every movement - I can well believe it). The scene which had me the most weepy wasn't, in fact, Kong's death (although it's severely tear-jerking, don't get me wrong), but the beautiful, timeless, idyllic moment where, Anne Darrow in tow, Kong discovers the ice on a lake in Central Park, and for a few moments plays with sliding on it, with a sort of amiable, elephantine grace. The brutal interruption of this moment anticipates his end, the creature so horribly reft from his own environment, hopelessly challenging the guns and aircraft of civilisation from atop the Empire State Building. If there is a more effective symbol for humanity's self-absorbed, destructive unconcern for the dignity and identity of any creature other than themselves, I'd like to know what it is. Oh, yeah, I wept buckets, but I suspect a lot of it was self-loathing.
See this movie, people. As a B-movie it's a blast, but there's a lot more going on here.
* except for the tight bladder, which is fast becoming the main problem I have with really long movies. Goblet of Fire's epic Voldemort confrontation somehow fails to grip when you really need to go to the loo.
I am fast coming to the realisation that a large chunk of the famed Jackson directorial film-fu is, in fact, a supernaturally sensitive ability to cast well. This was one of the defining features of Lord of the Rings, and the Kong casting is faultless. I was agreeably surprised by the depth Jack Black can achieve as an actor, having only seen him be an asshole in High Fidelity; his character in Kong is interestingly, desperately, hopelessly flawed and self-destructive, and you can't help liking him even while you loathe his guts. Naomi Watts has that perfect vintage movie-star glow, and Adrien Brody is growing heavily on me in the quiet, sensitive, angsty stakes. There is also a truly wonderful minor role played by Andy Serkiss, as the horrible ship's cook, whose grotty dog-end cigarette remains firmly fixed in his mouth even during a brontosaurus stampede. He's one of those actors who vanishes into his role, and not just when he's being animated.
This being a Jackson film, it has the usual quotient of amazing visual set-pieces; in fact, visually, it stuns. The opening set-piece is a Depression-era New York montage, and caused me to wriggle in my seat in sheer retro happiness; it also does very, very interesting things to the rest of the film on a thematic level, to seat it in that terrible desperation. Skull Island is more of a monsterfest, although as an environment it's both beautiful and creepy; the savage islanders were quite terrifying, not just because of the body piercings and brutality, but because of the vertiginous, sliding, nightmarish, fragmented way in which the encounter is filmed. The jungle adventures have an amusingly ironic take on pushing the envelope, so that encounters are almost immediately upstaged by another one with something bigger, nastier or more numerous. Some of it, frankly, was gratuitous, although even the horrible crawling bug-scene was leavened with humour, and there's a nasty satisfaction in seeing the ship's cook, purveyor of noisome grey glop to the unfortunate masses, vanish into a seething soup of mud and giant leeches. Heh. Besides, this is a B-movie. There's no such thing as gratuitous monsters in a B-movie.
Above all, however, this movie grabbed me not only because it's an extraordinary treatment of an extraordinary myth, but because it's framed, sensitively and lovingly, as a tragedy. The myth part is easy; King Kong is one of the great, enduring myths of the twentieth century, distilling into a couple of symbols a metric buttload of Western fantasies, angsts and fears about, basically, sex. Kong himself is the atavistic icon of masculinity, in the most stereotypical and primitive sense: all strength, physicality, territorial possessiveness, even size. The myth's power is in its ability to insist that even this grossly extreme view of masculine power is also vulnerable, endearing and capable of a slightly goofy emotional fidelity which is ultimately his destruction. Even with this he forms a sharp and very cruel contrast to his equally reductionist counterpart, the playwright Jack Driscoll, Anne Darrow's human lover, who is all intellect, sensitivity and civilisation. He's doomed: even with the death of the big ape, he will never satisfy Anne Darrow, because he can't save her from multiple giant flesh-eating dinosaurs; in every sense, he simply isn't big enough. (The Freudian subtext is perfectly plain). She, of course, is the extreme symbolic exemplar of passive womanhood, defined solely in terms of her beauty, fragile blondeness, and her ability to enthrall the male without doing anything so unfeminine as act; she is clearly there to respond to all this testosterone with fluttered admiration, heaving bosom fetchingly displayed. All of this should be tickling my subliminal feminist rage, but curiously it doesn't, I think because the myth is so aware of its own excesses, and equally so determined to demonstrate the inescapable fact that these reductionist symbols are doomed to tragedy. Tarzan and Jane, while embodying similar contrasts, are somehow a lot more offensive.
The myth is one framed in gender terms, but in fact for me the film's main tragic effect is in its demonstration of the horror inherent, not in male/female relations, but in human/animal ones. The tropes of the civilised versus the barbaric are very interesting, summed up neatly in Anne Darrow's pratfalls to amuse Kong: the upright, civilised human descending into the animal antics of the body. The tribespeople who sacrifice Anne to the monster are a fascinating exercise in unredeemed brutality, a depiction of the absolute antithesis of civilisation in terms that are cheerfully and wantonly politically incorrect. What becomes interesting is the extent to which the obsessed director and the scary animal-collecting ship's captain become, in the end, worse than the savages: they are self-absorbed money-grubbers, carelessly betraying everything Kong stands for because they are simply incapable of appreciating it. The scene with a captive Kong displayed to a glittering New York crowd in the midst of a vulgar, trashy theatre display, is brutally cruel.
Of all the characters in the film, Kong himself, ultimately, is the most human, not only because of the visual effects which construct him, but because in the end he is the only character capable of unflawed moral operation. He is beautifully created and animated, his enormous face and body amazingly, endearingly expressive. (Naomi Watts has commented in an interview that acting with Andy Serkiss was easy because, despite the weird body-suit, he clearly was Kong in every movement - I can well believe it). The scene which had me the most weepy wasn't, in fact, Kong's death (although it's severely tear-jerking, don't get me wrong), but the beautiful, timeless, idyllic moment where, Anne Darrow in tow, Kong discovers the ice on a lake in Central Park, and for a few moments plays with sliding on it, with a sort of amiable, elephantine grace. The brutal interruption of this moment anticipates his end, the creature so horribly reft from his own environment, hopelessly challenging the guns and aircraft of civilisation from atop the Empire State Building. If there is a more effective symbol for humanity's self-absorbed, destructive unconcern for the dignity and identity of any creature other than themselves, I'd like to know what it is. Oh, yeah, I wept buckets, but I suspect a lot of it was self-loathing.
See this movie, people. As a B-movie it's a blast, but there's a lot more going on here.
* except for the tight bladder, which is fast becoming the main problem I have with really long movies. Goblet of Fire's epic Voldemort confrontation somehow fails to grip when you really need to go to the loo.
