Peter Jackson's KING KONG
Now, you ladies may be wondering why I'm including this fish-free movie on my piscatorial website. But I finally saw it after a great deal of pressing from others, and although I disagree utterly with the male human teenager who insisted that it was one of the greatest films ever made, I do have to say that it sums up EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW about our quarry.
This new version came out in 2005, directed by Peter Jackson (yes! the man who brought us the Sumatran Rat Monkey!). It stars Naomi Watt as Ann Darrow, Jack Black as Carl Denham, and Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll. I've seen every version of this story, but only this one succinctly captures the true, distilled essence of the flawed species we seek to convert into US.
As you'll recall, in the original version, Ann Darrow was an actress hired by entrepreneur Carl Denham to star in an adventure film set on a remote tropical island. Jack Driscoll was a feller on board ship that she fell in love with, and who had to rescue her from Kong over and over throughout the story. Later versions diverged quite a bit, but Peter Jackson brought the story back home, painting the characters with a lot more depth and detail than we got in the first Kong, and giving us some terrific scenes of prehistoric mayhem in the bargain. AND tender interspecies romance.
BUT FORGET ALL THAT. This is, at its core, an edge-of-your-seat action movie, about some little shaved monkeys who found their greatest fear -- A REALLY BIG, UNSHAVED MONKEY WHO COULD WHUP THEM ALL. The rest of the story was just about who would get to keep the pretty blonde, and who would get to do the triumphal chest-pounding in the end. This is really about the monkey Everest, the ultimate ego threat. CAN ANY MAN PREVAIL AGAINST KONG? Nope, but Ann Darrow can. After swallowing this bitter pill, the males typically decide to capitalize on it . When this too proves to be more than the humans can handle, they simply shoot Kong down off the Empire State Building and blame the whole thing on Ann. It wasn't the fighter planes, it wasn't drunken Carl Denham and his greedy-ass get-rich-quick scheme; "It was Beauty killed the beast." OK, gotcha.
I think we can agree this spells out ALL THE STRATEGY YOU NEED to capture the interest of, and recruit, any landscum male we encounter. Watch this movie and learn.
You know, before we forsake the subject of this film, I would like to linger a moment over the Skull Island tribesmen. What a lovely bunch. It's hard enough to imagine what a 25' Gorilla is doing on a remote island with a population of Dinosaurs; what these wretched humans are doing here, huddling on a leafless crescent of beach behind a hundred-foot wall of stone carved in shrieking Gorilla heads is really a puzzler. Why the sight of Kong sends them into a white-eyed, zombielike ecstasy is another good question. What exactly has Kong done for them lately?
At first I thought they were being typically human, worshipping the thing that keeps them miserable, instead of lashing together some canoes and heading for better territory. But I took a second look, and then a third:
>> They seem to live on a stretch of land with no hunting grounds, no place to farm, not even a decent stand of coconut trees or a waterfall. What do these people eat and drink?
>> It rains here continuously. They seem not to care about staying dry. They rather seem to like the damp. They aren't even pruny. Hmm.
>> You're supposed to think they're black. But there are real black people on board the ship that brings Denham's film crew to the island. Look again: the islanders are green.
>> Why in Cod's name would these people worship Kong? Is that what they're even doing? Or are they the devoted caretakers of an irresistable tourist attraction, waiting for the right boatful of rubes to come along and take a look? Could Kong be the real hostage here? Is he a pawn to the nefarious plans of the Skull Island Greenies?
>> Why in Scrod's name would they want to feed Ann Darrow to Kong? Surely they knew the menfolk would not understand, breach the wall, see Kong for themselves, send for reinforcements...a-HA! GREEN-SKINNED, SEMI-AQUATIC WELCOME WAGON LADIES!
Any other questions?
This new version came out in 2005, directed by Peter Jackson (yes! the man who brought us the Sumatran Rat Monkey!). It stars Naomi Watt as Ann Darrow, Jack Black as Carl Denham, and Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll. I've seen every version of this story, but only this one succinctly captures the true, distilled essence of the flawed species we seek to convert into US.
As you'll recall, in the original version, Ann Darrow was an actress hired by entrepreneur Carl Denham to star in an adventure film set on a remote tropical island. Jack Driscoll was a feller on board ship that she fell in love with, and who had to rescue her from Kong over and over throughout the story. Later versions diverged quite a bit, but Peter Jackson brought the story back home, painting the characters with a lot more depth and detail than we got in the first Kong, and giving us some terrific scenes of prehistoric mayhem in the bargain. AND tender interspecies romance.
BUT FORGET ALL THAT. This is, at its core, an edge-of-your-seat action movie, about some little shaved monkeys who found their greatest fear -- A REALLY BIG, UNSHAVED MONKEY WHO COULD WHUP THEM ALL. The rest of the story was just about who would get to keep the pretty blonde, and who would get to do the triumphal chest-pounding in the end. This is really about the monkey Everest, the ultimate ego threat. CAN ANY MAN PREVAIL AGAINST KONG? Nope, but Ann Darrow can. After swallowing this bitter pill, the males typically decide to capitalize on it . When this too proves to be more than the humans can handle, they simply shoot Kong down off the Empire State Building and blame the whole thing on Ann. It wasn't the fighter planes, it wasn't drunken Carl Denham and his greedy-ass get-rich-quick scheme; "It was Beauty killed the beast." OK, gotcha.
I think we can agree this spells out ALL THE STRATEGY YOU NEED to capture the interest of, and recruit, any landscum male we encounter. Watch this movie and learn.
You know, before we forsake the subject of this film, I would like to linger a moment over the Skull Island tribesmen. What a lovely bunch. It's hard enough to imagine what a 25' Gorilla is doing on a remote island with a population of Dinosaurs; what these wretched humans are doing here, huddling on a leafless crescent of beach behind a hundred-foot wall of stone carved in shrieking Gorilla heads is really a puzzler. Why the sight of Kong sends them into a white-eyed, zombielike ecstasy is another good question. What exactly has Kong done for them lately?
At first I thought they were being typically human, worshipping the thing that keeps them miserable, instead of lashing together some canoes and heading for better territory. But I took a second look, and then a third:
>> They seem to live on a stretch of land with no hunting grounds, no place to farm, not even a decent stand of coconut trees or a waterfall. What do these people eat and drink?
>> It rains here continuously. They seem not to care about staying dry. They rather seem to like the damp. They aren't even pruny. Hmm.
>> You're supposed to think they're black. But there are real black people on board the ship that brings Denham's film crew to the island. Look again: the islanders are green.
>> Why in Cod's name would these people worship Kong? Is that what they're even doing? Or are they the devoted caretakers of an irresistable tourist attraction, waiting for the right boatful of rubes to come along and take a look? Could Kong be the real hostage here? Is he a pawn to the nefarious plans of the Skull Island Greenies?
>> Why in Scrod's name would they want to feed Ann Darrow to Kong? Surely they knew the menfolk would not understand, breach the wall, see Kong for themselves, send for reinforcements...a-HA! GREEN-SKINNED, SEMI-AQUATIC WELCOME WAGON LADIES!
Any other questions?
posted by Cliffie, The Lemming Girl at 6:15 PM
1 Comments:
best not to look too much into the logic of some of these tales!
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