KING KONG *** (out of ****) Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Jamie Bell, Evan Parke, Colin Hanks, and Andy Serkis Directed by Peter Jackson & written by Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, from the story by Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace, James Ashmore Creelman, and Ruth Rose 2005 180 min  PG13 When you’re Peter Jackson, the man behind “The Lord of the Rings” films, the most powerful director in the world, barring perhaps Steven Spielberg—and you and Spielberg are currently competing against one another for a Golden Globe—there must not be anyone to tell you “trim that” or “cut that bit right there.”  So the result is that you make a movie like “King Kong,” which is all at once ambitious, visionary, overlong, messy, exciting, tedious, repetitive, and endless.  At three hours, the movie plays like the special edition version you might watch on the DVD where, at the end, you concede “I see why they cut those parts.” Watching “King Kong,” you can almost hear Jackson’s voice in your head, the way directors talk on DVD commentaries, saying “and we cut this scene for the theatrical release because we felt an earlier scene accomplished the same thing.”  Only no one told Jackson to cut anything.  Irony of ironies, when “King Kong” is finally released on DVD—in time for Xmas 2006—it’ll probably have ANOTHER hour of stuff.  There are too many scenes, too much dialogue, and too many characters that serve no purpose. I also don’t think I like the way Peter Jackson has paced his last four movies.  I am a HUGE fan of long movies.  Just ask my long-suffering wife.  But long movies by Kubrick, Malick, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, and Leone are characterized by a single action being stretched out to ponderous, meditative, self-examining lengths.  In movies, as in life, we see things more clearly, more philosophically when we slow them down.  Sergio Leone will take fifteen minutes for his characters to have a shoot-out, and end up with a movie that lasts 180 minutes.  Jackson, on the other hand, paces everything as fast as a normal movie, and he ought to clock in at 100 minutes, just like a normal movie.  But Jackson, too, clocks in at 180 minutes, and it’s because, instead of one normal length shoot-out, he’ll have three normal length shoot-outs, when one would have done the job. And basically that’s what happens with “King Kong.”  We land, get off the boat, get back on the boat, get off the boat, forget something and go back for it, back and forth.  There are as many sailors as there are ways that Jackson has thought up to kill them.  They’re attacked by one kind of giant insect, then another, then another.  Then giant dinosaurs, then another kind, then another.  We’re introduced to a relationship between an old sailor and a young one (Evan Parke and “Undertow’s” Jamie Bell), and it just stops.  The skipper rescues everyone, proving that he’s not such a hardass.  Then 30 minutes later, he rescues everyone again, proving…what?  That he’s still not such a hardass?  (He’s played by a permanently world-weary Thomas Kretschmann, who maintains the same amount of facial stubble for the entire sea voyage.  In “The Pianist,” he also proves that he isn’t such a hardass by being the Nazi who spares Adrien Brody.  Needless to say, he saves Brody again in “King Kong.”) Jackson calls the 1933 “King Kong,” directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, his favorite film of all-time, and the reason he became a director.  That film clocks in 74 minutes shorter than Jackson’s.  74 minutes.  That’s enough time to have a “Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”  106 minutes is enough time to do a fairy tale, which is what the original “King Kong” is, not a deep character examination, but an efficient, almost brutal presentation of mythic iconography.
		I would never accuse Jackson of not being cinematic; for his faults, his movies have, so far, always looked magnificent enough to recommend.  But there seems to be something of TV in how they run on and on while maintaining a completely conventional pace.  In recent years, the 18 - 49 male crowd (TV’s target audience) has recently been sucked into action-oriented soap operas like “Lost,” “24,” “Buffy,” “Smallville,” etc.  Like endless guitar solos, overarching story threads go on and on for as long as writers can fight off carpal tunnel syndrome, while characters run back and forth among the same locations.  And, as befits television, every program is stylistically homogenous.  The spike in DVD sales and semi-legal downloading of said programs indicates that the shows are not watched once a week so much as in gluts of several episodes at once—an experience, in many ways, not unlike a Peter Jackson film. But here, I ramble, because I really did enjoy Jackson’s “King Kong,” even if it does belabor every point it makes.  It contains many great sights as characters flee danger and struggle to stay within the PG13 lexicon (a lot of things are “goddamned”).  The relationship between Kong and the blonde (Naomi Watts) is touching, even if it has been changed from a sexual one to that of a monkey and his pet person.  She accepts him this time around, whereas in 1933 she’s just a screaming victim of the Depression.  When she’s not screaming, she’s in teary-eyed close-up.  Jack Black plays the power-mad, life-risking filmmaker who seeks Kong.  Black is in many ways Jackson’s stand-in, but also the stand-in of every movie director, who becomes an insane dictator at some point or another.  I like that he kidnaps his writer and keeps him locked in a cage. “King Kong” is a better film than Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, with more life, energy, and humor, although he still hasn’t returned to the deranged whimsy of his early (shorter) films like “Dead Alive” and “Meet the Feebles.”  Jack Black exists at the crossroads of these two styles.  Jackson had me swimming along during the middle, but then he starts to lay things on too thick at the end.  As for the special effects, they’re impressive, being 1.2% better than the last super-expensive CG doohickeys (what… “Star Wars III?”), what with the digital eyelash rendering and all.  Kong is motioned-captured from actor Andy Serkis, who played Column in “Lord of the Rings.”  I know I haven’t said a whole lot specifically about Jackson’s “King Kong,” so here are links to the 1933 “King Kong,” Jackson’s “Return of the King,” and Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles.”  Read those three reviews, then mash them together. I also have to admit that I was a little distracted during the first act of “Kong,” for two reasons:  1) I’ve been working, I must admit, on a screenplay, based on a novel.  We’ve been whipping the crap out of it to get it down to feature length, getting down to an almost cruel terseness, and so I was sensitive to Jackson’s rambling; and 2) before “Kong” was THE MOST BADDEST ASS PREVIEW since “Kill Bill.”  What was it?  It was Michael Mann’s high-def “Miami #%#ing Vice,” starring Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell, pimped out with a speedboat, a submachine gun, a mullet, and the mustache of a relief pitcher.  It took the first half-hour of “King Kong” to get over it. Oh yeah, and another thing…you let me know if you think it was beauty or the airplanes that do it at the end.  I think it’s the airplanes this time around. Finished Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night Back to home.