I digress. The point is that Friday nights I usually sit around in my pajamas or I go out and karaoke to some loud, catchy eighties tune. But this week was a pajama week.
So I started to watch Peter Jackson's King Kong.
Notice I say started.
I never watched the original, so I'm just judging this on its own merits as a film I didn't actually have the patience to sit through.
Because what I saw was a bloated piece of crap. The writer and the actress fall in love by staring at each other a lot. And we're supposed to believe they've shared some intense romantic connection because she's giggly and he's intense. Because that always works. I was already bored as soon as they kissed because I really wanted to watch him fight against his love for her. He's a writer. Surely he doesn't want to get involved with one of his silly little actresses whose whole job it is to show up and look pretty. And surely she doesn't want to fall for the writer, all buried in his books and shy and dorky. Oh, they address that and then brush over it in like two seconds and suddenly they're in love. And they haven't even met the monkey yet, so they went ahead and got that character development stuff out of the way so they could get to the crappy CGI that was to follow.
They reference Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, my least favorite book in all of classic literature, except maybe for Joseph Conrad's Nostromo which might just have been worse. Okay, pretty much anything Joseph Conrad makes me ill. The point is, Heart of Darkness is all about evil black Africans and how they poison the souls of decent white folk. It's about a bunch of other crap too, but the main metaphor for evil is definitely black people.
Don't believe me? Ask Chinua Achebe.
Look, people, I'm an English teacher. Occasionally I'm going to rant about literature so you can calm the hell down.
I bring this up because the reference to Heart of Darkness, however annoying to me, was fairly apropos. These crazy black people on this island are pretty darn ignorant and evil too. Joseph Conrad would be proud.
After watching The giant CGI monkey swing a screaming Naiomi Watts around for about five interminable minutes I gave up.
And turned on Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It's a violent, Dickensian noir comedy and I loved it. Shane Black always breaks the fourth wall in his scripts - now he does it in film form and it's perfect. Each character has such excellent quirks, individual personalities and really terrific lines of dialogue. I bought the love story because these two characters had something in common besides surfacey stuff. They both feel like big old losers, and that that serves as an emotional obstacle between them. They have issues they have to work out on their own. Plus, funny dark comedy jokes. After my misadventures with King Kong I appreciated the joke Robert Downey Jr.'s character makes about the ridiculously long ending to Return of the King.
My only concern was that it was too in love with its own cleverness, but that only made it like that really hot guy who knows he can make you melt when he looks at you and you know he knows but you go home with him anyway and enjoy it so much you don't care that he'll never call. That's how I feel after watching this film.
Dammit, Peter Jackson, you don't have to throw money at the story to make it go. Characters, for crying out loud. Characters is the answer.
You started watching King Kong last night? I think the end credits just rolled. The original version's only about 100 minutes. Yeah, maybe it's kinda creaky but it moves. I still watch it once a year.
ReplyDeleteAs for KKBB, I still feel that the Robert Downey Jr-Michelle Monaghan storyline isn't fully resolved but it's pretty terrific anyway. And it gets better on repeated viewings.
I think you're a bit hard on Conrad. The most evil character is Kurtz and it was not being in the presence of Africans that made him evil, it was the evil inside him getting free rein when he became the sole source of authority, outside any formal social structure. No one (that I ever heard of anyway) ever argued that Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now went crazy because the Montagnards he was stationed with were inherently evil. I like the Achebe that I've read (Girls at War and Things Fall Apart) but I think his analysis of Heart of Darkness is wrong.
ReplyDeleteI can't quibble with your thoughts on King Kong though. The horror, the horror...
Perhaps. But it's the presence of Africans that brought out his evil side. Conrad's other work is also based on how white people are corrupted as soon as they enter foreign lands.
ReplyDeleteI didn't finish watching Apocalypse now so I can't judge that scenario. I fell asleep.
My main beef with Conrad, despite the racial overtones, is that his writing is unecessarily convoluted. In a class filled with grad students studying English only one of us actually understood the plot of Nostromo and it wasn't me. But that didn't stop our professor from raving about its genius.
the original King Kong was good, though the clamation bits are, by todays standards, corny. After hearing the reviews of it, I decided that if it was ever on TV, and I have nothing better to do, then I'll see it. Otherwise, I heard in the new version, the CGI was good, but the story wasn't nearly the same, and dropped a few parts.
ReplyDeleteAs to Heart of Darkness you really must consider when, and by whom it was written. At that time, the European powers thought their civilazation was better, though I think the steady reign of wars between them proves otherwise. It would be about the same as the view today on the USA imposing its views on society and government on other the standards of other countries. How many times have you heard them comment that they have no clean water, electricity, or petroleum vehicles, and therefore need to be modernized? Should it not be more important to find if they are happy that way before destroying that way of life?
Race is an easy card to play, but really it is more about one civilazation thinking itself better than another and imposing itself on them, and if the other resists, they are then evil. Darkness a euphemism for 'uncivilized barbarism' by another's standards, not color of skin. Also remember that Africa was the Dark Continent at the time, mostly because the unexplored areas of that place were shaded in and marked unexplored. In that context, Darkness meant unexplored. Also remember that at the time, the British colonists were well known for their attitude toward native cultures.