While King Kong Lives opens with footage from the 1976 film, this is only a sequel in the sense that there is a giant ape (or two) involved (imagine being the person who has to call the agent for Sweet Dreams-era Jessica Lange and asks if she could pretty-please reprise her role as a "special guest star"). Jack Prescott and Dwan, we learn, have gone into business together as private detectives and travel the country in a customized motor home - well, I'm only kidding. "Dwan? Dwan who?" Giant apes out for a stroll. Enter Lady Kong, who is magically "discovered" at this crucial moment. Now an additional complication rears its head Kong needs more blood. I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been to have the eighth wonder of the world introduced to you as a heart-transplant recipient who makes moon-eyes at a She-Kong.Īnd that's the plot in a nutshell Kong has survived his plunge from the World Trade Center, needing only a heart transplant to keep him afloat after ten years flat on his back. And it had Linda Hamilton in it, who at the time was an actual celebrity (post- Terminator and pre- T-2/Buns of Steel/Mrs. King Kong Lives, while not made with a Lord of the Rings-type budget, was still made with the kind of money that could produce a dozen Japanese genre films. The first Kong film I saw was Toho's King Kong Escapes, but that flick had no pretense of being anything more than a goofy Big Monster movie I was unscarred. I got a couple emails from individuals who lamented that their very first exposure to King Kong was this film, which is sad indeed. I'll assume that the general warm fuzzy feelings surrounding Peter Jackson's trailer for King Kong has properly inoculated the community to the point that it's safe to once again to dip into King Kong Lives, the horrid result of the last time a major studio undertook a Kong project. ![]() I'm involved in a Kong movie, because it's a legend. King Kong is not the only moody, rage-prone foreign artiste to have a rocky reception Stateside-but few artists fall as hard as he did, or from such lofty heights.Kong is | King Kong movie news and rumors In Jackson’s King Kong, the big guy is the ultimate temperamental leading man from overseas whose animal magnetism bewitches an ambitious, unscrupulous American filmmaker ( Jack Black), leading to heartbreak for everyone-and more than a few deaths. and motion capture work by Andy Serkis as the lovelorn galoot in Jackson’s loving homage follows on the heels of, and nearly matches, that pair’s revolutionary work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. ![]() The original remains the high-water mark for stop-motion animation even nearly a century later, while the C.G.I. Jackson’s film and the original also double as valentines to cinematic craftsmanship: there as here, Kong himself is both a creative and a technical marvel. The ingénue does some shtick to sooth the savage beast, and he responds not unlike a producer who’s not entirely sure if she’s right for the part. Kong’s early encounters with Watts’s starlet feel oddly like an audition. In part because Jackson is such a cinephile, this King Kong also plays up the filmmaking and show-business aspects of the story more than any other version. Jackson’s King Kong is neither the horndog of 1976 nor the savage brute of 1933: he’s a furry dreamer who pines hopelessly in ways that are all too human for a gorgeous, sad-eyed vaudevillian played by Naomi Watts. ![]() In other words: here’s what all that monkey business is really about. We wouldn’t want you to miss the deeper symbolic significance of movies about a simian monster climbing phallic skyscrapers in pursuit of sexy yet unavailable actresses-so here’s a brief primer on the larger metaphorical elements at play in the major American King Kong movies through the decades. Like vampires, zombies, and superheroes, the story of a giant ape from Somewhere Else-a creature worshiped as a god in his own world, who is kidnapped and taken to the United States in shackles to serve as a plaything for a wealthy white elite-has proven especially metaphorically rich. But there’s another reason King Kong has never left us. It’s easy to see why this character has proven so enduring: as humans, an affection for giant apes seems hard-wired into our DNA, and everyone loves freaky mystery islands full of anachronistic dinosaurs and fantastical beasts. Kong: Skull Island, the latest big-budget, mega-hyped King Kong movie, just hit theaters Friday.
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