RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media New Kong trailer

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Pig Iron said:
animitronics would be as good or stop motion....

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fuck no

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King Kong Returns to Empire State Building
By NAHAL TOOSI, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Not surprisingly, considering New York's long-held fascination with the big gorilla, the city went ape for King Kong Monday.

The supersized simian has captivated New Yorkers since he first stepped foot, a giant one at that, in the city in 1933, via the classic RKO film. His building-scaling, blonde-loving ways made him an instant legend.

With the arrival Monday of the new $150 million cinematic version of the ape-meets-girl story, King Kong was once again the toast of the town.

Besides Mayor Bloomberg declaring Monday "King Kong Day," the hairy creature took a seat of honor in Times Square, growled from billboards throughout town and was the guest of honor at many parties. One of them was at the Empire State Building — the structure he famously climbed while carrying Fay Wray in the original movie.

"I always kind of felt there's like this twisted love relationship between King Kong and Fay Wray and the Empire State Building," said Lydia Ruth, the building's public relations director and special-events coordinator. "We made him famous or he made us famous. I'm not sure."

William Kornblum, a professor of sociology at The Graduate Center of City University of New York, said that despite being fiction, the movie did, in many ways, reflect history.

"The film used a building which symbolized the way the United States, and especially New York City, was reaching for the sky in its ambitions," said Kornblum, a New Yorker who specializes in urban history.

Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, agreed.

"It seemed, in a way, one of architecture's noblest achievements and at the same time it was where this primitive ape climbed up," he said. "It was a symbol of modernity overtaken by the symbol of the primitive."

Part of the reason the King Kong legend had so much impact was that "it came out at the right time," said Ray Morton, author of "King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon." The film, he said, "was brand-new at the same time the Empire State Building was."

The 1976 remake of "King Kong," starring Jessica Lange, placed the ape atop the World Trade Center towers.

But the new rendition of the film, directed by Peter Jackson of "The Lord of the Rings" fame, takes the creature back to the Empire State Building, which, because of the tragic events of Sept. 11, is once again New York's tallest building.

At Times Square on Monday, a fake giant ape attracted hordes of crowds, including many tourists eager to take pictures with one of New York's most famous visitors.

"It's so cute! It's adorable," said Carol Kenner, 35, of Brooklyn.

Michael Zorek, 45, a stay-at-home dad, took his 3-year-old son, Jeremy, to check out the Times Square ape.

Jeremy told his father that "King Kong" didn't seem like a kids film. But as he looked at the hairy creature in front of him, Jeremy did not appear overly impressed.

Was it scary?

"No," Jeremy said. "It's pretend."

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He's huge, hairy and a king among monsters. But make no mistake, the gorilla in Peter Jackson's "King Kong" is not your grandfather's giant ape.

The 1933 "King Kong" and Jackson's brand-new version have much in common, of course. Both monsters hail from a mysterious, fog-enshrouded island, both wind up at the top of the Empire State Building after a brief flirtation with show business, and they both have a fixation with a glamorous actress named Ann Darrow, who travels quite neatly in their gargantuan mitts.

But this three-hour "Kong," which opens Wednesday and will surely crush all box-office opposition, offers a monkey for the new millennium - a nearly paternal gorilla who connects with Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) in a more subtle and personal way than did his 1933 and 1976 forebears.

In fact, thanks to the evolution of special effects in the last 70 years, the new Kong has a realism and a range of emotions that allow him to be every bit as complex as any human on the screen.

While both movies are set during the bleakest years of the Great Depression, the new one looks back at the era with an understanding that was not possible at the time.

The 1933 film was the most ambitious combination of live action and special effects to have hit the screen up to that point. No child of the Depression ever forgot the thrill of seeing master animator Willis O'Brien's amazing models, the many dinosaurs and Kong himself unleashing their savage fury.

"I was about 13 or 14 when I first saw 'King Kong,' when it opened at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The movie changed my life," says Ray Harryhausen, who took O'Brien's technology and used it to fashion his own brilliant career as a filmmaker and animator with movies like "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958) and "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963).

"I've always associated Willis' work with the old alchemists, who tried to create the perfect homunculus through occult means and chemicals. RKO Pictures and O'Brien succeeded, using stop-motion animation instead of magic," Harryhausen says.

Jackson, who directed the groundbreaking "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, felt the same way when he first saw "King Kong" as a child at home in New Zealand.

Jackson was adamant that his "King Kong" be set, like the original, in the '30s, unlike the 1976 remake, which had a contemporary setting. Most audiences agreed that the fantasy didn't work as a modern story.

"I prefer to look at the original 1933 film in the context of the Depression, when the whole social contract seemed to be crashing and economic backsliding got confused with evolutionary backsliding, at least in Hollywood monster films," says David J. Skal, author of "The Monster Show."

"Just as the shape-shifting Count Dracula blurred the distinctions between humans and lower animals, just as Frankenstein's monster was a strange composite of a robot and an ape, and just as Dr.Jekyll's alter ego, Mr. Hyde, was an outright Neanderthal man, King Kong was the ultimate embodiment of the human merged with the subhuman," Skal adds.

All that has changed with greater knowledge of how gorillas interact, both among themselves and with humans.

Much of Kong's behavior in the new film comes from research done by Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, who wrote the script with Jackson, and actor Andy Serkis, who provides the human model for Kong (as he did for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings"). To get the right feel for the part, Serkis spent time with a gorilla clan in Rwanda and was "adopted" by a female ape named Zaire at London Zoo.

The 1933 film certainly hinted at a sexual fascination between Kong and Ann, but this has been replaced by a deeper relationship in the new movie.


In the new film, Driscoll is a successful New York City playwright, a "tweedy type with his nose in a book and his head up his ass," as Ann describes him. The 1933 Driscoll, played by Bruce Cabot, was a typical Hollywood he-man.

"We thought it'd be more interesting if Driscoll is as much out of his element in Kong's jungle as Kong is later in New York City," Boyens says. "We also felt that as soon as you have an alpha-male heroic character - the old lunkhead action guy - going up against the biggest alpha male in the world, King Kong, it becomes about them and stops being about Ann. And then, of course, Peter, Fran [Jackson's wife] and I are all writers, so it was maybe a bit self-referential as well.

These changes bring some realism to the story, which is a reinvention of the "Beauty and the Beast" myth.

"The 'Beauty and the Beast' story is about the redemptive power of love for the Beast, who is a loner in his castle. He has all this power but no human connection, no family," says Marina Warner, author of "From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers."

"Like Kong, the classic idea of the Beast is one who tends to have very pure, strong emotions - he doesn't contain or repress his feelings. I think that for women, who wrote the original myth in the 17th and 18th centuries, the story had a primitive natural eroticism, a combination of raw power and innocence. A woman's dream of a protective monster like Kong is a sort of infantilizing dream of being back with some daddy figure, of thinking yourself back to the beginnings of your own life, when your parents were huge and your father was a titan."

It wasn't beauty that "killed the beast" then - it was being cast in the role of an angry dad.

King Kong" eked out a box-office win this holiday weekend — but the $207 million remake of the 1933 classic has little so far to be thumping its chest about.

The fantasy-fueled tale is falling well short of blowout blockbuster status — like that earned by such box-office gorillas as the "Star Wars," " Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" franchises.

The movie industry has had its collective fingers crossed hoping for a "Kong" smash that would prime a major reversal of a yearlong slump in ticket buying, now at 7 percent. That wait continues, with the weekend purse off by 15 percent from a year ago and 18 percent from the previous weekend.

Still, there remains a hopeful school of thought that "Kong" might yet follow the long-haul pattern of "Titanic," which started with a relatively modest $28.6 million opening weekend on its way to a best-ever $600 million domestic and $1.8 billion worldwide gross.

"King Kong's" $33.3 million in ticket money for the holiday weekend was down by 34 percent from last week's $50.1 million take. Still, it led a weekend parade of pictures that included "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "Fun With Dick and Jane," "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" and "The Family Stone."

"'King Kong' is doing solid business but it's not smashing records," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.

One likely reason for that, he noted, is it's three-hour, seven-minute length.

"They can't show it as many times during the day, so that may have lessened its box office strength," Dergarabedian said. "The fact it did such strong business Christmas day shows there's a lot of interest in the movie."

The film earned "a pretty healthy" $9.2 million on Christmas, Dergarabedian pointed out.

John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, speculated that the busy box office, packed with nearly a dozen new offerings, may have resulted in Kong's less-than-stellar take.

"The concern with the (holiday) weekend was there were a few too many movies released," Fithian said. "I'm not worried about 'King Kong.' It's the type of movie that will continue to do business well into the new year."

The supersized simian just edged out Buena Vista's mystical adventure, "Narnia," which took in $31.7 million over the long weekend, nearly duplicating its previous week's take of $31.8 million.

"That kind of hold is just remarkable by anybody's standards," said Chuck Viane, president of Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. "By the end of the third week, we'll be at the $200 million level. It's one of those kind of dream stories."

"Kong" and "Narnia," plus a slew of other recent Oscar-bound offerings, are not enough to stem the year's box-office slide, Dergarabedian said.

"It's too little, too late, and there's no way we can make up these deficits."

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Rob Kamphausen said:
'King Kong' Falling Short of Blockbuster

One likely reason for that, he noted, is it's three-hour, seven-minute length.

the supersized simian just edged out Buena Vista's mystical adventure, "Narnia," which took in $31.7 million over the long weekend, nearly duplicating its previous week's take of $31.8 million.

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i also could have done without the 10 minute giant bug sequence. having everyone in the theater, from older fan to little kid to myself, watch a pair of giant leeches eating a man alive in as gory a fashion as possible wasn't all that pertinent to the story.

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