Friday, June 5, 2009

I Can't Believe I Rented It: King Kong

I was watching "King Kong" and I was wondering how many people didn't like it. Maybe it's the fact that they knew how it was going to end. After all, who doesn't know that Kong is gonna die? And then I thought, "Only idiots think that way. There hasn't been a brand new ending to anything outside of Christopher Nolan purposely telling the story backwards."

Some people didn't like "Titanic" because they knew how it was going to end. Well, sometimes, that isn't the point. Every movie can't have a twist ending. Sorry that M. Night Shamalyan can't write everything, but Hollywood isn't in the business of purposely offending their customers.

They might not think that the movie's realistic, but that's the point of imagination. Most of the stuff we imagine isn't real, like when you imagine sleeping with your boss's hot wife on his desk, while he's tied up in the corner. We all know that in real life, the only sexual pleasure you're getting out of this scenario is being sodomized by your own leg. If you were so concerned about realism, you wouldn't have turned on a movie about a giant ape getting shot off the Empire State Building.

I mean, come on. When you're dealing with giant apes that are worshiped by a lost civilization of savages, you just gotta let some shit slide. It's not like people have a frame of reference for dealing with 25-foot tall gorillas to make things "just like real life." And the ironic part is, no one ever complains when they see dinosaurs in movies. At least someone on Earth can say, "Hey, I've seen an ape before." You can go to the zoo and see one that's eight feet tall, but where can you go to see a dinosaur? It's been 70 million years since anyone's seen one, but how do we know we're doing those right?

When Jurassic Park came out, everyone was in awe of how real they looked, but how the fuck would we know how real they looked? For all we know, their mating habits included a hip-thrusting sex dance and they always washed their hands before chasing down a tasty brachiosaur.

And maybe they weren't able to buy into the fact that a white lady is sympathizing with a giant ape.

Maybe it's because I read shit, I understand that while it's a stretch, a white lady could try to get people not to shoot the giant monkey. After all, he did save her from the dinosaurs that were so fake, right? Isn't it within reason to think that she'd realize that Kong wasn't a bloodthirsty killer some of the time? The least she could do is try to keep him from getting shot.

Now, if she gave it up to Kong, that might be a bit of a stretch. I'd walk out on a movie like that, too, mainly because bestiality is only acceptable on the internet.

Not only that, some people like to talk about the supposed racial undertones of the movie, and when the original came out, you might have been onto something, seeing as how it came out in 1933. Even though white people had been around black people for 500 years to that point and hadn't seen any of us swing through the trees or communicate with jungle creatures, it was still widely believed that we were just like monkeys. White people back then were just really stupid.

But in 2005, if you sought out racial undertones, you were either J. Anthony Brown or someone else who just isn't funny. Okay, so the monkey caught hell chasing after a white woman, and wound up chains. How can I not see the symbolism, right? Probably because I don't identify with the silverback experience. Sure, I like bananas, but then so do white people. I don't eat them because of my genetic predisposition; I eat them because they taste good.

The irony is that even though people think that the point of the movie is to tell black men to stay away from white women (as evidenced by the beating Kong took all through the movie), the white woman stood still by her man. Since "King Kong," in actuality, is a thinly veiled exposition on the evils of race-mixing, I should still get with a white woman, because I know she'll be loyal, even in the face of machine gun fire from bi-planes. The movie told me so.

So putting all of that aside, in my mind, there's no real reason not to like "King Kong," other than not having the attention span for movies that don't have a joke or an explosion every ten minutes. Anyone who's ever had a dog can relate to this movie, without the dog having to carry them up the side of the building. It's got all kinds of characters who feel like real people, lots of action, and a sad ending that makes sense, because there was no other way that it could go down. Sure, there were no gay comedic foils or potential action figures (but Lord knows, they tried anyway), but it was a remake that actually made sense to make, and actually exceeded the original.

But that's not hard to do, considering that it relied on stop-motion special effects.

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