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note: do not watch King Kong Lives while sober
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Oct 24, 2017 19:36
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Mechafunkzilla posted:Does Kong gently caress? There may have been some slight subtext in the various Kong movies. In the 1976 movie they roofie Dwan before setting her up with Kong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31dhSRrW60k
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Oct 24, 2017 19:38
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This seems like a good enough time to talk about how both the '76 Kong and King Kong Lives are terribly underrated, and how they dovetail completely into Skull Island, thematically and aesthetically.
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Oct 24, 2017 19:40
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I think we can all agree to be glad Kong is a gorilla and not a bonobo.
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Oct 24, 2017 19:44
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K. Waste posted:This seems like a good enough time to talk about how both the '76 Kong and King Kong Lives are terribly underrated, and how they dovetail completely into Skull Island, thematically and aesthetically. I wonder if the '76 Kong would have had a bigger cultural impact if it didn't have the godawful luck of being released a few months before Star Wars. The production was also way more 'troubled' than usual, including dumb poo poo like building a full sized Kong prop for $1.7 million which only ended up appearing in 15 seconds of footage in the final edit. 
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Oct 24, 2017 20:02
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Honestly, it was an inglorious task to try and remake the original. The original is one of the most technically impressive films in the history of cinema. It cannot be overstated how they pulled every trick out of the book for that movie and even invented a few new ones. It is a marvel of a movie that, effects wise, would only be challenged by movies made 30+ years after. So of course each remake, 76 and Jackson, tried to match that in their own ways. Tried to recapture that impact and that level of sheer Next Level-Ness Both kind of collapsed under the weight of it sadly. 76 for reasons stated above, and Jackson by just trying to make the movie as epic as possible resulting in a giant bloated 3+ hour thing. Though one thing I do find funny is people talking about how big Kong was, because the original Kong kept shape shifting. Dude could be anywhere from 18 feet to 100 depending on what they needed him to be.
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Oct 24, 2017 20:11
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:There may have been some slight subtext in the various Kong movies. pretty sure kong also tries to stick his gigantic finger up her dress 
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Oct 24, 2017 20:19
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:... and then when they got to see the finished product they went "Ohhhhhhhhh gently caress THAT" and banned all their IPs from being adapted into live action films for the next few decades. The upcoming Detective Pikachu film will be the second ever live action Nintendo film. Oh hey, Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls) is writing that.
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Oct 24, 2017 20:48
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HannibalBarca posted:pretty sure kong also tries to stick his gigantic finger up her dress The whole "untamed savage jungle beast abducts pure white woman" thing was a whole genre unto itself for the longest time, not-so-coincidentally hitting its height in the Jim Crow/post-Reconstruction era.    There may be some ..... underlying psychological issues .... which the US was struggling to come to terms with.
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Oct 24, 2017 20:58
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What genuinely makes the first Kong more than just a racist thing Though note that it IS pretty racist in a few fundamental ways that no Kong story will ever escape unless it goes full super hero like Skull Island Is just how sympathetic Kong is. He is absolutely the victim in all of what happens. The main lead is the villain of the film
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Oct 24, 2017 21:04
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Burkion posted:What genuinely makes the first Kong more than just a racist thing I was just re-watching the Planet of the Apes movies (and the remakes which are pretty solid story-wise), they're all allegories about race and how society sees and treats the "savages".
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Oct 24, 2017 21:14
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:The whole "untamed savage jungle beast abducts pure white woman" thing was a whole genre unto itself for the longest time, not-so-coincidentally hitting its height in the Jim Crow/post-Reconstruction era. the scene I was talking about from the 76 Kong, though, which makes me think it was more of a sleazy exploitation thing from everyone's favorite loveable Italian slimeball, Dino de Laurentiis.
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Oct 24, 2017 22:20
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I don't understand how Kong+Godzilla+Jaegers can all exist when King Kong is substantially smaller than the rest. Did they make him bigger in the Skull Island movie?
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Oct 24, 2017 23:31
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DLC Inc posted:I don't understand how Kong+Godzilla+Jaegers can all exist when King Kong is substantially smaller than the rest. Did they make him bigger in the Skull Island movie? He’s big in Skull Island but not Godzilla big. They say he’s still pretty young and growing at the time and it’s going to have been 50 years before he shows up again so they’ll size him up.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:52
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We should change this thread title to "Godzilla-Kong's Still Growing, Ok?"
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Oct 25, 2017 00:00
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Yeah the plan to have a Godzilla/Kong shared universe meant that Kong had to be massively upscaled which had a whole series of knock on effects on things like how he would interact with humans and what could possibly oppose him. There's just no way he could have a final confrontation against the '33 biplanes or even the '76 attack helicopters. I doubt this modern Kong could even climb a skyscraper without toppling it just from his weight. DLC Inc posted:I don't understand how Kong+Godzilla+Jaegers can all exist when King Kong is substantially smaller than the rest. Did they make him bigger in the Skull Island movie?
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Oct 25, 2017 00:02
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The only thing off with the "still growing line" is that the skeletons of his parents aren't any bigger than him. If he is still growing, his parents died young, too. I guess that's possible but it seems weird to me.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:12
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FooF posted:The only thing off with the "still growing line" is that the skeletons of his parents aren't any bigger than him. If he is still growing, his parents died young, too. I guess that's possible but it seems weird to me. It's a handwave line because they wanted Kong to be small enough to plausibly interact with the human characters in Skull Island but leave room for him to be big enough to stand up to Godzilla in 2020. Don't think too hard about it.
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Oct 25, 2017 02:56
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As we've established, Skull Island does the usual thing with modern movie heroes and turns him into Batman. Interesting that most depictions of Skull Island are a nightmarish hell of giant creepy crawlies, dinosaurs and missing links, while K:SI explicitly works it into the Kaiju creature mythos they're going for; a place where the full giant ecosystem still survives, giving a hint of what the world was like when titans walked it every day- and a society where people have learned to accept the Kaiju and live alongside them. The 2005 one by contrast is a Darwinian nightmare, walled off by terrified degenerate tribespeople, and apparently the geography is meant to indicate that the island is shrinking, causing a horrific escalation of survival of the fittest as everything fights over dwindling territory and resources.
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Oct 25, 2017 03:52
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Inescapable Duck posted:As we've established, Skull Island does the usual thing with modern movie heroes and turns him into Batman. Yeah, the 2017 film shows a Skull Island where Kong has successfully Batmanned his way through the bad guys and established a fragile peace. The local humans and peaceful giant critters can go about their lives knowing that there's scary monsters out there but there's an even bigger monster keeping them in check.
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Oct 25, 2017 04:05
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I wonder if the '76 Kong would have had a bigger cultural impact if it didn't have the godawful luck of being released a few months before Star Wars. I wonder if the Universal version would have been better; The Legend of King Kong at least had some pre-production art of dinosaurs.
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Oct 25, 2017 04:44
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Inescapable Duck posted:As we've established, Skull Island does the usual thing with modern movie heroes and turns him into Batman. They’re not exactly hiding this 
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Oct 25, 2017 05:00
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Which gets back to SMG's point that this seems to pretty obviously set up Kong as an antagonistic figure going forward. It's gonna be hard for him to accept that Godzilla isn't just a bigger version of those 'apex predators' who killed his parents, and Godzilla already has roughly the same relationship with Monarch as Superman did with the U.S. government, so that will compound the sense for Kong going forward that only he can stop Godzilla.
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Oct 25, 2017 05:36
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There's kind of an obvious contrast between them; Kong obviously has a lot more in common with humans, being a primate and a social being (which compounds his tragedy that he has no family or peers left) while Godzilla is far older, far more different and more mysterious in his actions and motivations. It is established that Kong and his species have generally been relatively friendly towards humans and protected them (so long as the humans aren't attacking them or blowing poo poo up for no reason) compared to Godzilla barely acknowledging them. That seems like a pretty logical setup for a conflict; Kong kinda likes humans (maybe we're like adorable tiny monkeys) while Godzilla doesn't care much about the collateral damage he causes just by moving around, even if he might be ultimately the one thing keeping the planet from a Kaiju apocalypse. (a fair few Godzilla works, including Half-Century War and Final Wars, aren't subtle about how the rise of all of the Kaiju is basically Ragnarok for humanity) On another note, I liked the Skull Islanders of Skull Island; less horrifically racist 'degenerate superstitious tribesfolk' more still problematic but at least better 'mysterious natives with connections to ancient secrets beyond the modern world's understanding', but their attitude and culture seems interestingly different and suited to the harsh life of surviving Skull Island, with their voiceless communication and stoic personalities resembling Kong himself. And all the make-up makes it look like they don't talk much before everything you need to know is literally written on their face, and body.
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Oct 25, 2017 07:20
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I think the body paint had less to do with written instructions and a whole lot more with camouflage as everything on the island including the human natives seeks to blend in with its surroundings to avoid being eaten by something bigger. The only creatures that don't try to blend in are Kong and the Skulleaters because they're at the top of this hierarchy.
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Oct 25, 2017 07:49
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I wonder if the '76 Kong would have had a bigger cultural impact if it didn't have the godawful luck of being released a few months before Star Wars Definitely had nothing to do with it. KK76 was received like the overhyped piece of poo poo it in fact was, and had been soundly forgotten by the time people started hearing about the weird space movie.
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Oct 25, 2017 10:22
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I want the Pacific Rim crossover to have the heroes try to summon Legendary Godzilla, but they end up with Shin Godzilla and it gets much, much worse from there.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:02
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Bimmi posted:Definitely had nothing to do with it. KK76 was received like the overhyped piece of poo poo it in fact was, and had been soundly forgotten by the time people started hearing about the weird space movie. First off: it was released in December 1976, meaning "the weird space movie" was barely 6 months away when it came out. Second off: in spite of this, it was still a massive commercial hit, and while critics were mixed on it, many prominent ones (most notably Ebert and Pauline Kael) praised it. King Kong Lives is the one that bombed, not King Kong '76.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:19
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Seems like both of the major King Kong remakes were fairly well recieved and box office hits, only to be pretty quickly forgotten.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:27
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I like how after the year 2000, Peter Jackson forgot how to make a movie shorter than three hours.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:28
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I still really like King Kong '05, bloated running time and all.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:35
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Too many movies are hacked to pieces these days and it shows. Give 'em room to breathe. Though it does seem like in the Hobbit case Jackson felt obligated to make them three hours each just because LOTR was. Probably studio demands.
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Oct 25, 2017 15:00
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Inescapable Duck posted:Seems like both of the major King Kong remakes were fairly well recieved and box office hits, only to be pretty quickly forgotten. '76 is an odd duck because it actually did get rediscovered on TV after it was initially forgotten- in 1980 or 1981, NBC picked up the airing rights to it and made a fuckload of money. It then got promptly forgotten again when Lives bombed.
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Oct 25, 2017 19:55
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:First off: it was released in December 1976, meaning "the weird space movie" was barely 6 months away when it came out. Might as well have been five years. No one knew what the hell a Star Wars was until Time magazine wrote a huge, glowing review calling it the best movie of the year. Kong was not on anyone's mind at the time, because while quite a few people saw it, nobody seemed to particularly like it. And just to complete the circle of pedantry, making double your budget back is about the slimmest possible definition of "massive commercial success" there is, especially when films like Jaws and Star Wars were doing it twentyfold and then some. e: it was actually outgrossed by that deathless cinematic classic, "In Search of Noah's Ark." That's a lol right there. Bimmi fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 20:57
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Kong had a lot of hype because in marketing they played up the fact that they constructed some kind of giant robot for the movie. We were all disappointed in the result. Also, no dinosaurs - only a giant snake - sucked.
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Oct 25, 2017 21:56
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Kong 76 was a solid hit, but not as much as de Laurentiis hoped. He got it in his head that this would topple Jaws and be the biggest blockbuster ever and it didn't do that. Plans to make a sequel were delayed because as part of the initial legal fracas he'd given Universal dibs on future Kong movie and they sued him over Orca being a Jaws rip off and by the time that was resolved it wasn't a priority.
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Oct 25, 2017 22:00
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Kong was also one of the most expensive movies ever made up to that time, so whatever blockbuster status it enjoyed is highly relative. And as someone who was there, I can tell you that even a good movie would've had a hard time living up to the ungodly levels of hype the drat thing generated. One of the most interesting things to me about Star Wars was that it literally came out of nowhere and exploded into this supermassive phenomenon of its own accord. Fox initially had little confidence in it, which was evident from the almost total lack of pre-release support it got. All the magazines that should have been covering it totally missed the boat, and I didn't even know it existed until Time did their piece on it.
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Oct 25, 2017 22:47
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I really like Kong 76. It's one of those movies I can't explain why I like it, but I just do.
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Oct 26, 2017 02:04
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I wonder if the '76 Kong would have had a bigger cultural impact if it didn't have the godawful luck of being released a few months before Star Wars. Said it before, I'll say it again: Carlo Rambaldi is like the ultimate right place, right time guy.
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Oct 26, 2017 02:34
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I mean Rambaldi was responsible for the animatronics facial expressions on the suit-actor Kong as well, and ET wasn't nothing.
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Oct 26, 2017 03:35
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