The Producers and King Kong
I love going to the movies when only the most dedicated fans are there. Seeing The Producers on December 25th was one of those experiences. None of the stores were open, the room was barely a third full, and nearly everyone stayed to the bitter(ly funny) end. It was a great show with a great audience.
The last time I saw a movie with the same ambience was seeing another Nathan Lane vehicle, Isn’t She Great•, on Superbowl Sunday, January 30, 2000. In fact, few reviewers later would admit to enjoying that movie as much as I did; perhaps the audience boosted the movie for me.
No such boost was necessary for The Producers. Based on a broadway musical version of the original Producers•, this is a hilarious story of a man who is such a failure that he decides the only way to be successful (that is, make money) is to work to his strengths: make the most colossal failure ever shown on Broadway.
Remakes are in season right now, and most of them aren’t worth the expense of thinking about them, let alone making them. I saw a trailer in front of King Kong that was so bad, and so badly eighties, that I blurted out that it looked as bad as Miami Vice. Of course, it was Miami Vice. Why do we need a remake of that television show? The original said everything that needed to be said about that illusive corner of the eighties--which wasn’t much. The best thing to come out of that show was ex-Eagle Glenn Frey’s rather forgettable “Smuggler’s Blues” from his The Allnighter• album. Used in one episode, the song rather encapsulated the futility of Miami Vice’s approach to the drug war. Despite this, the series went on for four more seasons before cancellation.
Shopgirl is remaking a minor subplot from LA Story. Aeon Flux• remakes an MTV animation. Doom remakes a video game. Final Destination, Saw, and Underworld are remaking their own previous versions.
Aeon Flux is perhaps the most disappointing of these. You would think that Hollywood could make a movie that at least pretends to be as edgy as some shorts that appeared on music television ten years ago.
I saw Peter Jackson’s King Kong about a week ago, and King Kong is not one of those remakes. This is a great movie on its own, and it is a great remake, one that both embraces the original and successfully uses modern technology and culture. They wisely do not change the period. The Great Depression was an important part of the original King Kong•. Removing it is one of the things that killed the seventies remake. If there is anything worse for a movie than being remade, it is being remade in the seventies (Body Snatchers? A Star is Born?), but few movies get a second chance at a remake.
The top billings go to Naomi Watts, Adrian Brody, and Jack Black, who all do great jobs in their roles as ingenue, scriptwriter of the movie within the movie, and director of the movie within, respectively.
Jackson seems to understand that despite what computer technology can do to increase the scope of a movie, acting and story are still paramount. In Kong, Jackson makes use of Andy Serkis’s phenomenal body-acting to bring Kong to life just as he did to bring Gollum to life in Lord of the Rings. Serkis also plays the ship’s cook, but of course it’s the title character that movie-goers will remember him for. Though he doesn’t get top billing, Serkis is the star of King Kong.
A friend of mine called this movie a “Star Wars moment”: the recognition that the scope of movie-making is expanding so much that we don’t know where tomorrow’s movies will go. We’ve had this technology for a while, but we haven’t known how to use it for acting and story. Now our use of the technology is catching up to the technology itself. And nothing shall be withheld from them, that they have desired to do.
The question becomes, what is it that we desire? Do we want more King Kong, Star Wars, and the Matrix? Or do we want more Aeon Flux, Revenge of the Sith, and Revolutions?
- The Producers
- Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are great in this movie musical of a broadway musical of a late-sixties Mel Brooks movie. Great satire, but I don’t know what of.
- King Kong
- “In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with leading lady Ann Darrow.”
- Andy Serkis is King Kong
- “He helped create one of the most fully realized CG characters on film, as Gollum, but now he’s given humanity and true emotion to a giant CGI gorilla in the classic King Kong.”
- Isn’t She Great•
- An over-the-top movie about unsuccessful over-the-top actress Jacqueline Susann becomeing a successful over-the-top author. Nathan Lane shines in this overlooked, soft-spoken love letter to Susann.
- The Allnighter•
- Glenn Frey usually managed to ensure at least one hit on each of his otherwise-forgettable albums. On this, you have “Smuggler’s Blues”, a song whose message of the futility of the drug war was so blatant that most people seem not to have got the point.
- the original King Kong•
- These two DVDs contain a wild amount of information about the original King Kong and how it influenced later movies.
- the original Producers•
- The movie that inspired the musical that inspired the movie. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder star in this movie about the worst broadway play ever made.
- Aeon Flux•
- The complete animated collection of that “mysterious and amoral secret agent from the country of Monica.”
- The Not-So-Secret History of Aeon Flux
- “One wonders how this crew could capture the pure imagination explosion of Chung’s elaborately perverse cartoons--much less in a film that’s rated PG-13... If they can’t make a movie as edgy as a series of two-minute cartoons that ran on MTV ten years ago...”
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)