{"id":287,"date":"2006-01-24T10:52:58","date_gmt":"2006-01-24T10:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=287"},"modified":"2006-01-24T10:52:58","modified_gmt":"2006-01-24T10:52:58","slug":"kong-and-ann-darrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=287","title":{"rendered":"Kong and Ann Darrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally saw Kong last week – at the Embassy, which was as good a venue for it as I’d hoped. There was a lot to love in the film, and I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t tap into the mythic like it wants to. I don’t know why not. Some confluence of elements in the original that don’t work the same way here? In any case, the thing that I enjoyed the most about it was the character of Ann Darrow.
\nAnn is a fascinating character. She almost abandons everything – spirals away from language, and civilisation, incredibly quickly. She was broken by society, smashed by it, and didn’t want to come back to it. Naomi Watts performs her with insight and affection, deconstructing her to the point where the final act, in which Ann has virtually no dialogue, feels perfect because the character has progressed beyond anything that can be conveyed in words.
\n(I’d love to know how much Watts thought through her performance, because it comes across as something very raw and devoid of strategy. There are things going on in Ann Darrow conveyed by Watts that I suspect she couldn’t articulate.)
\nI can’t remember the last film I’ve seen that finishes by utterly destroying its heroine.
\nAny romance with Driscoll is doomed, she might be with him and marry him, but she’ll never be able to love him, because she’s already lost to the world.
\nThe moments in the film that got me – the moment when Ann’s being rescued, and you see in her the desire to not be rescued, to go back into the island with Kong. And, after Kong falls to his death, when she stands looking down and the temptation to follow him over the edge plays right through her.
\nLoved the effects. Kong was great. Too long, but not by much – I’d only shave about ten minutes out of it. (The whole first mate-cabin boy relationship can go, and apart from that I’d just shorten a lot of shots from three seconds to two seconds – do that enough times and you’ve got five minutes out of the film.)
\nJack Black didn’t hit all the right notes. Which I’m sad about, I was confident he’d do a great job, but he just didn’t sell it to me. Particularly that final line, originally intended for Fay Wray, which clunked out as the worst piece of dialogue in the whole film.
\nOverall: Go see it, if you haven’t already. It delivers the monkey action.
\n——-
\n“For me the whole thing that gave the 1933 King Kong its poignancy was that he was an artefact, he was not real. My feeling is that in all of us there is a wild untameable doomed thing that will always be shot down in the end. When King Kong tenderly puts Fay Wray down on a safe ledge and goes to his death, it moves us, because we know what it is that’s happening. Because we know that that thing in us which is always doomed to be shot down, is being shot down. And when you have a realistic gorilla, it ain’t gonna work.”
\n– Russell Hoban on why he’s not going to see the new King Kong<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally saw Kong last week – at the Embassy, which was as good a venue for it as I’d hoped. There was a lot to love in the film, and I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t tap into the mythic like it wants to. I don’t know why not. Some confluence of elements in the … Continue reading Kong and Ann Darrow<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-4D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}