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King Kong: Don't Mess With the Monkey
Noodles22 writes "King Kong: Don't Mess With the Monkey began as an audition piece for Eden Phillips. After adapting some scenes from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh's 1996 King Kong screenplay, the natural appeal of the Kong story attracted more and more enthusiastic volunteers who generously gave of their time to make Kong a rich, funny short film. We are honoured to dedicate it to Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Wingnut films, and all those involved in the Lord of the Rings films, and upcoming King Kong remake."
not only was that not "rich" or "funny" but those were the LONGEST TEN MINUTES OF MY LIFE
So if Hitler's favourite colour was blue, blue must be the colour of evil.
Lookit... if you were a film director who had just pulled off the greatest gamble in film history, made a three-peat at the box office AND the Oscars (nominations at least), successfully taking three unfilmable books and made them into three monster hits AND critical darlings, got nominated for everything and won a boatload of awards, and made the studio and yourself more money than a mere mortal could ever spend, and you were then given carte blanche to make whatever film you wanted to make as your next project; are you telling me you wouldn't make the movie you'd wanted to make since you were six years old? Of course this is a masturbatory effort for PJ, but knowing him, he'll probably make it interesting, and people will line up to watch it, good or bad.
And please remember that he's not making this movie for us, he's making it for himself. After bringing us the LOTR trilogy, I'd say he earned it.
-- This sig for rent.
This is going to be a big dissappointment for fans of LOTR expecting more of the same from Peter Jackson.
It seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction between the title of your post and the first sentence. Jackson made his career with edgy genre-busting films. In fact, LotR is in many ways his worst work in the last 10 years. That does not mean that it's not a fine pice of work, but compared to Dangerous Creatures and even The Frighteners the story is lacking. Really not any fault of the writers, it was just the naure of that wondrous hydra of a narrative that Tolkien created, that you really can't condense or summarize it successfully.
The nice thing about Kong (70 years old, not 50 years old), is that since it was written as a story to be told from start to finish in 100 minutes, it is the perfect size for a film adaptation. There is enough there to fill the attention of the audience for an afternoon, with enough wiggle room for Jackson to put his own stamp on it.
LotR fans are not necessarily Peter Jackson fans and Peter Jackson fans are not necessarily fans of LotR. I'd much rather see him do another Dangerous Creatures or Forgotten Silver (that managed to bamboozle fair number of New Zealaders into thinking that he really did discover that all of the major inovations we take for granted with film were invented in New Zealand and lost.) In fact, Jackson quipped that he promised Fran Walsh, his partner (professionally and personally) a low-budget, low-stress art film.
Don't forget what a flop the remake of Godzilla was.
The big problem with Godzilla is that the original Godzilla was a product of a specific time (post-WWII reconstruction) and place (Japan). Godzilla just does not translate well.
But on the other hand, we see a remake of The Wolfman about every 10 years, a remake of Dracula every 10 years. A remake of Hamlet ever generation. Why not do the Gilglamesh of monster movies, King Kong?