posted 12-24-2005 12:21 PM                    

quote: Richard Greco

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And this is related to the movie "King Kong" how?

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Well, John Holmes and King Kong both met an untimely death after a career in movies, and they both may have shared a "certain" attribute.

posted 12-24-2005 05:21 PM                       

quote: Bobby Henderson

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Blah. If anyone wants to get technical you really only die from one thing: hypoxia. Lack of oxygen to the brain. If your heart stops pumping blood, no oxygen is supplied to the brain. AIDS, HIV, cancer, a locomotive slamming into your car at 100mph, etc. they're all just elements that can lead to that hypoxia thing.

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posted 12-29-2005 08:45 PM                       

quote: Greg Mueller

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What did the penisauruses/cockroaches/spiders/scorpions/centipedes (who all happily coexisted) eat before the guys fell off the log to feed them?

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posted 12-30-2005 08:07 AM                       

• The extended 'On Top of the World' opening sequence, which offered a brutally explicit impression of what Depression-era New York must have been like;
• Replacing the 'I must get a girl' scene on the ship in the 1933 film with the screening room scene in the remake - you got a sense of who the moguls were that Denham was up against;
• Rescripting the Driscoll character as a Federal Theater playwright, thereby creating another reference to the specific historical period in which the action is set;
• Rescripting and expanding the Englehorn character;
• The references to Heart of Darkness
• Intelligent 'quoting' from the original without the remake being tied down by it: the title sequence design, Denham's 'We'll be millionaires, boys!' monologue and then the incredible jump cut to the theatre marquee, quoting the tribal dance music from the original film in the extended stage sequence in the remake.

• Rescripting Carl Denham as a crass, culturally insensitive, cultural imperialist moron. There was no sense in this film that the Denham character is supposed to be a parody of a real person (Merian C. Cooper) and that a lot of the political incorrectness in the original is tongue-in-cheek, with reference to the exploration documentary genre that was popular in the mid-20s (not just Cooper, but film-makers such as Flaherty, Martin & Osa Johnson, etc.). I'd have preferred John Goodman to Jack Black in the role.
• The film was about 3 reels too long, with most of the excess length being taken up by extended dinosaur fights and long, lingering expression shots (e.g. Ann gazing at Kong) which make their point in 10 seconds but go on for 50. It was like Jackson was directing at Lord of the Rings pace, but this called for much tighter pacing, with the three phases of the story occupying closer to equal length. Another down side with the dino fight is that yes, the CGI was impressive; but impressive CGI is nothing new now, and needs a decent script to support it.
• Technical blunders. We see a sound recordist making tests on the ship and a hand-cranked Mitchell camera; obviously, no hand-cranked camera would have been used to record sync sound.
• Making the romantic attachment between Ann and Kong far less ambiguous. In the original we were left guessing where her sympathies lay, to a certain extent; but not in this one.