Could it be that people really could care less about a self-indulgent three hour remake of a classic film and that they prefer being transported into a bona-fide fantasy world reimagined from a child fantasy series staple? Hollywood Reporter notes that this week, Narnia has knocked Kong from its perch. Kong‘s total box office take? $174.3 million domestic and $400 million worldwide. Of course, given that the film cost at least $200 million to make and that the typical Hollywood rule is that a film must earn three times its budget to break even, this will not exactly sit pretty at Universal. Universal still needs $200 million, which they’ll get for the remainder of the film’s run and the DVD sales. But I don’t think this was the sum they’d really hoped for, do you?

This is likely a good thing for Peter Jackson, who demonstrated with this film that he’s transformed into an out-of-control filmmaker and may not be worth the $20 million paycheck plus grosses deal that he netted for this. Not until he proves to us that he’s more than an overgrown adolescent (and I, for one, am shakily optimistic on this score).

The study of dermatology in cinema. Includes skin conditions used to signify evil.

Look, I love Fast Times at Ridgemont High as much as the next child of the 80s, but does it really merit entry into the National Film Registry?

Syriana‘s thematic content has been broken down well by Bud Parr. I have nothing further to add to his hosannas, except to note that I greatly enjoyed Syriana, ranking the film higher than Traffic. Where the visceral impact of Stephen Gaghan’s Traffic script was bogged down by Soderbergh’s trashy stylistics (at the expense of, oh say, offering us a visceral on-ramp so that we could actually give a damn about all of the characters), Gaghan as writer-director (working with Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematographer, Robert Elswitt) allows the camera to accentuate a world where the connections are there but just outside our grasp of understanding.

Consider the moment in which George Clooney is talking with his son in a restaurant and the camera lingers for about a minute on the workers who are preparing their food as the dialogue continues over the visual. Or the moment in which Clooney and William Hurt are talking about spheres of influence and the camera, in a wide shot, allows a blue boxy IKEA to fill the entirety of the frame.

What makes Syriana a fantastic film, one I definitely plan to see again, is that, without really beating us over the head with didacticism too much (save, now that Bud has mentioned it, the Gecko-descended speech from Tim Blake Nelson), the film demands that we shift out of our traditional perspective and begin considering some of the global and economic connections that are kept under the radar. It does so in a way that strikes me not so much as political, but one which is more observational, concerned primarily with avarice run amuck. The film is not afraid to have its characters offer their perspectives (such as a moment late in the film when Alexander Siddig explains to Matt Damon precisely why he cannot reform his oil operation), but because I was so immersed in the story, trying to keep track of the five subplots, this dialogue didn’t really come across as partisan. Perhaps what Gaghan has accomplished here is a film that offers an uber-plot on steroids, proving in the process that the preachiness we might disapprove of in a less complex film isn’t really so unbelievable when it’s placed within a mammoth framework.

Peter Jackson is out of control. The Jackson who gave us the Freudian overtimes in Dead Alive, the intricate psychology of Heavenly Creatures and a sweet love story in the highly disturbing Muppets satire Meet the Feebles, in short the Jackson who once took chances, is no longer around. The filmmaker who once dared to instill subtext and nuance into disrespectful genres, has been replaced by an overgrown adolescent who has run amuck, a fortysomething toddler whose storytelling abilities have been occluded by a need to fling random computer-generated bodies around and spend countless dollars on special effects.

This is not to suggest that King Kong is without its merits. It is enjoyable in a ridiculous over-the-top way at times. It can be viewed, after its insufferable opening 75 minutes (written with dialogue so hackneyed and didactic it could have been lifted from an old ABC afterschool special and an aw-shucks savant named Jimmy reading Heart of Darkness and an Asian servant stereotype to boot), as an exercise in seeing just how far Jackson will push his Barnum-style showmanship (for this is, after all, an expensive and sensationalist circus). For my money, the fun started at the dinosaur run, which operates as a methed up Jurassic Park, although without that sense of wonder that greeted Spielberg’s film. But when one is watching a movie just to see what a filmmaker will throw in next, that’s hardly a suitable motivation for experiencing film, even when it wears its exhibitionism on its sleeve.

Jack Black is woefully miscast. Robert Armstrong’s Denham wasn’t an eyebrow-raising scenery chewer, but a man fully committed to his hucksterism. The great Naomi Watts is wasted, reduced to a doe-eyed cartoon offering us the most cliched idealism in the first hour and a sense of Kong-centric solicitude in the last two hours that isn’t particularly convincing. She’s also not much of a screamer. Adrien Brody is better, but he is given nothing other than a Clifford Odets/Barton Fink-style stereotype.

It’s worth pointing out that any film which has its heroine wearing high heels while climbing up a ladder to the top of the Empire State Building is highly suspect. If one considers this homage, then I suppose it works in the way that Jackson’s cameras flying over skylines represent an improvement in technology that Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack didn’t have. But I was never really convinced of this Skull Island or New York the way I was the 1933 original. I never cared for the characters or had a reference point for where the story was heading. I’m curious what gives Jackson a fair pass and Lucas, who is similarly inept, a fail. Are the film geeks so caught up with experiencing anything Jackson does or his frequent courting of folks like Harry Knowles that criticism of his overwrought tendencies is no longer welcomed?

Perhaps Jackson’s Kong is best represented by its titular character, who really isn’t much of a character this time around because not only does Jackson edit his Kong sequences with a paucity of master shots, but, despite the who knows how many dollars that have gone into making Kong’s fur bristle convincingly in the wind or to tranpose Andy Serkis’s facial expressions onto Kong’s face, this Kong does not have a soul. His movement is slightly off during all FX moments, even during the telltale beatings of the chest (which should be Kong’s ultimate personal signature). And I suspect it is because the film has been rushed for its holiday release or the visual effects team didn’t bother to base their modeling on real gorilla movement. This is a Kong that has been thrown together with buttons and expensive machines. One can clearly see with this Kong that not a single human hand touched it. And this is problematic, given that the whole arc of the picture focuses on Kong.

But more troubling than this is (to my eye) poor attention to detail with some of the visual effects. The blue-screen effects have been rendered without an attempt to match depth of field. Meaning that when one sees an actor in front of such obvious projetion, the disparity between what the camera has set focus at and what the CG people have set focus at seems notably off by large degrees at nearly every moment. Even Kubrick understood how important this was with 2001. Kubrick’s opening ape scenes, for example, were shot on a soundstage with rear projection. But you’d never know it from looking at it because Kubrick was anal about lighting schemes and focus for all corresponding images. No such luck with Jackson, who is clearly too happy to let his anarchy loose without justification.

If we judge this film on the script, we see that it fails. The best dialogue in this picture is extremely self-evident irony or elementary satire. We have Denham explaining, after a fellow crew member has been masticated upon, that he’s making the film and that “all proceeds will go to the family.” (Again, the Barnum tone here, too easily parsed and spelled out for the audience, is suspect.) We have a character mentioning that every B-movie needs a monster. The like. Hardy har. Yes, we’re clued in, Jackson. No need to hit us over the head with the irony mallet. And the gratuitous slow-motion strobe effects don’t help either.

I enjoyed this film in spots, but I had absolutely no stake in the characters. I could not care about this Kong. It is the most soulless movie that Jackson has ever made. It doesn’t strike me as innovative. It doesn’t strike me as particularly trusting. And as much as I bemoan Spielberg’s blatant manipulative devices, I think that Jackson (with Kong, at least) might have outfoxed Spielberg in the shameless manner he’s worked off the roller-coaster ride impulse.

Kong is a film which takes no chances. With a $200 million budget, it seems too expensive for a movie with a barebones plot. (The 90 minutes of the 1933 original, which doesn’t appear to have been dramatically altered outside of the gushing ape pathos given to Watts, has been stretched out to 3 hours and 7 minutes.) And I suspect that Jackson’s megalomania here is what led to the eleventh hour replacement of composer Howard Shore with James Newton Howard.

Turns out that the real out-of-control ape here is Jackson.

[UPDATE: Gwenda went crazy over it. Ron Silliman digs it. Matthew Cheney didn’t care for it.]

It looks like King Kong is a box-office turkey, having ratcheted up a mere $9.8 million on opening day. To offer serve the public, I have translated Universal’s spinspeak into regular vernacular:

UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “It’s a great start.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “This is the worst beginning we ever exepcted.”

UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “We’re very pleased with the word-of-mouth that’s feeding back to us and the film’s playability and reviews are great, so we’re looking forward to the weekend.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “Our test scores we’re through the roof. What happened? An example must be sent. I’ll have Bob get the guillotine out and roll a few heads through the publicity department. But it’ll have to wait until this film really tanks over the weekend.”

UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “We knew we weren’t launching a sequel and it’s at a busy time during the holiday season, so I was thrilled to see the numbers were close to $10m.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “Remakes of film classics have marketability, my ass! We’re sticking with remakes of television series. Hell, we’ll be lucky if this thing clears $40m by Sunday.”

Bah. What next? Mr. Mister’s “Is This Love?” played against images of Christ being crucified? Thank goodness they didn’t scour into the Joy Division catalog.

James Tata says that Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown is well worth seeing. But more intriguingly, there is this description: “There is a scene where Adams seduces away Peralta’s girlfriend that is amazing. There is a party. Peralta leaves her behind at the party (last time he’ll make the mistake of leaving his girlfriend unattended at a party, I’ll bet) lying on the grassy meridian of the sidewalk, and Adams, who has had a crush on her all along, leaps down from a high wall, landing, cat-like, next to her, and then starts a sinuous dance. Again, as described this sounds a bit hackeneyed, but it is a remarkable bit of acting.”

Leave it to the trusted Mr. Sicha to report the astonishing developments of our time. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has been reducing steely septuagenarian critics to tears and that “one of New York’s most jaded reporters admitted afterward that he found it impossible to be cynical about the film.”

The Apple: The lyrics “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire,” a production number devoted to speed or (as, Catherine Mary Stewart sings it, “Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!” which, as foreshadowed, is apparently “what America needs”), a man on a scooter who circles around a secretary pool (all of them wearing see-through plastic and white) for no apparent reason at all, audience reaction measured in heartbeats, a musical number in an apartment where the singer stands in one place and consciously sings the cue cards for the vapid lyrics off camera, and weird Orwellian orders with a mandatory Bim Hour (part of the National Fitness Program where even doctors put down their tools in the middle of the surgery and begin moving their arms up and down singing “Hey hey hey”).

This movie is awful, but strangely mesmerizing in its badness. Who was the insane studio exec who green-lighted this thing?

[MORE HERE: “The Rise and Fall of Cannon”]

This interesting Bill Murray profile doesn’t explain why Murray transformed himself into such an asshole to portray Hunter S. Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam, but it does describe much of his latter career. Among the things discussed: the set of Tootsie, an oversensitive Lucy Liu and how he came to be the darling of indie filmmakers. (via Chekhov’s Mistress)

Sylvester Stallone is returning to the role of Rocky Balboa for Rocky VI. In this installment, Rocky will apparently confront John Rambo, leaving both men to wonder why their collective swagger is infinitely unappealing to the moviegoing public.

Brilliant.

Evil Interiors (via Greencine Daily)

Variety: “Ben Affleck is in talks to create and write ‘Resistance,’ a potential drama series about a second American Revolution that he’ll exec produce with Live Planet partner Sean Bailey….’Resistance,’ to be produced by Touchstone and Live Planet, will be set in the not-so-distant future, imagining a United States that’s been divided into separate countries following a pair of catastrophic terror attacks”

(Choose Your Own Adventure) Escape by R.A. Montgomery: “By the year 2035, the United States has been split into three hostile provinces — Dorado, Rebellium, and Turtalia. You are a spy working for the Turtalian democracy and you must escape from the hostile Dorado.”