King Kong - The Death of Filmmaking

If any of you sat through the three hours and seven minutes of Hollywood's latest computer animated film (with a few real human beings thrown in for good measure) - King Kong - then you have bared witness to the end of actual filmmaking as we know it.

What do I define as filmmaking? Remember in Indiana Jones when the rickety bridge falls apart and bad guys plunge to their death while Indy hangs on for dear life? To shoot that scene, a real set was built with a real bridge, actual actors were brought in to actually act, professional cameraman used real-life cameras to shoot the action (after a cinematographer and lighting designer worked their art), and little dummies were made with flailing arms and legs. Then, the filmmakers destroyed the real bridge, the dummies went falling into the water below, and Harrison Ford's stunt double grabbed onto the sides of a cliff as a camera, with true auteur Steven Spielburg behind it, captured every glorious moment.

That is how you make a movie.

King Kong is how you make a cartoon.

Consider this - When King Kong fights three T-rexes while clutching a screaming Ann Darrow like a stress ball, not a single thing in that shot is real. There were no cameras. There was no set. There were no actors. Everything was fake. Everything was made on a computer. Amazingly talented animators drew a giant ape, three giant dinosaurs, a very fake looking Naomi Watts, and a massive jungle behind them.

So Peter Jackson, Academy Award winning director of Lord of the Rings as well as mediocre crap like The Frighteners and absolute crap like Dead Alive, stood behind the animators and said, "Nah, draw that dinosaur's teeth a little bigger. Good, now draw, like, a totally awesome fight scene!"

That is what passes for filmmaking now? That is a somewhat realistic cartoon, not a movie.

The magic of moviemaking is gone. The skill of designing sets, the art of perfecting the right camera angle, the beauty of getting the lighting just right to make the face of the lead actress glow from behind, is all gone, all replaced by computers. And King Kong is, with a little help from George Lucas and his three latest Star Wars movies, is ushering in this new era.

And moviewatchers suffer the consequences, because let's face it, an actor cannot give the best performance possible if he or she is standing in the middle of a green room and a director says, "Ok, now imagine you are in a deep, dark cave, you can hardly see, and a giant bat with four eyes is flying toward you. Pretend you are frightened. Good, now pretend you are ducking the bat, ok he's coming back, now just jump, great, ok now jump again. Perfect!" People's eyes and expressions change when they are actually looking at something. When they are acting in front of a green screen, that realism just isn't there.

That great performance just isn't there.

To me, this type of moviemaking is a cheap imitation of real moviemaking. People without much talent use a green screen as a crutch. I think this is embodied perfectly in King Kong's director, Peter Jackson.

Many critics and fans are hailing Peter Jackson has a genious. Respected movie reviewer James Bernardinelli called him a wizard.

Where exactly is his talent?

If you watch the first hour of King Kong, that is to say, the one part of the movie where there actually were actors and cameras, you would have seen atrocious overacting the likes of which is typically reserved for broadway plays where the actor has to perform for viewers in the second balcony, cheesy and super corny dialogue you'd expect to see written by a kid crafting a play for a doll's tea party, and pathetic editing that amounted to a wavy camera with a cheap blur technique I don't even think a high school kid would want to use in a student film for fear that a pretentious teacher would laugh at it.

Where in that movie is the work of a genious wizard? Anything that involved actual directing is laughably bad, and every other part of the movie was drawn on computers. Typically, when a director wants a good performance out of an actor, that director has to motivate the actor to really understand the complexities of the character, and to get lost in the moment. When Naomi Watts is making King Kong laugh, the only talent involved was that of the animator perfectly fine-tuning the lines of the mammoth gorilla's flapping jaw.

But this, ladies and gentlemen, is the future of filmmaking. Creating everything on computers. In essence, making those cut scenes that run between levels of a video game to further the plot along.

Now, I have heard arguments that, "The dialogue was supposed to be really corny. The movie was supposed to be bad."

Is that seriously going to be your argument? People, this movie cost excess of $207 million to make. That's almost a quarter of a billion dollars. Do you really need to spend that much money to make a bad movie? Give me twenty bucks and a camera and I'll make a bad movie for you.

I was baffled when movie critics and award shows showered Peter Jackson with praise for the Lord of the Rings movies. Yes, the special effects were phoneminal and yes, he brought the mega popular books to life. But anyone who has studied film should have noticed the poor editing, and quirky camera angles, and the cheesy blur effects that seemed to be mimicking Miami Vice. I couldn't imagine how people with knowledge of the film business could have considered those good films.

Now I realize it's because there is a conspiracy. Either that, or Peter Jackson has brainwashed everyone. I think this because now the same overblown praise is being awarded to King Kong. Roger Ebert, one of the most famous critics in the world, wrote in his review, "This is one of the year's best films."

Roger, if dialgue and acting this bad exists in one of the year's best films, then this was a really, really bad year for films.

In my opinion, the moments when Naomi Watts and King Kong were the only characters on the screen were great. Honestly. But every other part of the movie was absolutely awful, and the first hour is the worst movie I've seen all year.

So much went wrong with this never-should-have-been-made remake.

It was as if Naomi Watts was in a totally different movie, because besides her, every other actor gives what I think amounts to collectively the worst performances of the year, and on multiple occasions the characters are given painfully long bits of dialogue that describe an entire plotpoint or someone's full backstory in one sitting, something that a first time screenwriter might concoct in a movie that would never see the light of day, or that would be seen as trite and cliched if it ever was made.

Plus, one of the major points of the plot doesn't make sense. Jack Black's character, a film director, says that he has stumbled upon a map of a mythical island that has never been discovered.  The flaw in this logic, of course, is that if the island has never been discovered, then there can't be a map of it. If a map exists, that means it has been discovered. This moment would foreshadow my feelings for the entire rest of the experience.

And the scene in which Jack Black declares his ownership of sad map is so horribly directed that I don't even want to talk about it. Peter Jackson is supposed to be one of the best directors in showbusiness right now and his inability to craft a simple scene astounds me.

Actually, while we're on the subject, let me pinpoint the exact moment I realized he couldn't really direct. This movie has some stunning action sequences. All of them are computer generated.

The one scene - the ONE scene - that required real cameramen to capture a choreographed fight sequence between real, honest to goodness human beings, was shot with the camera waving around frantically to the accompanyment of trippy, blurry images as if the audience had just smoked crack.

Why did Peter Jackson do this? Because he can't actually direct. He can only tell cartoonists to click mouse buttons and draw impressive looking dinosaurs. When it comes time to stage a real action sequence, he was lost. He had to resort to cheap tricks.

To the people who said that this movie had top-notch acting and directing, I honestly wonder what movie you were watching. I see movies like Crash, Cinderella Man, Syriana, A History of Violence, Walk the Line, War of the Worlds, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Millions (all movies that came out this year, the same year that Roger Ebert said King Kong was one of the best films of) and am astounded that people could consider the acting (besides Naomi Watts's performance) anything but disasterous, and the directing anything but amateurish.

Reading glowing reviews of this movie makes me physically angry.

Why am I so angry about this? Why do I care so much?

Peter Jackson is just like so many people in this world today (our president included). That is, he has way too much power and way too much money and it is totally undeserved. I realized this while watching President Bush's speech last night. To me, hearing people praise Bush for, "being really honest with us in how the war is going" when he was really anything but, is the same as calling Peter Jackson a wizard when he has less talent than some of the people I graduated from college with (who can't even get a business to loan them money for a camera while Peter Jackson gets $207 million).

I mean, come on. Peter Jackson is a multi-multi-millionaire who is respected and admired and has been given so much undeserved power that he was allowed to remake one of the most beloved movies in history (the original 1933 King Kong) for the most money ever ($207 million plus more than $75 million for marketing) with the ability to cast whoever he wanted (Jack Black as Carl Denham and Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll) as well as having final cut authority (which is why it is over three-hours-long).

Why is this man even allowed to work in Hollywood let alone have full control over the most expensive movie ever made?

I wanted to like this movie so much. I wanted Peter Jackson to prove me wrong. Instead, he revealed to me just how inept with a camera he really is.

In my opinion, King Kong, and the worshipped god of a man who made it, are pathetic.

And its existance marks the end of actual filmmaking as we know it.

I hope all you people who said you liked King Kong really, really love Pixar movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles, because that's what all movies are going to be soon thanks to the 25-foot tall gorilla that is Peter Jackson