Friday, August 29, 2008

Requiem for Kong: "My Funny Valentine"

By Matt Zoller Seitz

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Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz at 3:01 AM

13 comments:

Bruce Reid said...

Quite lovely; this really captures the blend of tongue-in-cheek and heartfelt that makes me constantly (even on this blog, once) cite Guillermin's as my favorite Kong. Kong's massive, clumsy paw gently shoving Lange back from the line of fire is charmingly ridiculous, but every time I smile at it my raised cheeks manage to dislodge a tear that'd been brimming. Even better: Kong pacified in the storage ship by Dwan's scarf, that red little wisp draped across his thick fingers.

That Listening Ear piece linked a few days ago (which I agree, Matt, was excellent) made a fine argument for the cinematic spectacle of Cooper's original; but as much as the remake was ridiculed for its effects I find their human scale--they don't even try to hide that you're watching a man in a (pretty damn good) monkey suit--greatly moving. I mean, what's more cinematic than those very human eyes, staring up in loss and longing?

Of course, this might have been intended as pure straight-up mockery, but 1) that doesn't seem your style and 2) I don't care. I'm gonna find it goofy and loving and sad anyways. So thanks!

Sorry you had to miss some sleep to make it, though.

8/29/2008 11:34 AM
Matt Zoller Seitz said...

Bruce Reid: "Of course, this might have been intended as pure straight-up mockery, but 1) that doesn't seem your style and 2) I don't care. I'm gonna find it goofy and loving and sad anyways. So thanks!"

No mockery intended; the 1976 Kong, campy though it was, had a profound effect on me and was absolutely one of the movies that set me on the path toward whatever it is I've become. Kong got a raw deal. The fact that such a tragedy was visited upon him during his very first trip to New York does not speak well of this city.

What I wanted to do here was suggest, through the limited means at my disposal, what the big guy must have been feeling during his final moments. In monster movies I'm always more interested in the POV of the monster than the humans.

Glad you liked it, Bruce. I remembered your comment about loving this version while I was editing (it was a pain getting that 10-minute final sequence down to the length of the Chet Baker "Valentine") and there were a couple of points where I thought, "Oh, well, if this doesn't work, at least Bruce will enjoy it."

8/29/2008 11:42 AM
M.Chavez said...

I loved it as well. Thanks much for making it.

8/29/2008 12:54 PM
Dennis Cozzalio said...

Matt, the stars have aligned once again. We spent some time talking about the merits of the 1976 Kong at SLIFR last week, and to have this show up now is a beautiful litttle dovetailing moment.

I took a lot of grief from my purist buddies in 1976 who insisted that liking (or admitting liking) the new version-- not even preferring it to the 1933 version, but just liking it in any way-- was some sort of heresy. And the movie carries with it an completely undeserved reputation as a camp hoot, which is far from what it is. Rick Baker's humanizing work as Kong is comparatively low tech (I guess), but works so well as a means of creating a real character for the ape that complaining about it seems like pointless nitpicking.

And of course the movie is imperfect, but what movie isn't? And few movies' imperfections work so well as they do in this one to create a blockbuster that, it its own special way, feels a little handmade. Hats off to Jessica Lange as well, whose reputation as an actress was redeemed even as the actual quality of her work here remains marginalized. Though Lange proved herself to be a formidable actress, I think some people believe that, for this movie, Lange was Dwan, inept and clueless and free-floating through a movie in which she had no idea how to fit. But I see purposeful charm and sexual confidence and, yes, confusion too in her work, which is as entertaining as King Kong is on the whole.

Nice piece of work, and thanks for adding to the conversation in your inimitable way.

8/30/2008 1:45 AM
Robert Cashill said...

I can't really join in the enthusiasm--at age 11, seeing it on the big screen, I found it lacking, particularly the disappointing Skull Island scenes (Star Wars arrived to upgrade special effects in the nick of time)--but it was a big hit with TV viewers in Hong Kong, where it was in constant rotation on one of the two English-language stations 20 years ago. John Barry's score is however one of his picture redeemers.

8/30/2008 11:40 PM
Origami said...

Matt, the music you picked for this is transcendent. Sparse, vulnerable and pure; exploring the song with little more than brushes, breath and understated counterpoint.

Unfortunately I can't find it on "The Best of Chet Plays" or any of the other records by Baker, Mulligan or Pepper that I've tracked down. Is it possibly on another album?

thanks
James

8/31/2008 12:32 PM
Matt Zoller Seitz said...

Origami: My bad -- I was going off an iTunes playist and misread the info. The instrumental version used in this short film is actually on Deep in a Dream: The Ultimate Chet Baker Collection, issued as a tie-in with James Gavin's biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. Wish there was a way to upload a corrected music title card to the video without breaking the YouTube link.

8/31/2008 7:02 PM
ARBOGAST said...

There's a direct blood line between Guillermin's Kong (dibs on that band name) and Scorsese's Jake LaMotta, who let himself get beaten to a pulp in the ring, exhausting his challengers with his almost simian disregard for pain and disgusting them with the amount of blood he could lose while going unbowed. There isn't an 80s hero, from Rambo to John McClane to Martin Riggs, who didn't ape G-Kong's signature bloodloss, while Lethal Weapon star Mel Gibson practically remade Guillerman's Kong with The Last Temptation of Christ. Or am I crazy?

9/01/2008 1:41 AM
Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link Matt. Without you I'd miss out on so much.

Your Requiem feels more like a photograph than a film clip. I respond to it more as a document of your past experience than as fictional narrative. I wonder if the real subject of your revisit to the tragic ape is childhood; a requiem for innocence.

Origami
(having trouble posting under my google account)

9/01/2008 11:15 AM
Matt Zoller Seitz said...

ARBOGAST: "There isn't an 80s hero, from Rambo to John McClane to Martin Riggs, who didn't ape G-Kong's signature bloodloss, while Lethal Weapon star Mel Gibson practically remade Guillerman's Kong with The Last Temptation of Christ. Or am I crazy?"

Great observation -- and I don't think you're crazy about the Gibson connection, particularly with regard to the Lethal Weapon films and Last Temptation. Pauline Kael might have been the first to ID this particular signature in her original review of Guillermin's Kong (I agree, great band name!) in which she said that the movie reconfigured the original 1933 Kong as a kind of tormented hippie teddy bear, "Christ as mistreated pet." (!)

origami: "Your Requiem feels more like a photograph than a film clip. I respond to it more as a document of your past experience than as fictional narrative. I wonder if the real subject of your revisit to the tragic ape is childhood; a requiem for innocence."

That's deep -- so deep, in fact, that I don't know if I'm prepared to respond to it. It certainly never would have occurred to me, but the evidence is right there, in the clip and in my response to comments about it.

I don't consider my own childhood to have been particularly innocent, though, so if I'm longing for something, it's probably more an idealized vision than anything that actually happened.

Origami, are you my therapist?

9/01/2008 7:05 PM
Matt Zoller Seitz said...

Also, re: Arbogast's point, Raging Bull and the 1976 Kong would make a fantastic double-bill. They both are at their most ecstatically self-realized when they're wreaking mayhem, they both are essentially animals exploited by civilization for their dangerous aura, and they both have a major thing for a certain gorgeous blond and they both become homicidally and suicidally jealous when they sense that the primacy (no pun intended) of that relationship is being threatened by another suitor.

And both films contain scenes in which the physically and spiritually depleted hero reaches his low ebb in a jail cell (literal or figurative) and uses his body as a useless bludgeon against it.

9/01/2008 7:12 PM
Origami said...

Your therapist, Matt? I am less of a cocaine and mommy issues guy than rum and Roland Barthes. And that is close but (ahem) no cigar.

Origami

9/01/2008 10:52 PM
Matt Zoller Seitz said...

Hah! Excellent.

9/01/2008 11:57 PM

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