By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Film crickets: essayists with ravishment fantasies
In the FT, Nigel Andrews has some splendid verbiage in his appreciation of visual appropriations in Kong while getting over a few other truths: “Film critics, far from being the coldblooded commentators of renown, are essayists with ravishment fantasies. We want tremendousness, outrage and damned cheek. (And yes, we get that as much from Buñuel, Fellini, Godard and Almodóvar as from good monster hokum.) Jackson was a promising imagist back in the days of Bad Taste and Braindead. He became a genius-on-the-cusp with The Lord of the Rings. Now King Kong proves that no one on the planet can touch him as a circus-master of the fantastic.
“… Unclassified “things”—including a super-worm designed to enrich Freudian totemology with the concept of a phallus dentatus—crowd up a Skull Island dream-painted by Jackson and his designers. This island contains not a single location shot. Its beauty, realistic yet rhapsodic, will have Henri Rousseau and Gustave Doré �gazing in wonderment from artists’ heaven. Even the nightmare moments have their lyricism. From where did Jackson pluck the image of the heroine’s abduction by a midnight pole-vaulter, who resembles one of Goya’s spooky stilt-walkers mixed into a nightscape by Fuseli? Then there is the wooden edifice—part tower, part drawbridge across a chasm—on which Naomi Watts’s sacrificial heroine (venturing the first volley in an inventive repertory of screams) is lowered towards the jungle, like a human muffin on a toasting-fork.” [More chewy goodness at the link.]