King Kong is one week old - so where’s my blockbuster?
By Burbanked on Dec 22, 2005 in Movies, Views and Reviews | 1,030 views |
After Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings hat trick, you’d think that anything the man touched next would automatically flip the switch on both the money- and Oscar-making machines. So why am I feeling so completely indifferent to seeing the big ape? And despite the current 83% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, I know I’m not alone in this.
Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere has written a couple of excellent pieces about this unwieldy, savage beast of a movie - one of (measured) praise, and one of annoyed criticism. And the opening weekend “uh-oh” that echoed through the marketing and distribution corridors of Universal certainly suggests that all is not well in the jungle. In this day and age of the Hollywood Slump, can’t we even depend on our auteur/blockbuster makers to deliver the goods? The next thing you know, they’ll make another Indiana Jones movie and no one will line up to see it.
Look, it’s become a big deal for people to go to the movies anymore. For my part, gone are the days when I could glance at the clock in the middle of a lazy weekend day and think, “Say! I think I’ll nip out to the theater for a few hours” - and then within 10 minutes be sitting in the dark munching popcorn. For a lot of people, going out to the movies has become a logistical quagmire of scheduling, babysitters, driving, parking, paying, fighting crowds, paying some more and then paying some more.
And all for the pleasure of watching 15 minutes of TV-screen-formatted commercials before the feature begins.
I’ve become a brutal taskmaster of the movies - I used to be much more laid back, willing to see anything, free to dislike parts of a movie but appreciate the cinematography, or a single actor’s nuanced performance.
But no more. Now I demand total entertainment. Make it worth my effort, filmmakers! I’ve paid my money; you’d better thrill, engage, amaze and move me until my kneecaps tingle. And hey - if you want to make your movie three hours long and fill 90% of it with CG special effects that more or less completely take me out of the movie, great! But you’d better make it pay off somehow or I’m not going to come back.
And it’s not just Jackson. Lucas, I’ll get to you some other time. Spielberg, you’ve still got me at “hello” - but earn your endings a little better, will you?
Dedicated screenwriting 101 here: From an interview with Harrison Ford on the MTV Movies Blog in which the inevitability of another Indiana Jones movie is mentioned:
How do I get out of this? I love going to the movies with my boys, opening up their minds to the great pleasures of cinema and all that, but this is a hard one. Please help me: do I suck it up and just go, or can anyone out there provide me with a plausible, kind-hearted, permanent way out? (
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