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TalkBack / RE:Radio Free Nintendo - Episode 6
« on: June 24, 2006, 08:58:14 PM »
King Kong has ten times more content and art than Final Fantasy: Advent Children.
Lindy: My remark is movie snobbery, I won't deny it, but today's audiences could use to be more snobbish. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies are among the best fantasy epic pictures, but there's not much competition, and I only hope something better comes out soon. (If a film ever does top LotR, the Academy Awards will ignore it.) And although the films missed the point of Tolkien's work in several regards, the major misstep is merely the slapdash narrative style. Certain scenes are utterly incomprehensible because of Jackson's layers of cuts and audio; his methods are proven faulty by the large amount of reshoots and redubs he had to do just to make the movie make sense. In King Kong it is clear he had a chance to plan and breathe: he knew what his themes were and what he wanted to film. A project as massive as Lord of the Rings deserves more respect than having five different "assistant" directors filming entire chunks of important plot. Now, if the final product was cohesive, I wouldn't complain about his methods; however, one look at the pretentiously named "Appendices" on the LotR DVDs shows that Jackson and Co. revel in their mosaic method.
My major complaints with the film's lack of cohesion, narrative pull, and thematic emphasis can be traced to Jackson's use of his camera. Instead of making an expressive film with a swooping God's-eye perspective, Jackson abuses his ability to place the camera anywhere in space and makes his Middle-Earth look like a diorama or a real-time strategy videogame. Then he uses the most banal of methods to film a conversation with two characters, and it is no wonder we get bored (the first half of The Two Towers is wickedly snooze-worthy). Finally, too much of the film is shot handheld - much unlike the cinema-verite of French New Wavers Godard and Truffaut, and moderns like Paul Greengrass or even Steven Spielberg, Jackson's handheld camera seems cheap and wasted when compared with the massive CGI landscapes and lush, romantic score that cover the film. Spielberg's Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan have an immediacy through their handheld cinematography, while LotR's reeks of scotch tape and glue. Why, tell me, is LotR shot with more handheld camera than King Kong? Surely King Kong, a film with less ideas and having no real content, should have more whizz-bang action shots. Yet King Kong has far more deliberate framing and composition than LotR. In King Kong, Jackson presents themes of gender, masculinity, and sex that, while still shallow, are deeper than anything found in LotR. King Kong exposes LotR for what it is: a cheaply filmed, overproduced masterpiece of lifeless fantasy film. In satisfaction and depth, it is more akin to the cheap emulations of Tolkien than to his actual work.
Lindy: My remark is movie snobbery, I won't deny it, but today's audiences could use to be more snobbish. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies are among the best fantasy epic pictures, but there's not much competition, and I only hope something better comes out soon. (If a film ever does top LotR, the Academy Awards will ignore it.) And although the films missed the point of Tolkien's work in several regards, the major misstep is merely the slapdash narrative style. Certain scenes are utterly incomprehensible because of Jackson's layers of cuts and audio; his methods are proven faulty by the large amount of reshoots and redubs he had to do just to make the movie make sense. In King Kong it is clear he had a chance to plan and breathe: he knew what his themes were and what he wanted to film. A project as massive as Lord of the Rings deserves more respect than having five different "assistant" directors filming entire chunks of important plot. Now, if the final product was cohesive, I wouldn't complain about his methods; however, one look at the pretentiously named "Appendices" on the LotR DVDs shows that Jackson and Co. revel in their mosaic method.
My major complaints with the film's lack of cohesion, narrative pull, and thematic emphasis can be traced to Jackson's use of his camera. Instead of making an expressive film with a swooping God's-eye perspective, Jackson abuses his ability to place the camera anywhere in space and makes his Middle-Earth look like a diorama or a real-time strategy videogame. Then he uses the most banal of methods to film a conversation with two characters, and it is no wonder we get bored (the first half of The Two Towers is wickedly snooze-worthy). Finally, too much of the film is shot handheld - much unlike the cinema-verite of French New Wavers Godard and Truffaut, and moderns like Paul Greengrass or even Steven Spielberg, Jackson's handheld camera seems cheap and wasted when compared with the massive CGI landscapes and lush, romantic score that cover the film. Spielberg's Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan have an immediacy through their handheld cinematography, while LotR's reeks of scotch tape and glue. Why, tell me, is LotR shot with more handheld camera than King Kong? Surely King Kong, a film with less ideas and having no real content, should have more whizz-bang action shots. Yet King Kong has far more deliberate framing and composition than LotR. In King Kong, Jackson presents themes of gender, masculinity, and sex that, while still shallow, are deeper than anything found in LotR. King Kong exposes LotR for what it is: a cheaply filmed, overproduced masterpiece of lifeless fantasy film. In satisfaction and depth, it is more akin to the cheap emulations of Tolkien than to his actual work.
