Dude, you need a breath mint!
This is so ridiculous, I just had to blog about it. As if I don’t have enough to do. 
Why somebody felt the need to remake King Kong is…strange, but the reviews are even stranger. Everyone reading this knows the story of King Kong, right? No background needed. On with the monkey show. Read these:
- “[Director Peter] Jackson doesn’t deal with the implicit racism of King Kong – the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes. But the director has supplied a fatherly black man (Evan Parke) on the crew to look after a teenage misfit (Jamie Bell): See, blacks aren’t all out of place in civilization! Some even take care of whites!” — Slate
- “Any movie that features white people sailing off to the Third World to capture a giant ape and carry it back to the West for exploitation is going to be seen as a metaphor for colonialism and racism. That was true for the original in 1933 and for the two remakes: the campy one in 1976, and the latest, directed by Peter Jackson. (In addition, a ‘Kong’ wannabe, ‘Mighty Joe Young,’ has been made twice.)” — Newsday
- “It remains a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West, all issues that were obvious in the original but unexamined; they remain unexamined here, if more vivid. Thus the natives of Skull Island are still ‘primitive’ and debauched, the death count is casually high, the tracer bullets that miss Kong atop the sky needle apparently sail on to pick off members of the Algonquin Round Table quipping over their martinis in the bar and nobody gives a damn or even thinks about it.” — Washington Post
Update (12/16): Kwame McKenzie:
The story feeds into all the colonial hysteria about black hyper-sexuality. This imagery has a long history and is difficult to shift…The story also touches the raw nerve of the Darwin-based association between black men and apes. Though the monkey noises and the discussion about whether Africans are the missing link between apes and humans may be out of the classroom, it still has to be endured by black footballers when they travel to away games.
No comment. Draw your own conclusions.
(Image by Weta Digital Ltd./Universal Studios/Handout/Reuters)
