My God, what an overlong, bloated, stupid and pointlessly loud movie. Most of it is just watching nameless sailors getting picked off by Weta Workshop's CGI monstrosities in overly elaborate action scenes (which brought to mind the worst parts of the Hobbit trilogy).
Also, Jack Black's character should've gotten his head torn off by Kong. The character was a massive piece of shit, all of the deaths were his fault but noo, we're supposed to think he's funny. He even gets to deliver the awful final solemn line the movie ends on.
Between this and the Hobbit movies it's a miracle his LOTR trilogy ended up being as good as it was. What a hack fraud
the insect pit scene was pretty rad though. burned some imagery right into my head. pj's king kong is an absolutely guilty pleasure of mine and i'm very aware of how terrible it is. biggest budget B movie ever.
That scene was pretty effectively horrifying, I will admit. I'd randomly seen it on Youtube before though so the impact was robbed somewhat
same here. i saw it first on youtube totally out of context and thought the whole movie was going to have that edge to it. was disappointed obviously but i still kept going back for more.
He’s a union buster too. Engaged in some back channel dealing with the NZ PM and warners bros while filing the hobbit to break a strike and making unionising here much harder for the film industry.
The part of the Lindsay Ellis video series detailing that shit made me truly angry
Oh haven’t seen that, will check it out. Yea watching your childhood heroes turn out to be terrible is lame
I recommend it, she even went to NZ to interview the crew and one of the Dwarf actors
the problem with peter jackson is that someone told him it's OK to make 3 hour movies. this is because it is not OK to make 3 hour movies. a lot of level 99 half-elf dorks gave him a big pass because they would literally watch a 48 hour LOTR movie.
so PJ makes a 3 hour king kong movie by keeping every bullshit zillion dollar setpiece brainstorming idea the writers room had in the movie. for this, he should have had his hands broken by someone slamming the sliding door of a 1989 Dodge Caravan on them.
instead, he is allowed to freely roam the country side and goes back to the Tolkien lore to make another 12 hours of that bullshit, because those people will watch the Extended Hyperfighting edition where Fredo comes out and says "Hail" to the King Jaeldorb of the Gromkins in authentic High Klingon or whatever for 22 minutes.
Yeah, but those Hobbit movies weren't even bloated because they were slavishly aping Tolkien, they deviated quite a bit from the source material, in fact
It's Quentin Tarantino's fault. Before Pulp Fiction, movies were an hour and a half. That's the thing I like best about older movies: you're in and out in 88 minutes, including credits. But he made Pulp Fiction which was two and a half hours, breaking all the rules, and it was a wild success. Hey, I don't blame him, when you've got a movie as good as that, the only thing better is more movie.
But nobody else made movies as good as Pulp Fiction. They just made longer movies. I don't have that kind of time or commitment. I can't get invested in a 3 hour movie only to find out 90 minutes in that it's crap and not likely to get any better.
Oh, and Quentin Tarantino was thick as thieves with Harvey Weinstein. He knew. All of them knew that women were being molested by high ranking Hollywood producers and none of them said a goddamn thing. In fact, they had no problem with it. Wood chipper. Feet first. For all of them.
Quentin doesn't get the woodchipper, he has to work in a GULAG producing CMOS sensors.
The brontosaurus scene was absolutely ridiculous. The deleted triceratops attack had the same problem but at least it was significantly shorter.
And yeah the production of the monsters is basically demo reel ammo for anyone at weta workshop lol I remember how much I disliked the departure from the island as a kid.
In addition to the stampede scene being stupid, the composition was also painfully bad. I don't want to rag on the effects too much, as they looked pretty good, but that scene was like something out of a Youtube meme video where they insert movie characters into Morrowind or something
Not only are they escaping stampeding brontosauruses, they're ALSO being hunted by small theropod things. Every action scene just has way too much going on, the worst being Kong's fight against three T-Rexes, who all want nothing more than to munch on Naomi Watts and will stop at no lenghts to try to snap their jaws at her
The half assed interjections of character development for all the disposable sailors is the funniest part of the movie for me.
What, you weren't moved by the touching relationship between former feral stowaway kid and his black mentor/father figure???
There's more screen time given for them to be mourned melodramatically than they actually get of character development
Wait, did the kid even survive the island? I wanna say he did but the escape from the island is just a blur to me
I legitimately do not remember. I think the first mate dies and the kid is the one with the moment of faux pathos but I could be remembering it completely backwards
That definitely happens, I just don't remember if the kid makes it off the island- none of the surviving ship crew appear in the New York finale
Also there's apparently a scene in the extended edition where he grabs the first mate's hat off his corpse in the insect ravine :data-laughing:
As stupid and headache inducing as that movie is, I absolutely love the insect scene. It's also the first time since they get to the island that things slow down before ramping up again and you can actually feel some menace and dread. Also I'm a sucker for giant bug monsters.
Like I said above, I saw that scene on its own before and it is legitimately quite nightmarish
it’s a miracle his LOTR trilogy ended up being as good as it was.
I really liked Heavenly Creatures.
Heavenly Creatures is a 1994 New Zealand biographical psychological drama film directed by Peter Jackson, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his partner, Fran Walsh, and starring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey in their feature film debuts, with supporting roles by Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison, and Simon O'Connor. Based on [a notorious murder case] in Christchurch, New Zealand, the film focuses on the relationship between two teenage girls [which] culminates in... [Spoiler removed. C'mon WIkipedia!]
To anybody reading this - If you're interested - it's probably best not to watch a trailer and definitely do not read the Wikipedia page which has spoilers in the very first paragraph. I swear - some Wikipedia editors want to be "helpful" by being annoying as fuck.
You might not be able to put a face to the name Melanie Lynskey. She's the older Shauna in Yellowjackets.
Yeah, I should've specified that I'm only familiar with his output past LOTR. I mostly associate his early career with goofy splatter stuff
After I watched Heavenly Creatures - I hoped Jackson would have success in Hollywood because by the late 90s I was already growing very tired of the usual Hollywood stuff that was usually dreck. When I learned he was going to be involved in LOTR - I assumed he sold out and the movies would be awful commercialized shit with tons of whizzy-whizzy CGI and stupid cartoon physics. I was so happy to be entirely wrong. I love LOTR and I'm not into Tolkien nor fantasy.
When I watched King Kong it was mostly in amusement. It was exactly the sort of stuff I expected LOTR would be. Later I watched ~20 minutes of the first Hobbit movie and turned it off in disgust. I think whatever cinematic magic he had is all used up. It's a shame.
You can see glimpses of the bottomless pit of CGI excess he would fall into in some of the later battle sequences in LOTR (Legolas taking down the Mumakil comes to mind) and some of the comedy is just bad (most involving Gimli and most of added in the Extended editions), but they're still legitimately great movies. Recently rewatched them and dang if I didn't tear up at several points even as an adult.
Later I watched ~20 minutes
You were arguably still in the good part of that movie. It was uncomfortable watching it in the theater for the first time "Oh boy, they're sure spending a lot of time in Bag End, huh? Well, it's not like there'll be more movies after this so I guess we should be glad they're being generous, ha ha" You hadn't even seen a single CGI orc or any the overblown video game action sequences, or Orlando Bloom needlessly being a major character in the two latter movies, or the dwarf-elf love triangle he's involved in, or...
You were arguably still in the good part of that movie.
If I watched the opening right now - I might think it wasn't that bad. I'd make a terrible critic. If I get disappointed - I'm already halfway to hating what I'm watching.
in the theater
The last movie I saw in a theater was Dawn of the Dead (2004) which I really liked. I decided to go out on a high note. I got very tired of giving money to Hollywood and them giving me crap back in return.
the dwarf-elf love triangle
Good grief. Is there a Youtube fan edit of just that? I might really like it.
There's the opposite: "Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit" which you can find here: https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com/. It removes the stupid elf woman and all of the non-canon related idiocy. Like the theme park ride through the rapids and the attack on Dol Guldur. It does remove "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates" which is canon, which is a pity.
If I watched the opening right now - I might think it wasn’t that bad. I’d make a terrible critic
In general, the Hobbiton stuff (minus the pointless and distracting Fellowship-era bookending sequences), the Gollum sequence as well as Bilbo's encounter with Smaug (before it transitions into a convoluted terrible action set piece) as well as some bits here and there are the Actually Really Good Parts of the movie that really capture the feel of the original novel. It's just such a shame since the cast, especially Martin Freeman as Bilbo, were on point. You can occasionally squint and see the movies that could've been
The last movie I saw in a theater was Dawn of the Dead (2004) which I really liked. I decided to go out on a high note. I got very tired of giving money to Hollywood and them giving me crap back in return.
I rather enjoyed the experience of going to the theater a couple of times a year in the bEfOrE tImEs
Good grief. Is there a Youtube fan edit of just that? I might really like it.
Pretty sure all fanedits of the Hobbit deliberately cut that part out
Edit: Here's the how that awful sideplot ends. It's so unbelieveably cringe-worthy I can't believe the same creative team made the LOTR movies
the sections where you play as king kong are kinda garbage, but the fps sections are genuinely fun with some pretty inventive gameplay
how're you just gonna do Peter Jackson dirty like that without even mentioning Heavenly Creatures or Braindead, the latter of which is a stone cold all timer?
Source material. When you've got thousands of pages of source material you can nail it.
The Hobbit was 180 pages long and look what you got.
I mean it's still got some of the atmosphere and is a nice movie to nap to, it's not all bad.
If I had known that Peter Jackson had directed The Frighteners I would have been scared beyond belief for the future of LOTR.
Fortunately I only found out afterwards.
I remember this as one of the few movies where getting really drunk and smoking a bowl just made it progressively worse and even more boring
I dislike the PJ film, but I thoroughly enjoyed Kong: Skull Island. Very surprised to see John C Reilly in it.
I haven't seen any of the Monsterverse movies past the first Godzilla which I disliked due to the film having too much Troop worship and not enough Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe.
I do know the director of Skull Island is trying to get a Metal Gear movie made, which has my full support despite the fact that even if by some miracle it did get made, it would be awful
Just put Kojima's name on it and people will say it was bad on purpose which makes it good and we're just not on the same level as a genius like him.
I haven't played the Norman Reedus game yet but I maintain that Peace Walker is the only truly good thing with Kojima's name on it since MGS3, and a lot of that is ironic appreciation on my part
It's also an Adrien Brodyverse movie, if you count the Predators movie he was in.
It has some form of troop worship in it, but the first new Godzilla, and the second one with eco-terrorists, are straight up propaganda.
