The Three Faces of Kong, Pt. 2: 1976

The Dino De Laurentiis-produced remake of King Kong is an interesting case, in that it's not very good but still quite watchable because, in the end, it's still about a giant ape. Apes seem to make everything better, and the 1976 King Kong is the kind of movie I'm willing to watch even if it always disappoints just a little. My relationship with it is complicated. This is a movie that does a lot of things right, but there's something wrong with the core of it- it's a version of the original story with a lot of the magic and adventure missing, replaced as the times dictate with a grim cynicism and too many attempts to poke fun at itself. It's not without its moments, though.

On Dan Harmon's Removal from Community and Similar Bullshit

I should say something about Dan Harmon being fired from Community. God knows it's been bugging me enough. After the exhilaration of the show being renewed, followed by a gloriously fun three-episode finale, Sony Pictures Television decided to throw us all in the dumps by ousting its showrunner without even so much as a courtesy call, and so threatening to turn one of the most cutting edge shows on TV into something depressingly normal.

Obviously certain things must be gotten out of the way first. This is a low-rated show and it's a damn miracle it's been on as long as it has, and Harmon does not have the very best reputation as a showrunner- he recently had a major personality clash with star Chevy Chase (though in defense, Chase also has a difficult reputation), and there were rumblings of this for a time.

The Three Faces of Kong, Pt. 1: 1933

King Kong is an icon of cinema, and indeed a household name. A single film in 1933 was enough to endear him to the world, partly because it's a classic and partly because it was the first motion picture to realize the awesomeness of giant apes. This simian innovation is but one part of the legend, and here at the Club I've decided to look at the three major renditions of this classic story, from its original version all the way to the Kong of the digital age. I'm not touching any of the sequels or tie-ins yet, except of course for the monster's two Japanese outings, chronicled here and here.

Okay, this is partly because of the title. I'm proud of it dammit.

So we start in 1933, with one of the very best films ever made. King Kong is in some ways the ultimate demonstration of what people talk about when they talk about the magic of the movies. It shows us things that can only exist in the imagination and makes them vividly real, even more than real, for the time we watch it. It's a blend of romance, adventure, and tragedy that with time and changing attitudes has become more complex than its makers even intended, but hasn't lots its original emotional power in the process. Superlatives are hard to avoid in talking about this one.

Frasierquest 4.23: Odd Man Out

Frasier: Great news! Laura's in town!

Niles: Who's Laura?

Frasier: A stranger who called my machine by mistake.

Season four closes on an odd note, but not one unwarranted by what's gone before. For once paying little to no attention to the the problems of other characters, "Odd Man Out" is all about Frasier being in a rut. It's a rut we've seen him in all season, and it reaches a peak here that inspires him to commit an act of romantic chivalry with Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies. The result is a simple story that starts out realistically awkward but ends up very sweet.

After Roz skips out on her own birthday dinner, Frasier has a humiliating experience dining alone in a restaurant of families and loving couples. In his early 40s and still single, he's starting to realize that Lilith was a long time ago. When he finds that a woman named Laura (Linda Hamilton, a guest caller on the show's first episode) called his machine by mistake and is arriving at the airport, he finds himself mysteriously drawn to her. She's a cellist, she's witty and cultured, and as Martin observes she expresses affection easily. So off to the airport Frasier goes, to rescue a woman he's never met from the horrible fate of having to take a cab.

All of this is building off Frasier's "dry spell" that's lasted most of the season. If he had been doing maybe a little better in the dating department, his desperation here wouldn't seem so believable, and while this doesn't seem like it was planned explicitly, it works well regardless. The episode is about him feeling lonelier than he ever has in his life, and at times it's almost too cutting. (Then again, I've eaten alone a lot of times without feeling a stigma about it. I'm weird that way.)

That the episode focuses on Frasier to the near-total exclusion of everyone else is unusual for a sitcom season finale. There's no real taking stock of where all the other characters are in their lives as in years past. It's easy enough to infer some things- Martin is still with Sherry, Niles is still in couples therapy, and Daphne and Roz are single and doing their best to enjoy it. It makes sense, then, to focus on Frasier, because he's the one with the most problems.

The redemption Frasier finds at the end of his adventure is not quite what he hoped for. Laura's married, but she tells him he should appreciate the thrill of not being married. It's a concept that cuts to the heart of Frasier as a character- he craves a certainty and stability to his life that just isn't there, and looks ridiculous as a result. But for a moment, at the end of his rope, he's willing to listen.

So we end the season with Frasier off to Mexico in pursuit of another beautiful woman, a redemptive yet silly note showing his optimism after a year of setbacks. This is not a man who stays down for long, which is why we can enjoy his pratfalls. After what is easily one of the show's best years, though, he's earned a vacation.

No Guest Caller

Written by Suzanne Martin
Directed by Jeff Melman
Aired May 27, 1997

Daphne: And I have a date with Greg.

Frasier: Greg? I don't believe I've met him yet.

Martin: I have, he's gorgeous. (Off their looks) Well, he is!

Daphne: Certainly the best looking man I've ever been out with. Of course, he doesn't have a thought in that pretty little head of his. Oh, this could be the one.

In Theaters: The Avengers (2012)

Poster from IMPAwards.com

I come into The Avengers with conflicted feelings- on the one hand I'm glad they're finally doing a big superhero team-up movie, embracing the full range of absurd imagination inherent in the genre, and I've always liked Joss Whedon, but on the other hand I now have to be really specific when talking about the single most underrated film of the 1990s, and I do talk about it a lot. After much wheeling and dealing, Marvel Studios have brought together Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and Thor from their respective franchises, added a couple more heroes alongside them, and given writer/director Whedon the task of bringing it all together in a coherent fashion in time to kick off the summer blockbuster season.

This could easily have ended in disaster, given the sheer scale of what was attempted and the micromanagement inherent in any movie with a budget the size of several government programs. But The Avengers is admirable in how well it negotiates the perils of blockbuster moviemaking; it delivers even more action and spectacle than you'd expect, draws characters big and charming enough to engage us, and even has a plot that basically, more or less hangs together. Not too much, but it'll last until you get to the fridge.

Random Who Report: Planet of Fire (1984)

While classic Doctor Who stories often have the feel of movies, it was still a weekly television show. Sometimes episodes had to fill functions in a larger story, and for Planet of Fire a number of those functions intersected- the departure of a compaion, the arrival of a new one, dealing with a recurring character and giving us another round with one of the show's most popular villains. Peter Davison's penultimate story works pretty well under these circumstances, and if it lacks a certain urgency, it makes a good pause for breath between two much grimmer serials.

Random Movie Report #105: The Iron Rose

Jean Rollin has a style that's easy to pick up on, not so easy to love. His films' languid pacing and emphasis on bleak but atmospheric images makes his approach comparable to Bergman or Tarkovsky, with the crucial difference that neither of them ever made films about lesbian vampires. The Iron Rose- which, to be fair, is not about that either- is a particularly difficult and abstract film, one I'm not entirely sure what I think about some weeks after having seen it. It's as much an experience as a film, and while it's slow and not terribly satisfying, there's the nub of something powerful in there.

A boy (Pierre Dupont) and a girl (Francoise Pascal) meet at a party, make a date to go biking together, and end up at a cemetery, where the boy leads the girl into a crypt so they can make love. (Apparently this works. Single guys, take this down.) Time passes, pleasantly we assume, and when they climb out, it's night and they have no idea how to get out. The cemetery, being old and European, is a twisted maze of crypts, stones, and overgrowth, also featuring the occasional open pit to fall into. The girl slowly goes mad, developing an unhealthy obsession with death- one that may have always been there, even if she was reluctant to enter the place to start with.

So that is more or less the entire film. Two people are in a graveyard, trying not to be; it's a plot that, with a little trimming, could have been a Night Gallery episode. As a result, it's kind of slow going, and it's hard to work out any progression in the story- there's no sense that they're getting anywhere, so the only real driving force is the breakdown of the girl's sanity, which as the above paragraph indicated isn't really consistent to start with. The film mostly foregoes a music score in favor of ambient noise, which gets a little annoying after a while.

And yet there's something here. The upside of the whole mood piece approach is that Rollin is genuinely good at creating mood. There's a palpable sense of isolation and displacement in the images of the graveyard, and it's easy to believe the two characters are lost, because all we see are spots of light illuminated in a tangle of blackness. The place is old and filled with loose bones and skulls, and the silence is palpable.

The thinness of the characters seems deliberate, though it makes the girl's madness harder to process- it seems like it has something to do with the boy becoming agitated and violent at being lost, but it's hard to piece together a sequence of events in something deliberately plotless. Pascal is alluring in her way, just captivating enough to help anchor our interest, but both she and Dupont have to struggle with a script that gives them very little motivation.

As I've said in the past, atmosphere counts for a lot. The power of film to transport us to somewhere else is one of the reasons I love it, and really managing that is no mean feat. The film is based on a poem by Tristan Corbiere, and perhaps its idiosyncrasies stem from the fact that it doesn't stray very far from the poetic form- the aim, in the end, is to present images, not take us through a story. I'm not sure the picture is entirely successful in this regard, since it does still have to keep us engaged and it doesn't always do that, but what's there is more than enough to be worth a look.

Based on the poem by Tristan Corbiere
Scenario by Jean Rollin
Dialogue by Maurice Lemaitre
Directed by Jean Rollin

Grade: B-