2005 -KING KONG, the Peter Jackson remake

Peter Jackson's follow up to his Lord of the Rings trilogy and just about as ambitious an undertaking as those three films.  The chief complaint on this film is it's extreme length, the film comes in at almost three hours.  In spite of the length, Jackson makes sure you get your money's worth when you watch his version of King Kong.

Even for a long film like this, King Kong is never dull.  Jackson has enough of a film making instinct to know how how to keep an audience interested.  He really pulls out all of the stops when the SS Venture finally arrives at Skull Island home of the legendary King Kong and lots of other monsters with really big scary teeth.  The film thrives on monsters chewing on people and Kong ripping the heads off of anyone or anything who gets in his way in his pursuit of Ann Darrow.

 

If the film falters, it's when showman Carl Denham returns to New York City with plans to put the captured King Kong on display.  Here the special effects by Jackson's  company Weta start to look a little shaky.  Things perk up at the end when Kong climbs the Empire State Building for the big climax.

 

Frankly, it I have any issue with this Kong film or the previous version with Jessica Lange, it's the love story between the ape and Ann Darrow.  It just doesn't ever work for me.  I gigantic gorilla capable of ripping people to shreds is not my idea of a healthy relationship.

 

The film with the exception of Jack Black is very well cast.  Naomi Watts is a classic blonde Hollywood beauty, although she is actually from Australia.  She does pretty well with the role considering.  Adrien Brody is good as a playwright who is accidentally shanghaied and ends up on the SS Venture writing a script for showman Carl Denham.

The film has it flaws and Peter Jackson was apparently under enormous pressure to meet a Christmas release date, so I sense he didn't get to spend as much time on the post production of the film as he would have liked.  Still, this is a very entertaining remake of the original film.

The film was written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.  The running time is 188 minutes.

2014 - THE HOBBITT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, hopefully the last of this series, probably not

For all the fighting and killing and beheading in this film the supposed final chapter in the series is kind of anticlimactic.  Tolkein's book which was intended for younger readers has reached the end of this three part adaption with so much padding to it's story I didn't have a clue as to what was going on and I've read The Hobbitt twice.

The director Peter Jackson has so stuffed this film with visual computer image garbage it's hard to care who is fighting with whom when it's obvious that it's just a bunch of computer people moving around and whacking each other with computer generated swords.

In a film called The Hobbitt, Bilbo Baggins the Hobbitt himself has nothing to do.  Even during the final fight he gets knocked out and is unconscious for most of the action.  Bilbo didn't miss much. The fighting goes on and on and the large scale battle scene that takes up the last hour of so the film was done before in the previous five films.  Jackson even hired a lot of the actors from the earlier Lord of the Rings films to provide some continuity but all that this does is add a sense of deja vu to this noisy turkey of a film.

This film made a lot of money, so there is obviously an audience for this junk.  I saw the film at a second run movie theater and I can testify that a good portion of the crowd were fantasy nerds probably watching this for the fourth or fifth time.  The price was right, $3.00 admission to watch this piece of fantasy crap.

144 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.

1996 - THE FRIGHTENERS, a cult director goes mainstream

5 years before Peter Jackson started releasing The Lord of the Rings films, he made a jump into big time Hollywood studio film making with this film The Frighteners.  At this point in his career Jackson was a cult horror film director who had gained some respectability with Heavenly Creatures. Robert Zemeckis and Universal Studios decided to go ahead with one of his original screenplays about a psychic detective and his ghost associates who confront a serial killer ghost.

The Frighteners was intended as a mix of very black comedy and horror.  There is a heavy influence of Ghostbusters in this film.  But the comedy horror mix was not as well executed as that film.  Jackson's low budget horror roots are evident throughout the film. 

What the film has going for it is a decent cast particularly Michael J. Fox as the sort of bogus psychic detective.  Fox was always a very sharp performer particularly when it came to comedy and in The Frighteners he needs all the good will he can generate because this film has some extremely nasty stuff in it.

The Frighteners marks the beginning of Peter Jackson's very heavy reliance on computer generated visual effects which was to reach it's nadir in The Lord of the Rings series.  Today it seems that Jackson can't make a film unless he smothers it with lots of special effects.

110 minutes, written by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson.

2013 -THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, the 2nd in the 2nd trilogy or the 5 in the Lord of the Rings Saga

What an incredible piece of crap and this is getting good reviews mostly it seems because it was better than the first film in the new series.  This Hobbit film is essentially a rehash of The Fellowship of the Rings film which featured a bunch of guys being chased by some Orcs.  Nothing succeeds like success so Peter Jackson and his team just remade that film.  In The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug,  the hobbit and the dwarfs are chased by what else, Orcs.

This film is also incredibly violent, I can guarantee that the viewer will get his or her fill of Orcs getting shot through the neck with arrows or beheaded with a sword.  Jackson must like this stuff because there is a lot of it throughout the film.  Since no blood comes leaking out of the dismembered body or head it's apparently OK to constantly show it.

Considering all the money Peter Jackson had at his disposal he seems to be a very unimaginative filmmaker.  The film constantly repeats the same shots of the hobbit and the dwarfs walking around while the camera swoops in from a great distance.  If there is a mountain in the background and someone is walking up it, you can be sure the camera will come flying in from some bird's eye view almost crashing into the mountain. 

By now it's well know that The Hobbit will be a three part film series which means more story padding and more beheading scenes.  But I could be wrong.  Next year the public will proably all walk into the theater like lemmings to watch The Hobbit 3:  Hobbits Are  A Girl's Best Friend.

 161 minutes, written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro.

2003 - LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING day 3 watching this series

Coming in at a whopping 4 and 1/2 hours, The Return of the King was the shortest book in the Tolkein trilogy this film is something else.  A long padded out story line completely enthralled with it's own myth making self importance.  Nobody talks like a normal human being in this film almost every line of dialog is loaded with self important platitudes about duty, honor and legend. 

At this point in the trilogy, if you haven't read the books or seen the two previous films the plot is now incomprehensible.  However I have to give Peter Jackson credit he has stayed very faithful to the Tolkein books while orchestrating this extremely complicated production.  

Liv Tyler modeling what the well dressed elf woman wears around the home

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Probably watching this trilogy over three nights was not the best way to view it.  However I am convinced that these extended edition DVD's really added nothing to the story.

  263 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson.

2002 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, another butt buster in the series

The second film in the extended version trilogy.  This film contains god help me 45 minutes of new scenes, i.e. stuff that wasn't deemed worthy of release in the theatrical version and 11 extra minutes of ending credits.

The Two Towers picks up the pace with Peter Jackson cutting between three different stories in this film.  This film also prominently features the CGI character Gollum.  One has to give credit where credit is due this is a very impressive achievement from a technical and artistic standpoint

Liv Tyler looks good but really has nothing to do in this film.

As I popped in disc two of this version and faced down another two hours of running time I couldn't help thinking that perhaps some trimming of Aragon's hanging around the country of Rohan and maybe less of the talking trees would have maybe moved things along a little bit faster.

Everything in this film builds up to the big battle at Helm's Deep and it is spectacular to watch. Whatever reservations I have about the length and confusing plot are placed on the back burner for this display of CGI and practical effects mayhem.

223 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Stephen Sinclair.

2001 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING is really long.

Pity the poor fools like me who bought the extended versions of these incredibly long films.  However rest assured that this post will be a lot shorter than watching this film. 

The first film in this trilogy introduces the middle earth characters containing hobbits, dwarfs, elves, orcs, a balrog, nazgûl, uruk-hai, and humans.  To complicate matters even further many of the characters have multiple names or names that sound the same such as, Sauron, Saurman, Strider, Argon, Gandolf the Grey, Merri, Pippin, Bilbo and Frodo.  The film is a feast of fantasy foolishness for the nerdiest of nerds playing fantasy card games at their local comic book store.

Liv Tyler, because I don't want to look at any more pictures of Hobbits, Dwarfs and Orcs.

No argument that this first film looks great.  It was filmed entirely in New Zealand with some magnificent scenery in the background to look at.  This is probably a good thing because most of this film is watching characters walking, walking, walking.  The special effects are at a very high caliber and the actors seem very sincere in their roles.

Since this is  J.R.R. Tolkein's elaborate fantasy creation it is probably not unexpected that the first film would spend most of it's running time setting things up for the next two films.  Still, this is a mighty long haul through the first third of this trilogy.

219 minutes.

2009 - THE LOVELY BONES, the emperor has no clothes

Talk about over reaching.  Lord of the Rings ringmaster Peter Jackson somehow got it into his head that he was the perfect person to take on this best selling chick book about a girl murdered by a pedophile.  Filming this book would require a filmmaker who could bring a special sensitivity to a story about the ghost or whatever of the  girl looking down from heaven or somewhere viewing the lives of her family and her murderer. What The Lovely Bones got was a director whose specialty was killing "Orcs" on screen.

The Lovely Bones is amazing in it's awfulness.  It's pretty clear now that Peter Jackson made a deal with the devil not unlike that of Faust to make The Lord of the Rings films, because The Lovely Bones could in no way have been made by the same guy, it is inept on almost every level.

So much about the film is just offensive.  The whole murdered girl stuck in some sort of strange heavenly Disneyland prancing around having fun while her family suffers from her death is just incredibly misjudged and tasteless.  Heaven is the usual Christian fantasy that looks like some sort of city rose garden or bird sanctuary probably the last place anyone would want to end up.  The spirit of the dead girl blathering on about the meaning of life and death makes her death seem seem more trite than tragic.

I'm not even going to get into the comedy relief provided by Susan Sarandon as the eccentric grandmother.

As usual this flop of film once again only goes to prove the brilliance of Rod Serling's Twlight Zone series.  This "life after death" stuff was the kind of thing that series could do in a half an hour (including commercials) and with a lot more film making skill than Peter Jackson could do on a budget of $65 million dollars.

And what's with Mark Wahlberg's haircut.

136 minutes. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson.