Movie Log: King Kong, Trap, and THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

King Kong

1976, USA, d. John Guillermin, 2h14m, **
Who's In It: Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, Charles Grodin
File Under: Giving it a chance

There are a lot of big movies that I have never seen either because I assumed that they were bad, or that they just were not for me. But there is wisdom in knowing that you are sometimes wrong, so you can expect to see me occasionally "giving one a chance".

Kong '76 is trying so hard to update King Kong to its time, that it immediately became a dated artifact of the 1970s. In this movie, the expedition to Skull Island is an oil exploration vessel responding to the fuel crisis. Which is an interesting idea, but the script then has to insult its audience's intelligence in order to get archaeologist Jeff Bridges on board as a stowaway (after a quick background check, he's forgiven and given a job), and Jessica Lange as a wannabe-actress who's rescued at sea. Apparently, she fell off a yacht during a storm directly into a life raft. She was the sole survivor because she didn't want to watch Deep Throat in the yacht's cabin; the box office hit porno of 1972 is weirdly mentioned a lot in Kong '76. It was already a dated reference at this point, but maybe we can blame the Watergate scandal for keeping it in the zeitgeist.

Instead of the Empire State Building, the finale of Kong '76 takes place atop the brand-new World Trade Center. The ludicrous explanation for Kong scaling the World Trade Center is that they look like the twin mountain peaks where he lives. Even if you buy that, the flat square of the top of one of the towers is a boring visual locale for the finale. There were literally zero shots of this finale worthy of a screen capture for inclusion in this newsletter.

This is only worth watching to see Jessica Lange's first film role; she's pretty good, despite her character being a ditzy stereotype. She brings more life to it than Jeff Bridges does to his role of "guy who explains everything". Some of the production design is pretty cool, but the robotic Kong creations are showing the limitations of a tight budget.

The budget for this was $12 million, which was the biggest movie budget in 1976, but only $4 million more than All the President's Men. Dino di Laurentiis was smart about where to spend and where to cut costs, so while it is passably a "big movie", it has not stood the test of time.

Until the End of the World

1991, The World, d. Wim Wenders, 4h47m, ****
Who's In It: William Hurt, Sam Neill, Solveig Dommartin, et al.
File Under: Wim Wenders, Post-Apocalypse

With a nearly 5-hour runtime, it's fair to say that German director Wim Wenders' magnum opus is not going to appeal to most people. But for cinephiles, it is an Everest - a megalith to try to conquer - along with even longer films like the 7-hour Sátántangó. In my mind, one trains for these films by becoming familiar with a filmmaker's shorter works, and waits for the "conditions" to be right. We were very lucky for an Austin film club to take a chance and book a public screening of this film. A little over 50 people attended (a good dozen of whom were not properly "trained" and left at intermission).

For more than 2 hours it is a messy, episodic sci-fi chase across the globe at the end of the millennium - futuristic visions of Venice, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and San Francisco - with the doomsday clock poised at 11:59pm. But then nuclear bombs scramble the world's electronics, and the movie crashes into the Australian Outback for a 2-hour post-apocalyptic jam session at humanity's wake, where an experiment to record people's dreams is the only way to relive all that has been lost.

The characters in Until the End of the World are bank robbers, truth serum-wielding secret agents, a mad scientist, and a harmonica-playing private detective. The actors include Jeanne Moreau, Chishu Ryu, David Gulpilil, Max von Sydow: the faces of the world's greatest cinematic achievements. It's hard not to think of this as "Movies: The Grand Finale". 

Pour one out for the movies. Pour one out for humanity's fragile artistic legacy. In the future, at some point, we might lose all this, and we'll be left with what? Wim Wenders predicts: Tiny handheld devices soothing our addiction-addled attention spans with empty-calorie fragments of our memories in the form of blurry, bite-sized videos.

And his advice at the end of this 5-hour marathon: "Go read a book or something."

In all honesty, this story would have been well-suited to form a trilogy; it has two parts, but I felt there were three distinct phases to the story. And according to Wikipedia, there was at some point a "trilogy version". Alas, this was before the days of "limited series" on streaming platforms, and this is Wenders' preferred version of the film.

Trap

2024, USA, d. M. Night Shyamalan, 1h45m, ****
Who's In It: Josh Hartnett, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills

M. Night Shyamalan seems like a good dad. He gave one of his daughters Ishana her start in film/TV directing on his excellent TV series "Servant". Meanwhile, his oldest daughter Saleka is a singer-songwriter, and she gets a sizeable role in Trap as a popstar.

Not only does Trap deliver the simple pleasures of a cat-and-mouse suspense thriller, Shyamalan's best works are infused with his identity as a dad. He changed the ending of Knock at the Cabin because of his feelings as a father, and arguably made a much more interesting adaptation of the book in doing so.

This is a movie where the lead character is a serial killer, and we should absolutely root against him, but we also kind of relate to him just wanting to have a good day with his daughter. That's the weird alchemy of cinema sometimes.

• Shyamalan was apparently inspired by Operation Flagship, a trap where thousands of criminal fugitives were sent invitations to a lunch with the promise of free football tickets. The ones who showed up were arrested en masse. This trap was also used in last week's Al Pacino movie Sea of Love.

Paperhouse

1988, UK, d. Bernard Rose, 1h32m, ***1/2
Who's In It: Glenne Headly

Bullied at school and coping with a lengthy absence of her father, young Anna finds herself having vivid dreams, her notebook drawings of places and people come to life. The dream world here is unlike any other I've seen in cinema, although it was obviously an influence on Coraline. My only complaint is that it's a touch drab. The movie could probably use a remaster, but I think the stark colors were meant to be evocative of Anna's black-on-white line drawings.

Bernard Rose (Candyman) created a children's fantasy that was probably a little too scary for the children it was intended for. But it's also an interesting drama about how children process their world and try to exert control over it with their imaginations.

• When the original composer's score was turned in and found to be lacking, a young assistant by the name of Hans Zimmer volunteered to rewrite the whole thing on a tight deadline.
• The boy who played Marc died shortly after the film was made, and the girl who played Anna simply never pursued acting again.
• Glenne Headly is here to provide American "star power", I suppose, but I guess test audiences found it weird that the mom was the only American because they later had her dub over all of her lines with a fake British accent.
• Based on a book called "Marianne Dreams", Rose renamed the lead character after Ana Torrent, one of cinema's all-time child actors in:

The Spirit of the Beehive

1973, Spain, d. Victor Erice, 1h37m, ****1/2

On the one hand, it's easy to bemoan a loss of culture that we don't produce sophisticated, symbolism-laden movies like El espíritu de la colmena anymore. The title was inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck, a European intellectual of the early 20th century, and surely even our most intellectual filmmakers have moved on to more contemporary inspirations. But the cryptic, mysterious imagery of this movie had a more immediate goal of evading censorship by the Franco government. And it still only barely made it through.

Far from being a ponderous and sad tale, The Spirit of the Beehive is riveting because it is all seen through the widest little eyes ever committed to film: those of 6-year-old Ana Torrent. Like many child "performances", especially of this young age, it is not really a performance, but a game of imagination being played between filmmaker and child. When a travelling cinema brings Frankenstein to Ana's village in the movie, her reactions to the Monster are real: she is scared, but also fascinated and trying to see the good in him underneath his monstrous facade.

In her teens, Ana Torrent decided to really become an actress and would have a very successful career that recently reunited her with her first director. But Victor Erice's film would go on to inspire and influence generations of filmmakers, including Paperhouse and the films of Guillermo del Toro, who has set so many of his films in the Spanish Civil War (The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, Pinocchio). In The Spirit of the Beehive, you don't get as much fantasy or horror as in his films, but I think it is a deeper look into the point-of-view of a child and of the trauma of living under authoritarian rule.