Give me a break

Quote :

"Is KING KONG racist? asks Jim Pinkerton in his Thursday NEWSDAY column. "Lots of people say it is. And, if it is, why does the film keep getting remade? What does it say about us if the new KONG is a huge hit?" Pinkerton writes: 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.) Movie reviewer David Edelstein, writing in SLATE, notes 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." Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "King Kong racism" yielded 490,000 hits. Comparing the new film with the original, the WASHINGTON POST's Stephen Hunter observed, "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." And by more vivid, Hunter might be referring to the natives of mythical Skull Island, where Kong is discovered. Director Jackson took people of Melanesian stock - the dark-skinned peoples who are indigenous to much of the South Pacific, including Jackson's own country of New Zealand - and made them up to look and act like monsters, more zombie-ish than human. Indeed, one is moved to compare these human devils to the ogre-ish Orcs from Jackson's mega-Oscar LORD OF THE RINGS films. The bad guys are dark, hideous and undifferentiatedly evil. Developing... "

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash6.htm

*WARNING, SPOILERS* if you haven't, in fact, ever seen or heard the story before.

















YES, the metaphor does seem to compare well to slavery. I fail to see, however, why a metaphor about slavery needs to be inherently racist. Are we forgetting the end of the film? Where we kill kong even though he did nothing wrong? Where MAN turns out to be the monster? Where we feel more for kong than for the people who he was supposedly terrorizing? Where the white woman loves him as well?

people are STUPID AS FUCK

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 1:14 PM. Reason : .]

12/15/2005 1:13:01 PM

wiat

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 1:19 PM. Reason : d]

12/15/2005 1:19:24 PM

This reminds me of the people who said all the clones in Star Wars were Mexicans.

Which was funny, because they weren't.

12/15/2005 1:22:50 PM

RODNEY KING KONG

12/15/2005 1:40:13 PM

Quote :

"Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "King Kong racism" yielded 490,000 hits. "

its TRUE THEN!

12/15/2005 1:43:03 PM

GIVE US FREE

12/15/2005 1:43:53 PM

i searched google for "king kong umbrella" and i got 448,000
searching "king kong racism" with the quotes in the search returns 3


"king kong iraq" returned 2,730,000
this writer doesn't know how google works apparently.

12/15/2005 1:51:53 PM

legatic wins this round

-ZiP!-

12/15/2005 1:58:45 PM

^^Yeah exactly. What doesn't return 400 000 links when you search for something in google?

12/15/2005 2:18:28 PM

haha, this came up on SomethingAwful's Weekend Web last weekend. From some white power site they ripped on:

12/15/2005 2:19:39 PM

holy shit

thats rough

12/15/2005 2:21:55 PM

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 2:24 PM. Reason : .]

12/15/2005 2:24:15 PM

I think I can see the slavery symbolism and all that stuff, but I think people are reading a little bit too much into this thing.

12/15/2005 2:32:09 PM

Quote :

"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. "

haha i think this guy is giving the average american movie goer way too much credit

12/15/2005 2:34:00 PM

HAHAHAHAA, OMG how did I not get a huge monkey was supposed to represent a black man????

Come to think of it, maybe the T-Rex in Jurassic Park represented a black man too huh? It was caged up, and then broke free, and ........

12/15/2005 2:35:29 PM

If you try hard enough, you can make an argument that just about anything is racist.

12/15/2005 2:37:12 PM

Quote :

"Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "King Kong Matt Drudge racism" yielded 161,000 hits."

12/15/2005 2:39:04 PM

The minute I saw the tribespeople in the film I saw racism claims coming from someone somewhere.

12/15/2005 2:42:04 PM

I think the film Predator is a racist. In it, the predator killed that black guy after shooting his arm off. This symbolizes how back in the days of slavery, black families would unjustly be separated from each other at a slave auction. Arnold also called the same guy a "son of a bitch," implying that his mother (in this case his mother was a metaphor for Africa) was a female dog.

12/15/2005 2:42:28 PM

The moment I heard a movie about something, I thought race claims coming....

^LOL now thats creative thinking

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 2:43 PM. Reason : .]

12/15/2005 2:43:10 PM

Quote :

""Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "Penguins racism" yielded 693,000 hits.""

12/15/2005 2:50:58 PM

I read a really good article on this subject on a King Kong fan site

Quote :

"Why is this relevant to us? Because the basic, by now canonical storyline in the original King Kong is a product of the era in which it was created (I discuss this to some extent in Column 7: Going Native). The narrative is so compact because Cooper, Rose, Creelman, et.al. never have to waste time with explanations for what amounted to foregone conclusions in 1933: of course the ape will prefer the pale blonde; naturally the natives will flee until emboldened by the example of the white men; by all means riddle the giant beast with machine gun fire if he gets out of hand. And coconut bras? Why not! These viewpoints were pretty much universal in 1932; if anyone involved in the production raised an objection, it has never been noted or mentioned in any of the material to which I’ve been privy. And you may be the most enlightened person on your block in the here and now, but I can virtually guarantee that the 1932 version of you would not likely raise your hand in protest at an RKO production meeting (“Mr. Selznick, isn’t it demeaning for Driscoll to raise his hand as if to strike Charlie the Chinese Cook when annoyed with him?”). The character of Carl Denham is also a reflection of the times. He is painted as, at worse, an over-enthusiastic showman. At the end of the film there seems to be no overt animosity toward the man who instigated such destruction—completely in the name of financially enriching himself—at the hands of a giant ape. You almost sense awe and pity for him in the murmurs of the crowd as he approaches Kong’s corpse to deliver his famous—and comically self-absolving—line about Beauty killing the Beast. No one in the world of 1933 could blame him for grabbing opportunity by the scruff of the neck! It’s only in Son of Kong that we see Denham experiencing any sort of introspection or comeuppance. Different times, to say the least. Therefore, bringing the story into what we could optimistically call “a more enlightened era” is a definite challenge, especially if you want to maintain the naïve pulp charm of the original tale. For example, in an update like the “Kong: King of Skull Island” book by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland, which is designed to be as consistent as possible with the original narrative, those hypersensitive to issues of race and traditional patterns of depicting non-Western cultures can squint hard and find old tropes unconsciously resurrected and reinforced. Despite a “rehabilitation” of the Skull Island tribe (which a fellow Kong geek has gloomily characterized as “a vaguely New Age-ish ‘apology’ for the fierce, primal ‘keepers of the shrine’ in the original”), it’s explained offhandedly that native female sacrifices simply “died of fright,” while Ann Darrow is evidently further evolved and therefore impervious to this “fright death.” The islanders become inert nonentities in the sections of the book set in 1957, apparently unable to change their situation in the slightest post-1933 or even interpret their own ancient language and art until salvation is delivered unto them from the civilized world in the form of two Denhams. For the most part—with the exception of an ancient golden age—the native population of the DeVito/Strickland Skull Island seems passive and incapable of independent action, and virtually all of the events that change their destiny are instigated by the visitations of white men from “out there”—which is inconsistent, to say the least, with their bold foray to kidnap Ann Darrow in the main canonical Kong story. Despite efforts to broaden the natives’ characterization for the 21st century, these are echoes of a story spawned in the 1930s, a product of the world as it once was."

12/15/2005 3:14:16 PM

Meh, perhaps this example doesn't apply.

This is certainly not a racist film by any stretch.

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 6:10 PM. Reason : d]

12/15/2005 6:08:12 PM

The Lion King decries racial integration.

12/15/2005 8:23:35 PM

Results 1 - 20 of about 148,000 for hamburger racism. (0.36 seconds)

12/15/2005 8:32:00 PM

Theres a lot of writers that love to throw out that "a google search yieled x hits" crap...they do their stupid search and they are done, never bothering to notice that after page 3 or 4 most everything has nothing to do with what they intended to search for. Hell I just search for Lee Fowler racism and got 60,100 hits...maybe we need to fire Lee Fowler since google says hes a racist bastard .

12/15/2005 8:40:59 PM

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,030,000 for bicycle racism

12/15/2005 8:41:00 PM

wow, I thought this would be about the black natives in the film.

at least they're not white people in blackface anymore.

12/15/2005 8:43:57 PM

^ the actors playing natives in the original were mostly American blacks

12/15/2005 8:51:34 PM

Quote :

"I fail to see, however, why a metaphor about slavery needs to be inherently racist."

agreed

12/15/2005 10:49:27 PM

Jesus dies.....

12/15/2005 11:23:09 PM

FRODO LIVES

12/15/2005 11:32:18 PM

SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!!1

12/16/2005 12:21:01 AM

that comic is actually how i found out that kong dies

12/16/2005 9:08:24 AM

Quote :

"people are STUPID AS FUCK"

12/16/2005 9:13:56 AM

lol--Jesus dies

12/16/2005 9:14:10 AM

last i heard its a movie about a big ape

12/16/2005 9:54:56 AM

Mrs. Lippys car...............




















is Green.

12/16/2005 10:26:31 AM

Titanic Sinks.

Shit.

12/16/2005 2:49:41 PM

Rocky I.......




Rocky Loses



III
&
FH

12/16/2005 3:40:33 PM