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| Once upon a time (72 years ago, to be exact, in 1933), there was movie about a monkey. He was a big monkey with a blonde obsession, and liked dangling them over the Empire State Building. Now, on Friday, comes the most anticipated Hollywood remake of the year. |
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| It would have been possible to say King Kong was just another revamped remake, like Godzilla, but that's foolish for a variety of reasons. At $200 million (by a very conservative estimate), the whopping ape movie is helmed by none other than Peter Jackson, the one time B-grade horror filmmaker who reaped box-office billions and numerous Oscars with his cinema adaptation of J R R Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings trilogy. |
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| Seen here in the hairy hand of her biggest fan, Naomi Watts plays Ann Darrow, an actress with the ability to make the primate stop in his tracks. After her excellent work in films like Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams, we're hoping the actress will fit right into King Kong's palm |
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| Jack Black stars as Carl Denham, an adventure-documentary filmmaker who chances upon the great beast and brings it back to civilisation. Casting the comedian is an unlikely decision, but with films like High Fidelity and The School Of Rock to his name, acting range has never been a problem with Jack. |
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| Adrien Brody plays Jack Driscoll, a playwright from New York who becomes the adventure's inadvertent hero. Not just did Brody win an Oscar for Roman Polanski's The Pianist, but he is also the only American to win a Cesar, France's answer to the Academy Awards. |
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| Ultimately, however, the film is not about any of these characters. This is a movie about the monkey, and the great ape is voiced by Andy Serkis -- the man who memorably made J R R Tolkien's deformed hobbit Gollum and Smeagol his own in Jackson's Lord Of The Rings series. |
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| King Kong is not just a disaster movie. It is a film about humans and humanity, greed and selfishness, suffering and sacrifice. It is a film about nobility. Stomping into US theatres on December 14, it releases in India on the 16th. |
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