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A LOVE STORY
19 January 2006
I just saw the new "King Kong" and discovered that it has one of the most extended and impressive silent (non-dialogue)
passages I've ever seen in a sound film -- the love story between Anne Darrow and Kong. It's a real love story, too, complex
and moving -- sort of like a little silent film nestled inside what is otherwise a bloated and self-indulgent mess.
I thought the overall script, and the dialogue especially, was dreadful -- veering between clumsy thought-balloon character
exposition and failed wit. The long build-up to the arrival at the island in the original film is masterful by comparison
-- breezy, suspenseful, funny and entertaining. The build-up in the new film is just tiresome. About twenty minutes into
it I seriously considered walking out and waiting to see the rest of the film on DVD someday -- but that would have been a
mistake. The film really takes off with the brontosaurus stampede -- and when Darrow and the ape hook up, the film elevates
itself to a higher plane (as it were.)
Naomi Watts and the CG ape give star performances, particularly when they interact, and the battle with the T-Rexes is not
only thrilling visually but exciting emotionally, because it drives the relationship between Darrow and Kong.
Finally, in the stunning, breathtaking -- almost nauseating -- vertigo of the climax on the Empire State Building, the
Darrow character is given a chance to repay Kong in kind for his earlier heroics in her behalf. It's a genuine dramatic climax
to this wondrous silent film within a film.
It's too much, I guess, to hope for an "audience cut" of the film on DVD some day -- one that eliminates most
of the pre-island stuff and concentrates on the real magical heart of the film, a brilliant new take on an old theme . . .
Beauty and the Beast.
JUBILEE!
14 January 2006
"Jubilee!" is one of the last two classic showgirl revues still playing on the Las Vegas Strip. It's an extraordinary
cultural artifact, that seems to exist outside of time.
At the core of the classic showgirl revue are the choreographed parades of the half-naked showgirls, bare-breasted but
fantastically costumed, mainly above the ears, in the elaborate headdresses they manage to balance miraculously as they go
through their parade evolutions.
The display of female pulchritude is almost overwhelming. The traditional showgirl has a fantastic body and knows how
to move with a dancer's grace and so it is with the girls in the "Jubilee!" revue. They all have lovely breasts,
of course, but what's really stunning is that all of them seem to be real. Real breasts have become a novelty in Las Vegas
-- and not just in the strip clubs -- so it's really breathtaking to see so many of them in one place, bobbing gently as the
girls promenade, in their wondrous variety of natural shapes, with no trace of the overstretched, shiny skin that so often
gives away the presence of an implant.
It's all so much more erotic than the bumping and grinding of girls with artificial tits and no dancerly grace in the
lap dance emporia of this town. I think that most strip clubs are designed to help men feel temporarily superior to women,
but at "Jubilee!" this is not possible -- there are too many of them, they are too poised and dignified. You must
worship them or slink away like a whipped cur.
It's the numbers of naked women appearing onstage at any given moment that turn the show into a celebration of Woman,
that keep it from becoming a spectacle-display of women. The show is also an object lesson in the concept of nudity. Sometimes
the women wear slightly transparent bras, sometimes they wear spangled strings that outline their breasts, sometimes they
wear no tops at all. There is no progression here, as in a strip "tease", just a witty and seductive kind of play.
The lines of naked women make entrances at various times throughout the variety show -- then, in the second act, there
is a long section (about the sinking of "The Titanic", of all things) where they make no appearance at all . . .
so that when at last they do reappear the moment is joyous. There is clearly a long tradition of showgirl-revue theatrical
practice being drawn on here, and the skillful calculation of it is impressive. (The late Donn Arden, who created "Jubilee!"
more than twenty years ago, once worked for the Cafe Lido in Paris, home of the famous Bluebell girls and one of the classic
French topless revues from which the showgirl revues of of Las Vegas descended.)
Even more impressive is the fact that this tradition is presented in "Jubilee!" without a wink, without quotes
around it, without apology. It's as though the years since 1957 never happened -- we are in a timeless, mythical place while
the show plays, the land of the showgirls. The singing and dancing and juggling and acrobatics that make up the bulk of the
revue itself are professional and sometimes awesome, but they are just there to set off the girls, to serve as reminders that
there is simply nothing like a dame -- nothing you can name that is anything like a dame.
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