A fire hit the Universal Studios backlot on Sunday morning, destroying a video library as well as a number of notable sets and the King Kong “ride” from the tram tour. Contrary to internet hysteria, the Back to the Future clock tower (as in, “Save the Clock Tower! SAVE the Clock Tower!!!”) was damaged but remains standing, although the courthouse facade adjacent to it was destroyed, as was all of New York Street. There are tons of camcorder tourist videos of the King Kong thing on YouTube; the one embedded above is not only the best quality I could find, it also includes a shot at the end of the concrete lions that marked the entrance to the gated community in which the McFly family lived in Improved 1985. After the jump: the magic of the Clock Tower in action. …Read more
Wanna know how I know I’m not racist? I’ve been staring at the cover of the latest Vogue magazine for weeks and I didn’t once link the image of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen to King Kong and Fay Wray. But plenty of other peoplehave beenmaking the connection, calling the Annie Leibovitz-photographed cover offensive. Sure, maybe the pose makes James, who is apparently now the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue, look too violent, but I wouldn’t necessarily claim he’s made to ape Kong (pun intended).
Then again, it took me years to find out/realize that King Kongwas as racist a film as they come. Perhaps I’m more ignorant than racist, at least in the way NAACP spokesman Richard McIntire puts it: “some younger folks who don’t have that exposure may not even know what the King Kong movies were, may not get that.” (quoted by Women’s Wear Daily). However, when I finally did watch the 1933 original in its entirety as an adult, the colonialism allegory was clear as day. And I believe the film is pretty racist in retrospect, as are so, so many early films. Yet for all the places that have been colonized in history, I think it’s even more racist to claim that Kong is necessarily metaphoric of black victims of colonization.
There isn’t much to say about this new Cloverfieldspot, except to point out that New Year’s Rockin’ Eve isn’t the best place to premiere a trailer, in my opinion. I guess part of the target demo is sci-fi geeks without friends, a date or a party to attend, but then those geeks are probably doing something better than watching Ryan Seacrest ring in 2008 in Times Square. Sure, millions of TVs likely were tuned to Rockin’ Eve around the 11:50-12:01 mark, but it’s not as though the ball drop is like the Super Bowl. Most of us have the show on mute, because we’d rather listen to our dance music and our popping corks and our bubbly bubbling … and obviously our own shouting of the countdown, and so certainly missed any commercials.
Wanna know how I know I’m not racist? I’ve been staring at the cover of the latest Vogue magazine for weeks and I didn’t once link the image of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen to King Kong and Fay Wray. But plenty of other people have been making the connection, calling the Annie Leibovitz-photographed cover offensive. Sure, maybe the pose makes James, who is apparently now the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue, look too violent, but I wouldn’t necessarily claim he’s made to ape Kong (pun intended).
