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On July 9, 1981, Nintendo released Donkey Kong, the arcade game that saved the company. By this time Nintendo had been around nearly 100 years, though the company’s work had evolved greatly over time. It started as a playing-card company, later getting into such varied productions as instant rice and taxi services. In 1969, it ventured into an industry that would prove fruitful: electronic video games. For the next decade, Nintendo would achieve success in Japan with various home-gaming systems and arcade games. In 1979, the company decided it wanted to branch into the profitable U.S. market. Everyone agreed on...

With a new movie about King Kong coming out, a whole segment on NPR was devoted to proving that the fictional King Kong monster is actually a commentary on black people. The show interviewed Robin Means Coleman, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Michigan who specializes in studying King Kong. Yes, you read that right: a professor of Afro-American studies whose specialty is ... King Kong. [Snip] This is ridiculous. Yes, in the past, some racists have compared blacks to monkeys. But that does not mean that all portrayals of monkeys are about black people. In...

John Guillermin, a prolific British director best known for blockbusters like the 1974 disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” and the 1976 remake of “King Kong,” died on Sunday at his home in Topanga, Calif. He was 89. The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Mary Guillermin, said. In addition to big-budget extravaganzas, Mr. Guillermin (the name is French, but he pronounced it GILL-er-min) directed a raft of films in various genres from the end of the 1940s until he retired from filmmaking in the 1980s.

'Sexist' gorilla being kicked out of Dallas Zoo Patrick, a 23-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was born in the Bronx Zoo in 1990, has nipped at female apes he was to mate with and even bit one, and has belittled others. Patrick will be transferred to the Riverbanks Zoo and Gardens in Columbia, S.C. A "sexist" male gorilla at Dallas Zoo is being evicted and sent for therapy after he bit one female companion and belittled others. Patrick — a 430-pound Western lowland born at New York's Bronx Zoo in 1990 — will be moved to Riverbanks Zoo and Gardens...

KARALMANNA (Palakkad): Peter Jackson's King Kong is set on a mysterious, uncharted island. He might as well have shot it in Kerala. Or so it would seem, if — and that's literally a big if — claims by a team of amateur anthropologists are proved true. The team claims to have discovered footprints of a "giant-man" who had a shoe size of 29 inches, lived in a shelter 50 metres high and weighed well over 400 kg. Going by the footprint size, the creature may have been as tall as 17 feet, which would make it easily the "largest human...

...In a host of end-of-year honors, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson and Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart were both feted with knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II...

LORD of the Rings director Peter Jackson has been knighted for services to film. Sir Peter was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit after the New Zealand government announced in its New Year Honors today. Since starting out in film with cult classics the likes of Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, Jackson's popular work has included the Lord of The Rings trilogy, a King Kong remake and most recently, a film adaptation of the best-selling Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones.

King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe have taken away technical honours at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. The Peter Jackson-directed King Kong has won three of the four Academy Awards it was nominated for: visual effects, sound mixing and sound editing. Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia has won an Oscar for make-up, but lost out to King Kong for its other two nominations in visual effects and sound mixing. Philip Syemour Hoffman has won the Best Actor award for his portrayal of the waspish gay author Truman Capote, in...

Hollywood's problems at the box office last year may come down not so much to quality (or the lack thereof), as many have supposed, but to taste. There are plenty of talented craftsman in Hollywood, but—and this will come as no surprise—the prevailing tastes in Hollywood may not match those of the general movie-going public. Just look at the films that people actually went to see last year, and compare that list to what Hollywood is now recognizing as 2005's best. The 15 top-grossing films released in 2005, in descending order, were: Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith; Harry...

Ok, Freepers: As some of you know I occassionally work with films. This "review" of King Kong was posted to H-AMSTUDY, the main list serve for professionals in American Studies. Many, many academics wrote in agreement. If, after reading this, you want to know what it is like for your sons and daughters in college, go to the following web site and type King Coon into the search engine. You will get maybe two dozen responses which, with one exception, are supportive of this statement. McVey http://www.h-net.org/ H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online about search site map editors donate contact...

Vatican's Evolutionists By Rafael Brom Catholics should wonder why Vatican constanly issuing a stout defence of Charles Darwin's Fraudulent Communist Religion "Theory of Evolution". Now we have Vatican's high ranked Cardinal claiming that the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. Looks like that 150 million martyrs who were tortured and killed by communists since 1917 in the name of "Theory of Evolution" did not read their Bible correctly. I am sure that Vatican's Evolutionists will one day declare St. Peter as the First Communist...

LOS ANGELES — "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" snatched the box office crown from "King Kong" during another fierce four-day holiday battle for the top spot. Less than $2 million separated "Kong" and "Narnia" each of the past two weekends. "We edged out `Kong.' It's been neck-and-neck," Buena Vista's Dennis Rice said Monday. "These are two great movies in the marketplace that are doing great business." "Narnia" took in an estimated $32.8 million from Friday through Monday, nudging Universal's "King Kong" out of the No. 1 spot and into second with a New Year's...

It's far too early to write any obituaries for Universal Pictures' "King Kong." As of Tuesday, the end of its first two weeks in release, Peter Jackson's remake had amassed $128 million domestically and $153.6 million abroad, for a combined worldwide haul of $282.1 million. With those numbers, it's just about halfway home to recouping its $207 million production costs, give or take the added millions spent on marketing as well as the participations earmarked for Jackson. Still, the fact that "Kong" didn't automatically prevail as king of the jungle -- but instead has found itself in a day-to-day battle...

"King Kong" may be a far-fetched creation of Hollywood, but scientists say the big ape has some basis in biological fact: Animals on islands often evolve into gigantic versions of their mainland kin. "There is a whole body of research on islands which suggests gigantism occurs on them, but of course nothing on the scale of King Kong," said Sue Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and director of the global species program for WWF International. "There is evidence that this happens because of isolation and a lack of competition...The further an island is from the mainland, the more potential there is...

King Kong: The Greatest Remake Ever Made Author: Red Square, Location: Karl Marx Treatment Center Posted: 12/30/2005, 6:37 pm The huge popularity of our original King Kong review has prompted us to do an immediate remake. Progressive critics (do we get to read any others?) hail Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong for many good reasons - except for the real ones. Those can only be discussed among the Party elites (and The People's Cube readers, of course). The strongest subliminal message this movie sends is that of the moral bankruptcy of America 's culture of greed and commercialism and...

It wasn’t a particularly good year for conservative cinema. It rarely is. Yet alongside the cavalcade of ideology, mediocrity and stupidity that is Hollywood today, a few gems shone forth dazzlingly. What is a conservative film? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It’s not about men with bulging biceps and even bigger guns. It’s not cartoonish action heroes. It isn’t revenge tales masquerading as heroism. Conservative cinema does more than entertain; movies that do no more are visual candy. It instructs and inspires. Conservative films celebrate virtue. They tell timeless tales of individuals overcoming all manner of adversity to achieve...

For once, the critics and I are wild about the same movie – not, however, for the same reasons. Peter Jackson’s re-make of the 1933 classic, "King Kong," is wonderful in every way. But its magic lies not in computer-generated action sequences, but in its portrayal of old-fashioned ideals. Still, it is a great action film. Skull Island, residence of K. Kong, Esq., is an overgrown and weirdly mutated Jurassic Park. There’s a brontosauruses-going-over-the-cliff stampede, and Kong battles not one, but three T-Rexes to save the damsel in distress. There are giant insects, bats the size of single-engine planes and...

I went and saw the latest King Kong movie the other night. All 3 hours and 10 minutes of it. But once again the biggest question I've had about this movie remains unanswered. After they knock out King Kong on the island, how do they get him on the boat? You'd think with 3 hours + of movie we could have gotten an answer to that question

Well, having read all the reviews, perused the comments on many discussion groups, I was fairly well prepared to enjoy myself today when I went to see the new "Kong"... I walked out MAJORLY disappointed. The movie got off to a swell start - I actually liked the first one hour of the picture the best, as I think the re-creation of Depression-era NYC was excellent, and playing Al Jolson singing "I'm Sittin' on Top of the World" juxtaposed with breadlines was brilliant. (It was also an awesome tribute to the "World's Greatest Entertainer", the greatest American Pop Singer of...

The history of movie-based video games has not been a pretty one. Since the disastrous sales of the 1983 game "E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial" almost drove Atari into bankruptcy, it has been common knowledge that movie-license games are cheap quickies designed purely to capitalize on a film's publicity. Last month's release of the video-game adaptation of "Peter Jackson's King Kong" caps a year that proves those days are over. Designed by Michel Ancel, a respected game designer handpicked by Jackson, the movie's director, the stylish, critically acclaimed "Kong" is not the first good game ever based on a movie. But...