strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

Dec 18 05: Gorilla gorilla gorilla!

Saw King Kong tonight, which should not be confused with Brokeback Mountain, which is the movie we have not seen. (Now, if somebody could do some sort of mashup of the aforementioned films, that would be something to see as well. The mind boggles.)

Before I begin, though, can I ask a question here? What kind of person brings a four-year-old to see King Kong?

Yes, the big ape was cool, and there were dinosaurs, but. The big ape was intermittently scary. The dinosaurs were almost always scary. The giant bugs were unfailingly scary and frequently also likely to induce the heebie-jeebies. And then there were the gigantic… the gigantic very toothy man-eating penises. What the hell were those things? Gaaah. At any rate, I feel sorry for the many, many small children who were at our screening today, because they won’t be sleeping so well over the next week or six. I do not feel sorry for their parents, who will be comforting them tonight and/or paying their therapists’ bills later.

Anyway, other than having to deal with the usual ringing cell phones and chattering kindergarteners, the movie rocked. I only wanted to slap the Jack Blackiness out of Jack Black once or twice. Naomi Watts was generally fabulous and looked eerily like Nicole Kidman. Kong himself seemed like a really big gorilla and not a guy pretending to be a really big gorilla. The tribe of ooga-booga people on Skull Island I wasn’t entirely sure about; I feel like we didn’t get enough of an idea of who these people really were, or what their lives were like, but then this was not Ursula K. LeGuin Presents King Kong. Which is another film I’d love to see. I would also note that Act III, Kong’s night on the town, passed awfully quickly—the hours between the curtain going up on the Kongstravaganza and the sun rising over Long Island pass in about twenty minutes, with no obvious lacunae to stash the leftovers in.

Still: it’s great fun, and absolutely worth your eleven-or-so bucks. Afterwards the movie clan agreed that (a) it might be fun to see on the big screen a second time; and that (b) the inevitable DVD-with-all-the-trimmings, if it holds up to the standards Jackson and crew established for LOTR, will be an utter gas.

Commentary

And I liked the film… Peter Jackson is a great director…

posted by Kate, Dec 29 05 1:02 PM