King Kong or It's Tough To Be A Blonde

When my partner turned to me this morning and said he wanted to go see King Kong today, I let out a whiny groan. “King Kong!”, I said, “You don’t want to see that, do you?”. Well that was a stupid queston since he just asked me if I wanted to go. l could see that my whining was not going to help and given the fact that my partner almost never asks for anything… I bit my tongue and decided to look up showtimes.

All day, I dreaded the fact that I would be attending the 3rd telling of this story. Hasn’t the story been told enough? I thought to myself. Insult to injury was added when my partner volunteered that the movie was over 3 hours long! Would I be able to sit through the thing without a pee break? Would I fall asleep? Would I have enough popcorn and Milk Duds to last throughout the picture? Not only these issues dashed through my mind , I also knew that the movie was directed by Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings. Let me clarify what that means to me in a few words, I call it Bored of the Rings.

Somehow I managed to get through the day without coming down with the bird flu… and before I knew it we were off to the theater. We sat down in our seats and I finished almost all my popcorn and Milk Duds (mixed together, of course) by the end of the previews. Then.. the movie began. There was no escape.

I won’t give you full review or plot synopsis (I am sure there are many people who have, and have done a far better job than I), but I will say that for all my complaining, it wasn’t that bad. The acting for the most part was first rate. I had read that most of the actors had to work with minimal sets and had to react to a whole lot of nothing. Naomi Watts does a fantastic job as the new Fay Wray. Her scenes with the giant ape are wonderful. You really feel that she has made a strong connection to this CGI character. Kyle Chandler is perfect as the dashing matinee idol, Bruce Baxter, and Adrien Brody is passable as the human who falls in love with the beauty. However Brody’s nose is just too much to take in at times on the big screen. Jack Black as Carl Denhem is the weakest of the bunch. He has toned down some of his wild-eyed mugging, but for the most part he is strictly first week at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. The ape was more believable!

The special effects were great, but just as in the previous movies when the ape holds the girl in his hand in a long shot, it looks fake. The gross out was an intense scene with giant bugs! It is definitely not for children under 12. It was terrifying and disgusting. My biggest complaint (other than it being too long) was the way humans get flung around, dashed against rocks, crushed by animals, fall from great heights, and yet somehow manage to survive. This has been a trend in a lot of movies over the last ten years. Apparently Hollywood has never heard of blunt force trauma. Yes I know that I am supposed to suspend disbelief, it is a movie for crying out loud, but keep the things that are real… real. If you fall down you can get hurt. You fall hard, you will get hurt. You fall down really hard, you dead!

See it… If you must!

Kudos: Mick Lasalle, San Francisco Chronicle