more King Kong

I don't have the motivation. Last night I was working on elaborate conspiracy theories to explain this, but now I just don't care.

The bottom line is that at no point in the movie did I care what happened to any of the characters. They took a full 90 minutes before any action happened, and I have no idea why they even bothered with more than 5 minutes of intro. I assume they were trying to develop the characters, but none of it worked for me at all. In fact, as all the characters were introduced, I felt confused because it was like they didn't even try to make them real. They were like stupid cartoons that you couldn't relate to at all, which can work in a pure comedy or a pure action movie, but King Kong wasn't trying to be either of those. Ugh.

Naomi Watts starts out boring and is only interesting because she's pretty. Adrian Brody starts out boring and stays boring. Not surprisingly, I didn't have any interest in the boring love story between Adriann Brody and Naomi Watts. It seemed like they were trying to set up all kinds of stuff with the crew of the ship, but none of it ever went anywhere. The only characters I found remotely interesting were Tom Hanks' son (that character goes nowhere, but I just liked his acting) and the goofy guy who played the male lead of the film Jack Black was making.

This brings me to Jack Black. I love Jack Black, and I think he can be a great actor went he wants to be. I think he took this part and did everything with it that they wanted him to do. But he was terrible for this part. To explain why, I need to reference another movie - Wedding Crashers. Christopher Walken was horribly miss-cast (sp?) as the powerful politician father. If you are going to cast Walken in a comedy, you have to take advantage of everything Walken brings to the table. He can be brilliantly intense or totally hilarious and goofy, but the role asked him to be just this bland straight-man. Why use Walken for that? It doesn't make sense. Walken didn't do anything wrong with the role, he just wasn't right for the part.

Same thing with JB in Kong. The role called for a mildly goofy and amusing dude who puts his own obsession with making his movie above everything else. In the scenes of Kong where Black was supposed to be amusing, you could tell he was holding back. His character was always somewhat comedic, but when he was supposed to be serious, I felt painfully aware that I was looking at a brilliantly funny guy trying to play a mildly funny guy acting serious at the moment. It was just awkward and painful to watch.

The action scenes on the island were very very cool, and the CGI was excellent. I have no problem with suspending disbelief and overlooking the many things that didn't make any sense and just enjoy the show. King Kong fighting the T-Rexi was awesome. Basically there were 30 minutes of the 3 hour movie that I found entertaining.

I'm trying to figure out why people are saying such good things about this movie. I think that film geeks liked it because it is a remake of a very old movie that everyone has heard of but only film geeks have ever seen. So that's 1 point in their book. Plus the plot of the movie I assumed to be a big spoof of the movie industry, so I'm sure the critics love that.

I think Peter Jackson is a good director, so I'm going to acknowledge the possibility that this could even have been a good movie in the sense that Heart of Darkness was a good book - respect the art, but god it is boring. Maybe the first 90 minutes were spent painting a picture and establishing allegories that I didn't care enough to notice. Maybe they delivered some poignant message in the last hour that I totally missed because I was too busy wondering why anyone would possibly care about a huge monkey being in love with a blonde.

But how could anybody care about anything that happened? It baffles me. I must have asked myself a dozen times while watching it, "what is the point of this movie?" It isn't a cool story (giant ape falls in love with woman, shows her the sunrise, and fucks shit up??); it isn't an action movie because they spent way too much time on other stuff; in spite of a few funny moments it isn't a comedy. It is just a boring festival of crap.


This is a terrible blog entry. Sorry.