King Freak

My humans just watched the movie King Kong, which they've had on DVD since, hmm, oh yeah, my male human's birthday in July. They are so lame. Anyway, have you seen this? What a freak of nature! I mean, I guess that's the point. But Santa Maria! That thing was as big as a building! A very hairy and probably extremely smelly building.

The movie was so-so. I didn't find Adrian Brody to be the obnoxious yahoo I usually do, maybe because he wasn't in the central role. Still, I much preferred the gigantic monkey.

I thought many of the action scenes weren't realistic in any sense of the word. I also found them, frankly, boring. Just like the car chase scene in Matrix 2 -- bor-ing. When your action scenes are boring, you've got trouble. It announces to the world that you're so short on story you've got to fill screen time with all of this EXCITING ACTION and these FABULOUS SPECIAL EFFECTS! Yeah, well, I'm not buying it. Here's a tip: edit the darn movie! Three hours is ridiculous. What American can sit still for that long these days? I don't want to work for this. I'm here to be entertained! And for my maximum entertainment, it must be done within two hours or be extra-fabulous. This wasn't either.

So I give it a dewclaw half up. It was okay overall, with some good points, and it made my female human cry at the end, so I guess that's something. (Of course, if she sees any animal hurt, real or not, she cries like a baby, so maybe I shouldn't count that.) If it had been trimmed to a reasonable two hours, I think I could find it in my critical little heart to give it a dewclaw all the way up. Let's hope Peter Jackson doesn't get so enamored with the special effects in his next film that he forgets his audience and their limited attention spans. I've heard that he did a great job with the LOTR trilogy, so maybe this is an aberration. I hope so.