Long Kong

We saw Peter Jackson's King Kong remake today -- and, literally, my butt was numb by the closing credits. (Yeah, yeah, TMI.)

I had a love/hate relationship with this movie. There were many things to love, such as the scenes where Kong came to life, enjoying companionship or the novelty of sliding on the ice. I loved the tactile sense of bits like Kong grabbing a biplane by the fuselage and strut, spinning around with it, and hurling it at another plane over the dawn-lit New York skyline (and the complications of making a scene like that look lifelike would melt a non-computer-geek mind like mine), as well as the dinosaur vs. Kong sequences. Jack Black as Carl Denham seemed much more a slave to his own mania (he actually believes his own BS) than the Denham in the original. And of course Naomi Watts's character is more assertive and three-dimensional than the original Faye Wray character.

What I hated was the excess. We could have done with fewer, or shorter, scenes of Watts and Kong looking into each others' eyes and sharing an unspoken communication -- we get the point. And the bit on Skull island seemed to take forever. At heart, this isn't an adaptation of a classic of English literature, like Lord of the Rings was; it's a story about savage nature confronting urban humanity and succumbing to it. Or, more exactly, it's about a humungous ape who fights neat dinosaurs, kills humans like flies, becomes a fool for love, climbs a big phallic symbol and bashes biplanes. Trimming a bit would have been nice.