on the subject of kongs

I finally watched King Kong last weekend. Needless to say, it was a great movie and deserves all the praise it received. Naomi Watts did a fantastic job conveying feelings and emotions without words. She really makes the movie what it is. I loved those moments of silent communication between her and Kong, and I felt that these scenes were cut too short so the interjecting action scenes were jarring and took away from it. Although I'm sure if they were cut longer, the action types would complain that they're boring. Rocky told me that some people complained about the first hour or so being too slow. I felt that they were just right and not slow at all, actually quite an excellent intro. However this perception may have been colored by the fact that I watched Mrs. Henderson Presents, another wonderful movie, earlier that day. MHP showed a lot of theater life and also had a wispy blond girl in a major role, so there were a lot of similarities between the pacing of this movie and the beginning of King Kong.

The one thing I felt uncomfortable with was Jack Black's character towards the end. In the beginning, when he goes to great lengths to get the boat to leave New York and avoid the authorities, you believe that he is doing this out of passion for a great film. Towards the end, you find that these "great lengths" include letting his friends die (and being so callous as to say they died "for passion", twice) so he can bring back Kong and put him on stage. By the end I had lost all my sympathy for Carl Denham, which is why when he says "It was beauty killed the beast" in the very last line in the film, I didn't believe him. Not that I didn't believe the girl causes Kong's eventual downfall, but that Carl Denham as portrayed in this movie was too shallow and self-serving to have said such a thing, unless it was meant to take responsibility off him and make himself feel better. After all, it is partly, if not mostly, because of him that Kong wreaked havoc on NYC.

Anyway, these were my thoughts on the movie and I wanted to get it off my chest.