I really must be getting old. For some reason I no longer have the energy to keep up with my friends; they can stay up all night and still make it for their 8:30 classes the next day but I have to beg off at 8 p.m. even though I don’t have to get up til around 9 the next morning. Hell, sometimes even 1 a.m. is way too late for me already. Maybe I just need to get more sleep, or vitamins or something.
Today I ended early so I decided to watch King Kong at Glorietta with Pat and some friends from school. For those who didn’t know, King Kong is directed by Peter Jackson (the same dude who directed The Lord of the Rings trilogy) so naturally the movie was three hours long and slightly epic. I half-expected Aragorn to pop out in the middle of the movie, riding a horse or charging with his sword, because some of the scenery, character design, and camera angles really looked like stuff out of LOTR.
King Kong was a high-energy, exciting, and slightly stupid movie. It catered to every single fear I had: heights, freaky ghost-like children, and bugs. I felt my skin crawl when I saw the giant centipede and couldn’t bear to watch the rest of the scene. Bbut the worst was the huge, man-eating leeches. They were ugly, bloated, undulating things with fangs, and what made them particularly awful for me was how their victims suffered slow, horrible deaths. In the movie, one unfortunate crew member had an arm inside the mouth of a leech and his head being sucked in slowly by another leech, and even when his head was in the leech’s body you could hear him screaming. *shiver* I’m going to have nightmares tonight.
(Which reminded me of this weird dream I had last night. For some reason I had to observe the mating habits of cockroaches and I had very vivid close-up images of a cockroach penis repeatedly plunging inside a cockroach vagina. Not the most pleasant dream I’ve had.)
There are a lot of logical holes in the film, though. You never do find out how in the world Carl Denham (Jack Black) gets ahold of this mysterious map that pointed to the mysterious island. You also never find out how they manage to lug King Kong all the way to Manhattan using their rusty, rickety boat. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) not only runs around the jungle in nothing but a silk nightie; she is also barefoot and manages to stay clean and have perfect hair while being chased by King Kong, T-Rexes, and what have you. Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody) can do anything, from riding a bat to finding where King Kong was hiding in the jungle when so many others have died in the attempt. And the list goes on.
In spite of these pitfalls, I found King Kong to be a very exciting, and very brain-numbing experience. I guess that’s also partly due to the fact that I was with people who share the same sense of humor as I do. Don’t expect anything intelligent or clever from this movie because it really is nothing more than effective yet mindless entertainment. 3.5/5
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