Wednesday, December 21, 2005

The Monkey Movie

It's always good to get a few movies in over the Christmas season so Ali and I trundled into town to see King Kong on the big screen at The Odeon in Leicester Square yesterday. The only turkey I want to see is on Christmas day so I had high hopes that Peter Jackson would not disappoint me with his monkey movie and he certainly did not. This is one of the best films I have seen in ages. It runs for three hours and 17 minutes but you would be forgiven for thinking it was half that length. There are occasional moments when the special effects look a bit unfinished, for example the folks running between the legs of the stampeding diplodocus looked a bit "blue screen", but on the whole the effects were a marvel. The monkey itself never looked anything other than 25 foot sliver back gorilla with a range of expression and tenderness that was almost human. But more important than all that emotion crap, he kicks serious butt, for example at one point he takes on and beats three T-Rex's at once. Now that's Monkey Magic.

I won't go into any more details incase there is, unlikely as it seems, anyone out there doesn't know what happens or hasn't seen the 1933 original. But if you want to go and see a thrilling, scary, occasionally funny and very touching film then King Kong is great. Just need to check out Narnia and Potter now. I doubt that will be as good as the monkey.

3 comments:

Darren said...

Pardon moi for being a smartarse, but King Kong (if he were real) would be an ape, not a monkey.

The Potter movie was good, although I did feel a bit like they were just trying to get through it to continue the series rather than make the best movie possible. I guess that's the problem with a two and a bit hour movie from a 700 page book - they were always gonna have to skip large chunks. Not including Dobby and Winky was a major downer.

They'll have a different kind of problem with 'Order of the Phoenix', a book where essentially nothing happens until the last few pages.

Mr Ports said...

True - but on the list of funny words Monkey is very high up whilst the more accurate ape is very low. And as you will know if you have ever seen me present, I always favour funny over accurate. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story etc.

Darren said...

That's true enough. Someone told me today that King Kong had a sad ending, to which I replied "why, did they run out of bananas?" which was a lot funnier than him falling to his death from the Empire State Building. Ah, poor old giant simian.

Hands up who thought the 1976 version starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges was the best of the lot...? No, me neither. It was shite. Even though I was only 11, I was old enough to recognise a turkey when I saw one.