As promised, my humble take on Peter Jackson's movie and childhood fantasy with the big hairy ape, King Kong. And oh My God! the fella (and I mean good ole Pete and not Ah Kong) has lost so much weight! Not so long ago, Mr Jackson looked like a blardy gorilla himself. But i digress...:))
Anyway went to catch the show with a another couple yesterday. And just for the special occasion, I wuz slurping on a double-scooped cone of ben and jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream in the cinema.
2 words - Blardy Long! All bladder-bursting 183 minutes of it.
Peter had us sit thru' almost 70 mins of his wonderfully CGI-ed Manhattan before the silver-backed one scooped Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) away into the forest. By the time Ah Kong appeared, my own Chunky Monkey was well and truly digested. I hear in the original 1933 production, the protaganists were on the slow boat to Skull Island within 15mins of the show's opening. Fast game chop chop. But Peter chose to show us scenes like Ms Darrow stealing an apple and standing forlornly outside a strip club. Waste time lah I say.
And our dear Ermenegildo Zegna-shod Adrien Brody, who plays playwright Jack Driscoll, looked so scrawny I thought he was an opium addict from the Far East. But I pity him lah, since he had to fight for Ann's affection and attention from a walking giant fur rug. Kudos to Adrien though, he played the brave understated brooding hero to the hilt. But Ah Kong wanted to snap him like a bamboo twig for having the gall to lure Ann away from his grasp. Well if Adrien carries on being so skinny, he can shoot The Pianist II without going on a diet and proceed to hide inside his piano away from the Germans. ahaha!
Carl Denham (played by Jack Black of Skool of Rock fame) deserved to die in the movie but sadly didn't. Such an irritating conniving dirtbag, Ah Kong should have bitten his head off (both heads) and farted it out for the T-rexes to have another go. But I suspect Peter kept him alive so that he could spew a stupid 1-liner at the end of the movie "Its a case of Beauty killed the Beast". Gosh! Puke!
As for Naomi Watts who plays Ann Darrow, My-oh-my what can I say. A true 1930-ish Vaudeville sexpot I would love to catch at her nightly show time and time again, if I was a hot-blooded male New Yorker back then lah. I tell you the girl can scream. And scream and scream again she did, with so much finesse. In the end, deep down inside, she is torn between the scrawny but artsy Driscoll and the beefy 25-footer of a mutant banana. So when Ah Kong falls to his death, iconically from the top of the Empire State Building after his not-so-successful attempts at swotting machine-gunned bi-planes, it made life easier for her. No need to choose between the 2 guys you see.
The throngs who have caught the movie will attest to the tremendous special effects churned out by NZ-based Weta Studios. The Brontosaurus stampede was real and thumpy. So too was Ah Kong's back-yard brawl with 3 T-Rexes - especially the part when he breaks the jaws of one of them and plays with it for abit. Keeewl! Then there were the creepy-crawly mutant arachnids and what looked to me like Angry Penises swallowing people up. ahaha!
The natives on Skull Island were also pretty authentically scary. Although I suspect Peter recycled some of the muddy face paint and body-piercing paraphenalia from his Orcs and Uruk-Hai. Come to think of it, the big Ann Darrow sacrifice scene resembled the Battle of Mordor.
One scene made me cringe though, with Ah Kong and Ann sharing a short-lived, 'romantic' 'ice-skating' moment in Central Park. It bordered on the ridiculous and I cheered silently when the slip-n-sliding duo were interrupted by the bazookas of the US Army. ahaha.
Overall an engaging movie. Heard that Peter got a blank cheque for this from Universal Pictures. He may have got a trifle too self-absorbed in the movie's beginning but hell, not many people can make grown adults go teary-eyed over a CGI-ed Gorilla.
The Chunky Monkey RaWkz! :))