Pounding my chest for King Kong

Went with a friend this afternoon to see "King Kong". I'll confess, I spent much of the time wishing those annoying people would get out of the way so I could watch the ape. Yeah, there was action a'plenty and pathos by the tankerload, but for some reason, the best performance was still the nonhuman one... models, CGI and all that.

The trouble is, I really didn't find any of the humans all that engaging. Even the sympathetic heroine (so memorable I had to rack my brains to recall her name) was not up to the fine standard of performance that Fay Wray gave long before we were born. And, for goodness sake, why mess with reality -- in 1933, the woman would have been terrified of the ape from beginning to end! We didn't have a clue about greater primate behavior until Jane Goodall did her study on chimps and Dian Fossey worked with Gorillas in the Mist. If I'd been even the least bit intrepid as a woman in the 1930s, I'd still be crapping my bloomers if I faced even a regular-sized ape. But this one developed a wuv affair wif the feller. Eww.

Okay, I'll confess, I've been a big fan of Ray Harryhausen, and I have had low expectations for any remake of anything he did first. So I went to this one thinking there's no way that Peter Jackson & crew could butcher the story and scenery any worse than that monstrosity from my high school years (although, in retrospect, having caught parts of it the other night on tv, John Lone was a very attractive cook). I wasn't wrong. The 1970s are still the greatest embarrassment to modern artistic growth.

But that doesn't mean this flick today is worthy of any Oscars outside the tech awards. I still have the urge to punch Jack Black for being Jack Black, regardless of the character he was playing. I really hate his voice, and his face, and what I've seen of his acting skills... eccch. Adrien Brody, with his puppydog eyes and hurt expression didn't seem to be up to the challenge of acting the hero... We got more emotion from Kong than from anybody else. Of course, it didn't hurt that the geeks behind the scenes creating him had gotten help from Dian Fossey's films & foundation.

It wasn't a complete waste of 5 buckaroos and an afternoon. At least it wasn't the other remake released this month, of a flick they did in the mid-'70s.