KING  KONG   ;   A  Narada Film Review
King Kong - 2005     Peter Jackson - Director  and  Jan Blenkin - Producer
         
   2.0  out of   5.0
   -  Just scraping by...
      Stories of 'beauty and the beast' strike an elemental chord in the human animal - it is almost impossible to make a bad one.   Almost.   So, first, please remember these names Victoria Burrows, Daniel & John Hubbard & Liz Mullane - they were responsible for "Casting" for KING KONG - and they will never work in Hollywood again.   You don't cast Rick Moranis as Dirty Harry. You don't cast Judy Dench as Laura Croft.   And you don't cast Jack Black as anything other than a fraternity boy in a National Lampoon film.   At over a million dollars a minute (view time) for KING KONG, one can only marvel at the colossal waste...
         In fact the casting and acting were, across the board, so bad, that the gorilla KING KONG, a Computer Generated Image, stole the show.   This will be the first time an Oscar for "Actor in a Leading Role" will be given to a Computer Generated Image (CGI).   This will upset a lot of 'real' actors, but, hey, it's just the cinematic equivalent of John Henry The Steel Drivin' Man losing out to the Steam Drill - it was just a matter of time.   The ghost of Simone is upon us.
         Recently, Hollywood has proven that if you have the money, you can use CGI to do anything on screen.   And we've seen the spawning of a whole decade of films that have succeeded financially solely because of CGI - the wonderful world of eye-candy.   But KING KONG manages yet a further leap.   Here we see for the first time that not only can you make anything happen, but you can make too much happen.   The most ridiculous example is the stampede of brontosaurus, where the men are running in and around the legs of the stampeding dinosaurs - for a full ten minutes.   They could have lasted perhaps 10 seconds.   But the ultimate transgression here was not just that it was a ridiculous postulate, but that it had nothing to do with advancing the plot, and they took so looooong to do it.
         Saving the worst for last - Peter Jackson's directing of the several 'tear-jerker' scenes was amateur in the extreme - each scene drawn out seemingly forever, desperately trying to make up for poignancy by browbeating the audience with sheer time-in-situ.   The reason you ended up with a 3 hour film, Peter, is because you wanted a 3 hour film.
     LEAST  Enduring Line or Phrase:  "...t'was beauty killed the beast."


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