KING KONG & Brattle goodness!

This is the kitbashed email I sent out pushing KONG, WONG, and Capra this weekend. It's mostly what I blog'd yesterday, but has a few added little ripples...
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Before you see KING KONG (and you CAN'T NOT see it)...

Check out the Brattle tonight for IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE at a fundraising screening. And save some time this weekend for a kickass Wong Kar Wai three-fer. The dramatic bittersweet threesome of movies is...

DAYS OF BEING WILD

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

2046

If you can see them all, please do. Maybe spread it out over the Friday thru Sunday, to break up your Harvard Square holiday gift shopping (Curious George, Harvard Book Store, New England Comics, Black Ink, two crafts fairs, and - look out, boyfriends! - that deadly Jasmine row). That would be a helluva thing. I don't know if this is quite a "trilogy," but the stories certainly do interlock and trigger some powerful movie-world deja vu, and keep your eyes and ears open - they're all so frickin gorgeous and set to the sweetest soundtracks...~

There's also additional screenings of LIFE as well as a midnight event with "Dirty FOUND Magazine." Check out the Brattle's schedule and plan accordingly!

I'll try to dig up my old Wong Kar Wai blasts and post or link back to them at my blog. Hopefully soon. I'll likely be up in the small hours again tonight anyhow, post-vball and all... =)

And now for my hohum take on the new Peter Jackson flick, a small picture, but you might have heard of it...?

KING KONG! SEE IT!

SEE IT A DOZEN TIMES! I'll definitely be seeing it again =)

All the reviews and excerpts used to push this lean, mean, happy fun ball of entertainment - I've gotta say, they're all true, correct, and spot-on! This is

It's got everything, and in super-sized amounts! Romance! Comedy! Non-stop action! The environments are perfect. If Peter Jackson's re-creation of 1930s skyscraping Manhattan isn't completely accurate, it IS freakin beautiful. Jack Black is perfect as the overzealous director-showman. Except for perhaps being too hot for the period, Naomi Watts is a perfect retro-modern flapper damsel in distress. Adrian Brody... Well, he fits, but I hafta say, except for one little moment between the two of them, his chemistry with Watts pales in comparison to the electricity between Watts and King Kong. Crazyzay, but true.

RONIN-ish chase scenes, complete with deadly collisions and pile-ups... with savage land dinosaurs! Military artillery versus gigantic ape! Action-packed, brutal, even acrobatic, ape-v-dinosaur battles! Also, Berenice Abbot's NYC and the "Great White Way" brought to gorgous big screen life.

There's this one short cut, boiled down to an image, really, that just epitomizes the greatness of this story and its storytelling for the comic book/sci-fi/movie fan in me... We see the playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody), costumed in 1920s-30s wardrobe, beaten and scratched up, rushing thru the jungle brush, tommy-gun in hand, chasing after the sweet and beautiful Ann Darrow (vaudeville'd up Naomi Watts), with "Lost World" man-eating creatures on his tail... That, for me, is some powerful, joyous, crack.

Quick eyes will spot the Sumatran Rat-Monkey of Jackson's beauty of a zombie film, DEADALIVE. If you remember correctly, they're an abomination, created when the monster rats of some doomed ship came ashore on a lost little island and raped its native monkeys. Jackson genius, no? =) Some of you might remember me lamenting the "zombie technology gap" between Hollywood and New Zealand (w New Zealand in the lead) last year as a tangent off of my SHAUN OF THE DEAD blast. They know their zombies. Should add this quick follow-up now - Romero DID come out of retirement this year to close that gap with some LAND OF THE DEAD action.

Back to KING KONG... =)

Kong should be up for best actor this year. I saw so much more humanity out of him in this movie than from Tom Cruise in... well, almost everything, I think, bleah. I had these flashes when watching Kong in action, in e/motion, even, to Toshiro Mifune, of Kurasawa/samurai movie fame. Uncanny, really. Something, very wandering lone samurai about him...

If you pay attention to the credits, or probably all the behind-the-scenes bits about the effects and such on AccessHollywood or E! or SciFi you'll see a familiar name is actually behind the expression and motion-capture of the big ape. Amazing that he could be the go-to guy for this sort of work, but then, if it ain't broke, right?

At the start of the film, I thought I was picking up on a little pattern of K's, kinda like all the L's in Superman's universe, y'know? But after a while, I just mentally dropped it, so don't know if it was real and pervasive.

There's a sweet tip-o-the-hat to the original moviemakers Cooper and Wray dropped into some of Black's early dialogue. There might've been more, but those are the only names I know from the original. I've never seen the old school KONG all the way through, just clips and snips as part of documentaries and as examples of stop-motion animation and early flim special effects. I want to see it now.

Here's a crazy remark - the movie itself was all icing - really sweet and crispy icing, with little tiny STAR WARS figures laid into it to make it look like the Hoth battle scene from EMPIRE - after seeing my first trailer for Michael Mann's MIAMI VICE! =)

Woo-HOO! =)

I had no idea that this was in production. The trailer was maybe 15 seconds in when I said, "Hey... this looks like Michael Mann coolness..." Then some bits of Miami flashed on screen, and then Jamie Foxx buddied up w Colin Farrel (whom I don't love, but he does seem like a good choice at this time and place for a Sonny Crocket/Burnett, eh?)... and I just KNEW - MIAMI VICE! Probably embarrassed Joe pretty bad by saying so as loudly and excitedly as I did, heh. Frack, I can't remember a signature car from the trailer. I wonder what it'll be. Ah, the old Ferrari Daytona Spider. One of the only cars I ever bothered to learn the make and name of, heh. K.I.T.T.(the Knight Industries Two Thousand) and K.A.R.R.(the Knight Automated Roving Robot, heh) were modified 1984 Pontiac TransAms, did you know that? =)

Allright, enough already, right? If you haven't gotten the gist of this ramble yet...

GO SEE KING KONG!!! IT IS THREE HOURS OF ENTERTAINMENT GOLD!!

If you hafta go to the bathroom during the show, it's allright. Not in your seat, though! Get thee to the restroom! You're gonna come back and see it again, anyhow. Still, best make it quick =) I had to leave at what felt like the 1 hour mark, anticipating a lot of unmissable action in the following 2 hours. It was a few minutes after Kong first meets his blind date Ann Darrow. Of course, he picks her out of the crowd instantly, it being fate and all, but y'know, she emailed him to let him know that she'd be the one wearing the screaming-and-tied-to-two-posts. Just how I like to meet my dates, heh. It seems like what I missed was mostly angry Kong rushing thru the island jungle... Y'know, now that I think about it, perhaps the best/quietest time to run off might be when the crew leaves the island and the movie starts up again in Manhattan. There's a bit of quiet time setting things up, although the views of old Times Square are amazing...

Yeah, I thought about not getting any popcorn and soda, but how much more of a popcorn movie can this be? =)

Keep on keepin on,
brian out =)