1.
King KongI never had much interest in the King Kong story, but considering how well Peter Jackson executed the Lord Of The Rings movies, I was looking forward to seeing what he did with this. The end result was overwhelming but not entirely in a good way. I liked the long first half of character development, and the cast, especially Jack Black, definitely rose to the occasion, but once the action got going, I wasn't entirely on board. There were definitely some amazing sequences, but some of the scenes with the dinosaurs and giant insects were just too long and eventually became overkill (something that always bothered me: if there's an island full of dinosaurs and all kinds of giant creatures, why would the movie be ostensibly
just about the giant ape?). For a while the movie became kind of a house of horrors that was both impressive and a little greuling to watch in the same way that War Of The Worlds was.
Also, Peter Jackson has a couple habits that seem to be holdovers from his low budget gore movie days that keep plaguing this and LOTR, specifically the way he switches to a lower rate of frames per second so things move kind of slow and choppy every time there's some dramatic or pivotal scene. I swear he does it 20 times in the first half of King Kong and it gets so annoying. That said, there are some pretty spectacular sequences. And I have to give J.G. credit for noting the little in-joke reference to Dead-Alive (a crate in the boat labelled "Sumatran Rat Monkey").
2.
The ProducersCovered on
Powet Movies.
3.
The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The WardrobeWe were taken to a dreamworld of magic. Never read the books but enjoyed this, particularly for Tilda Swinton, who's really good at playing the same kind of evil/ethereal being as she did in the underrated
Constantine.
4.
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-RabbitWe saw this in the theater when it first came out a couple months ago but I don't think I ever wrote about it. I was always a fan of the earlier shorts, though, and they did a good job of expanding out into a longer and more complex storyline and making use of a bigger budget. My favorite might remain The Wrong Trousers, but they made the jump to theatrical features really well.
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