West Side Presbyterian Church
Seattle, Washington

February 2006

This month's reviews/features:

• King Kong
• One man’s 2005 retrospective -- Movies Released in 2005

King Kong

Why remake a classic?

Late on Christmas day, several of our family members ventured out to see King Kong, one of the “big” movies of the season. We were disappointed to be told that it was sold out. I had to wait three weeks to see it but needn’t have been annoyed; the new King Kong is just not that good.

Its strengths are outweighed by its weaknesses, but before we examine both of those, let me give the briefest of plot summaries: A struggling movie director, a would-be actress, and a well-known playwright find themselves on a tramp steamer headed for (apparently) the Far East. The obsessed director is on a quest to find an exotic subject for a movie that will resurrect his career. The steamer encounters a great storm and is blown to an “undiscovered” island which at first appears uninhabited. Finding hundreds of skeletons, the movie folks and the crew think they’ve stumbled on a deserted anthropological gold mine, but they soon learn that there are in fact people living there, and the skeletons represent sacrifices to – you guessed it – the mighty (but herbivorous) King Kong. A good deal of the movie is taken up with their encounters with Kong and every other computer-generated creature imaginable. Needless to say, the director’s obsession with filming everything he can see results in Kong’s capture and his being taken to Manhattan and his major moment atop the Empire State Building.

Strengths:

• Theme: The beauty-and-the-beast theme works well; we come to sympathize with the giant gorilla. More significantly, the picture makes a decent criticism of greed and exploitation.
• Acting: Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody do creditable jobs of portraying the “beauty” (the analogue of Fay Wray in the original film) and the playwright she loves. The other actors also do well.
• Locales: The film looks beautiful—even if most of the locales are computer-generated.

Weaknesses:

• Length: At three hours or so, the picture is much too long.
• Special Effects: They’re way, way overdone. In one seemingly interminable segment, Kong, the movie people, and the ship’s crew fight every dinosaur and other slimy creature imaginable. It soon becomes ludicrous.
• Language: There are several misuses of the Lord’s name.
• Purpose: The original (1933) King Kong is considered a classic. There was a dressy but feeble remake in 1976 starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. Director Peter Jackson did a wonderful job with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but he has fallen victim to the current mania for remaking movies that don’t need to be remade. In the future he should stick to things that haven’t been done before.

Rating: 2 ¼ stars

See it if you must, but with March Madness approaching, you’d be much better off going out and renting (or buying) this Golden Oldie...

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One man’s 2005 retrospective:
Movies Released in 2005

Index of movie reviews...
(2003 reviews through present)

Jay Maurer, a member of West Side Presbyterian Church, is a long-term movie buff and former college teacher of The Film as Literature. He has written movie reviews for The Good News (West Side newsletter) since 2002.

If you have comments or questions about the movie (or play) reviews, please contact Jay at dramachap@msn.com.

Ratings are expressed in increments of ¼ star.
A rating of 2 ½ stars or higher is meant to be a recommendation.
1 star: poor
2 stars: minimally satisfactory
3 stars: quite good
4 stars: superb

Criteria for determining the ratings:

• Reflection, either explicit or implicit, of Christian values, including suitability of language and lack of gratuitous violence
• Quality of the acting
• Originality
• Unity of the entire picture
• Substance, or in the words of C.S. Lewis, weight

Other Christian movie review Web sites:
Plugged In Online
ChristianityTodayMovies.com