HFCS: effika’s blog

Ok, so it’s not so secret since I posted it on both Livejournal and my Blosxom blog.

I feel so dirty using Wordpress. Dirty dirty dirty. You know what? Screw the post.php crap, I’m writing this in the new Vim and then just c/p’ing. Maybe thatt will make me feel less dirty. I’ll probably feel less dirty once I craft a theme for this. It doesn’t feel right that I’m using a theme I did not create.

Anyway, King Kong (2005). In a nutshell, it is very poor editing with very bad dialogue. It also may have some extremely useless characters– I say “may” only because their importance might have disappeared in editing. I am reminded of that great Tom Servo quote from the MST3k’d Devil Fish: “Just because you can edit, doesn’t mean you should.”

Slight spoilers follow. You could read these and still have a good time watching the movie.

I really think this could have been a pretty good movie if the editing was better. Editing can’t help the poor dialogue, but it can help me follow the plot! Now, the editing isn’t so bad that there are grievious continuity errors (although the Chinese man in the tree/gorge scene might qualify). No, instead, I am assuming that the editing left out all the important character relationship backstory. I know the movie hits the audience over the head with expositioned backstory, but most of it was boring and gave nothing to the plot. Supposedly long-standing relationships are hinted at by dialogue for some characters, but we never get to see the relationship. These relationships don’t have any meaning to the characters. Whether poor editing, poor scripting, or poor acting I’ll never know.

I think part of the problem is the fact that there’s all this character history being expositioned around, and we never see any of the results of that character history. There is a character, for example, that is supposed to have ties to the island that King Kong is (eventually) from. However, the character himself does not seem to know this, never reacting to the island or any claims others make of it. This same character appears 98% of the time as a foil for another character. He’s also very annoying, and Jay commented that he was dissapointed the character wasn’t dead by the end of the movie.

Speaking of which, characters are paired up in this film like crazy. Some characters seem to exist only so that the main characters have somebody to comment to. Usually these comments are giving morals or an “insightful” look at the situation so that the viewer knows he should be seeing layers of meaning in the scene.

The movie also suffers from “take the joke” syndrome. Unfortunately, many of these jokes (made at the scene’s expense) are not even that funny.

It wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t really that great.

Also, I wish to blame O. U. Improv! for teaching me about the elements of a scene and all that jazz. If it wasn’t for them I’d probably have enjoyed King Kong a lot more. :-)