Crazy street stunts in the Roaring Twenties in NYC and San Francisco. The cab driver is Harold Lloyd, the passenger Babe Ruth. The segment with the racing horse drawn bus is insane.
For 99 cents I couldn’t resist this Harry Potter mousepad. It turned out to suck as is for my optical mouse. It couldn’t read the surface accurately. But the wrist pad smoothly drifts over its plastic base on bearings, letting you accurately move the mouse using your arm muscles alone. I cut it out and placed it over the wood surface I normally use for my mouse. Nice, but not sure what to do with the rest of it.
Like Peter Jackson the director the 2005 version, King Kong was my favorite movie as a child. Willis O’Brien’s magical stop-motion creation of a giant ape and dinosaurs on mysterious Skull Island and Kong’s subsequent rampage in New York City were what captured my young mind. The black vs. white nature of the story passed over my nine-year-old brain. First the savage black natives and then big black Kong are fascinated by the ultra-white blonde, and then Kong is brought like a slave in chains to the New World. In the original we hear the quip “blondes are scarce around here.”
Jackson does not shy away from this aspect of the story, placing the story in the same era and location as the original, and retaining the racist mythology of the time. The natives of his South Sea island are dark and demonic, but they are too outrageously evil to be taken as other than fantasy elements in the story, like his Orcs in The Lord of the Rings. They have on so much heavy make-up that it is hard to tell, but I suspect that many were whites in blackface. Later in the New York theater scene, a direct homage to the original island ritual from the 1933 movie, the white dancers are all in blackface as well. It is an obvious fantasy of the white producer (Denham) of exotic native ritual. I’ll leave it up to black reviewers to say whether all this is offensive or not, but to me retaining these elements was essential to the retelling of the story.
I can quibble a bit. The timeline seemed to go from day to night to day in almost random sequence. I’ll have to look at the movie again to be sure about this. And the Kong, Ann, Jack Driscoll love triangle is a bit lame. But the adventure elements are amazing, and the cgi animation of Kong, aided by the motion capture acting of Andy Serkis is superb. There are action sequences in this movie that will leave you breathless. I also loved the recreation of Thirties New York City. And the scene on the ice in Central Park with Ann and Kong will make you cry. Naomi Watts is a perfect Ann Darrow.
