I got Tarkin!

At my teaching gig today my supervisor gave me a Christmas card with a Target gift card enclosed within it. I made a joke about using it to buy some Star Wars action figures, and went on to talk about how I've been trying to find the elusive Tarkin figure from the Episode III line for some time now. It's considered ultra-rare: I've seen it for sale on eBay for $30-50. Ever since I saw it on display at Star Wars Celebration III (of which I am gonna put the pics up sometime before the year's out) I've had a horrible fascination with this desiccated corpse of a children's toy. Well, I had to make a stop at Target after work today anyway and I headed to the toy department, more out of whimsy than anything else. I saw about five Star Wars figures hanging on the pegs and then almost howled with disbelief: there was a Tarkin figure! Just a few weeks ago Darth Larry and me were at a toy show at the Greensboro Coliseum: I went there looking for Tarkin but for the first time in bunches that I've gone to the show I didn't find my quarry. Lots of dealers did have some but they sold out really early on. Darth Larry told me that I'd find one sooner or later, and he was right: there it was, just sitting on the shelf waiting to be plucked up. And I didn't have to spring for it on eBay either. And with the gift card (the rest of which I used to help buy the King Kong soundtrack) Tarkin didn't even really cost me anything! Okay, I'm happy now. Happier than I would have been if I'd somehow found an Xbox 360 this holiday season, even! I got a Star Wars figure that a lot of people are looking for, and it came after a hard-fought but honorable search for it. What more could a guy ask for?? :-)

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King Kong has 21st best Wednesday opening

Between Catch Me If You Can and Armageddon.

I can attest to this. At the screening we were at last night, I would say that only 1/4th of the entire theater was occupied. Not what I was expecting in the way of a blockbuster audience at all. This is the one thing that really disappointed me: it would have been a lot more fun to have watched King Kong on opening day with a packed house.

I'm going to talk a lot more about it in my forthcoming review. But I'll go out on a limb and make a bold prediction here: King Kong might start really cleaning up once word of mouth starts getting out. That's basically what happened with Titanic: past the hype about it being the most expensive movie ever, it only really took off after the first week or so when it got around that "Hey, this is a really good movie!" Maybe the same thing will happen with Kong: it's definitely a movie that deserves that kind of lucky strike.

EDIT: I just noticed that even with 21st best opening, King Kong still had a better opening day than did Toy Story 2, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Return of the Jedi. Then again Godzilla 1998 had a better opening day than Return of the Jedi too... guess these aren't adjusted for inflation too well.

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Java going out of fashion?

Found an article at BusinessWeek Online about Java losing ground to other programming languages used to create apps for websites. Java is something that's fascinated me ever since I first encountered it in college ten years ago: at the time it seemed like the magic bullet for creating cross-platform applications. It didn't really evolve the way I anticipated it would, but it's still a neat arrow in the web developer's quiver. Anyway, looks like it's gradually giving way to something called LAMP. Head over to the link for an interesting read.

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The DaVinci Code and Poseidon trailers online

It's 8:12 and just drove through some nasty freezing rain/iced-up roadways to get to my office (so weird saying that: "my office"). Gonna be working on the King Kong (2005) review in the next little while but in the meantime, wanted to make a note about the full-length trailer for The DaVinci Code and the teaser for Poseidon being online now. I also found the one for Miami Vice but I outright refuse on principle to make a link to that: you wanna see it, find it yourself, but I ain't gonna be part-and-parcel to the destruction of another 80's landmark. Anyways, The DaVinci Code looks like a great trailer even if it's bullcrap bullcrap BULLCRAP history! Sheesh do we really want to regurgitate that old Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuff this badly? Will say though that Tom Hanks looks the best he's appeared in awhile in this trailer (and I noticed that between this and X-Men 3 that Ian McKellen will be in two movies simultaneously this coming May). Poseidon looks totally aces though. If it's as good a remake as King Kong is, I'll gladly buy a ticket to see this. Or it could be mediocre too. That's the thing about the trailers coming out this time of year: the movies they promo can go either way five or six months from now, but these usually look hella cool. Anyway, if you want to see Tom Hanks looking for those darned Christ-children or Kurt Russell on a topsy-turvy cruise ship, hit the above links for Quicktime goodness.

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First thoughts on Peter Jackson's King Kong

Just got in. And like what happened last month with my review of Walk The Line, I'm going to give myself a little bit of time to really digest it all. Will have a couple hours later during the day during which I can write up and post a full review.

I don't even know what to post as a thought about it for the interim. It's just... wow.

Is it perfect? No. Is it perfect enough to topple Titanic as all-time box-office champ? I think so.

It will never supplant the 1933 King Kong. This is an animal all its own. But in terms of being in the spirit of the original, this is the best damned remake I've ever seen in my life.

One word from the movie I'll use to describe this with: "Beautiful."

Time for some downtime. More on King Kong 2005 on the flipside.

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King Kong 1976 review

My good friend Marc asked me in a comment on my gorilla-sized review of the King Kong DVD and Kong: King of Skull Island book if I'd seen the King Kong movies from Japan. I've never seen King Kong Escapes but I've watched King Kong vs. Godzilla twice. The first was the day after Thanksgiving 1982 when some TV station in New Jersey had an all-day Godzilla marathon that I watched while the "grown-ups" were gone to Atlantic City: my very first glimpse of Kong in a movie was the scene where the native islanders get Kong passed-out drunk on berry juice, or something. The next time I saw the flick it was one Saturday afternoon some years later on Channel 48's "Billy Bob's Action Theater": think Vampira's old show but with Jeff Foxworthy's illegit half-brother instead. Some years after that I wound up watching King Kong Lives, mostly 'cuz part of it was filmed in this area. The less said of that unconscionable waste of celluloid, the better...

Anyway, I'll be hooking up with comrade-in-arms Darth Larry in a little bit to see Peter Jackson's new Kong movie (it opens today). So we'll soon have the original classic - which still holds its own against anything that modern-day digital wizardry can cook up - and we'll have the 2005 edition, with Jack Black and Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody directed by Peter Jackson with effects by WETA... 'nuff said.

But what about that other King Kong movie? The seemingly forgotten stepchild of Kong history: where does the 1976 remake figure into all of this?

Recently I had the opportunity to watch Paramount's 1976 redo of the standard Kong story. The one with Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange and Charles Grodin. I barely remember when this came out, but I recall enough to tell you that this was a huge thing: there were Kong toys and posters all over the place. I think one of the major burger chains even had a tie-in of some sort. I've seen snippets of it over the years but never the entire thing all the way through, so out of a sense of fairness I made myself watch Kong '76...

And... it's not too bad a movie. But it's not too good a one either. Where the '33 one still looks fresh today, the '76 edition looks horribly dated, and I think that's because of how they chose to implement its special effects. Instead of traditional stop-motion animation, they put Rick Baker in a gorilla suit and a servo-loaded mask to create facial emotion (built by the same guy who did the creature's head for Alien). It resulted in using a lot of miniature sets, many of which don't look too convincing. The movie also has numerous problems with compositing: the scene with the log over the chasm is especially troublesome. And some of the elements of King Kong '76 are just plain laughable: the "Petrox" oil company...?? I'll also say that "Dwan" is the stupidest name for a female character ever.

But problems aside, I think that the Seventies Kong does have some virtue. Having it be an oil research vessel that brings the characters to Skull Island is a pretty neat twist on the original tale. The scenes showing Kong held captive inside the ship en route to New York City: there's something that I would love to have seen depicted in the original film somehow. This remake does do a pretty good job casting Kong in a sympathetic light. And if nothing else, King Kong '76 now bears some poignancy in its use of a place that doesn't exist anymore: the original World Trade Center. Above everything else, that is why That Seventies Kong is worth considering. It's also worth bearing in mind that even though it's considered by many to be lackluster today, when it came out King Kong '76 was a major box-office smash. And it had the effect of propelling Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange to some pretty neat things like Academy Awards(tm) and Tron.

I think King Kong 1976 holds a unique place in cinema history. It has some intriguing twists on the classic story, even if it failed to really live up to its full potential because of now-apparent bad production choices. But even that holds some significance: 1976 Kong was the final special-effects movie before the modern blockbuster era. A few months later a movie called Star Wars came out, and suddenly everything - from the way movies were made to the way they were marketed - changed overnight. The '76 Kong came out at the absolute last moment that it could have and still have made a profit. After Star Wars, the bar would have been set so high, people's expections would have been raised so much, that this King Kong wouldn't have passed scrutiny at all. It really was the last big effects film of the era that started with the original King Kong in 1933.

If you wanna know more about the 1976 King Kong, Jeffrey Blair Latta's Kingdom Kong page is rife with info, trivia, pictures and more from the production. It came in quite handy while I was writing this review.

Well, I'm off to see King Kong 2005 now, but I'm glad that I got to get in a word or two about the first two Kong flicks beforehand. Will report back later with the 411 on how this new one stacks up. In the meantime keep smilin' :-)

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Yup, Bush's intelligence certainly IS faulty

I'm fast becoming convinced: neo-conservatives are schoolyard bullies that never grew up like the rest of us. Today the punk who enjoyed branding others with a red-hot wire hanger while a college student is telling us "oops, it was bad data all along but I'm still going to send your sons and daughters to die!" From Bloomberg.com...

Bush Says Iraq War Was Justified Even Though Intelligence Wrong

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush accepted responsibility for taking the U.S. to war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence while saying the invasion still was justified by the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and international terrorism.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said today in the final speech in a series intended to outline his Iraq strategy. "Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision."

What the hell is this blithering idiot talking about?! Saddam may have been a bad guy but he had nothing to do with 9/11!

But wait, there's more...

"I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," the president said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. "I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities, and we're doing just that."

Remember when Bush told us that going to war was an "agonizing" decision that he didn't take lightly? Well, now it seems like he totally glossed over all reason and sanity, and plowed ahead with his little war.

I'll say it again: cowards should not send others to fight a war when they themselves would not. And that's all Bush really is in all this: a coward who hides behind others.

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