2 posts tagged “movies”
Okay, so I finally got around to watching the King Kong remake and I have to say, I was caught up with it. Peter Jackson had me, especially at the end. The last 15 minutes stirred up a lot of emotion. Lots of powerful images there. Then he lost me. He lost me at the exact end, with Jack Black and his frickin' line "The airplanes didn't do it; t'was beauty killed the beast." That line ruined the entire movie for me. Not even the line itself, just the delivery. I was into it, it, nearly teary eyed, then that line hits and full stop.
I'm annoyed by this. Sure, it may be nitpicky, but I can forgive faults in the beginning and middle of a movie, even in the last bit, as long as the ending, those last maybe 3 minutes, are done wonderfully. It's a bit like Casablanca. Is it a perfect movie? No, of course not, but the last ten minutes of it are amazing. And while this version of King Kong is no Casablanca, the end was pretty damn well done. Except for that line. Now, instead of being completely sad and contemplating all the symbolism and allegory in the movie, I'm just frothing about one silly line.
Grrr.
/rant
Who's your favorite movie villain?
Sure, my choice isn't very original. Sure, I could have gone for another consummate villain, like Keyser Soze, Major Strausser, Belloq, Ian Mckellan's Richard III, or any number of Peter Lorre's creapy characters, but (and I know some people will argue this) none of them have the screen presence of the man in black. The first Star Wars movie I saw was Empire Strikes Back, so when I met Darth Vader, I met him at his underling-choking worst. What other villain (besides perhaps Milton's Satan) is at once so archetypal of evil, but also human. There is something in Vader's confrontation with Luke at the end of ESB that brings out his humanity, that desire of fathers for their sons to follow them. It's eerie, yes, but brilliant. It carries that shocking knowledge that Darth Vader is a human, not a machine.
Besides, Samuel L. Jackson may be one bad mofo, but Vader is the original king of BMFs.
