{"id":1329,"date":"2007-02-04T08:55:10","date_gmt":"2007-02-04T13:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/little-big\/"},"modified":"2007-02-04T12:29:15","modified_gmt":"2007-02-04T17:29:15","slug":"little-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/little-big","title":{"rendered":"Little, Big"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around 7:30 last night, I clicked around the channel guide and noticed that King Kong<\/a> was going to be on HD at 8pm. I wasn’t much interested in it as a movie, but figured it’d have some neat visuals. I hit the rest of the movie channels in the guide, and saw that The Station Agent<\/a> was about to begin.<\/p>\n

And, yes, I chose the dwarf over the giant ape. I really enjoyed the movie, and thought all three leads were a blast (especially Bobby Cannavale<\/a>, who steals every scene he’s in).<\/p>\n

Of course, since King Kong<\/em> is about 8 hours long, I was able to click back to it afterward. I was amazed at how silly the special effects looked: 40-ton brachiosaurs stampeded over a frightened boat crew with all the ‘realism’ of one of those Universal theme-park rides; Naomi Watts gets whiplashed in every direction by The Big Ape while he’s saving her from a T-Rex attack, but suffers nary a scratch; that CGI version of Jack Black showed none of the spark of the real thing, delivering lines lifelessly. I’m sure they did a great job of motion capture to get this simulacrum to look like Jack Black, but I have to chalk it up to a failed experiment in letting the special effects tell the story for you.<\/p>\n

(Wait? That actually was<\/em> Jack Black?)<\/p>\n

I actually stuck through to see the climax of the flick (while folding laundry and doing other stuff for a good stretch of it), and that’s what struck me as the big failure with this movie. See, everyone knows how it’s going to end: Kong climbs up the Empire State Building, planes shoot at him, and he falls off and dies. It’s tough to generate dramatic tension when the ending is predetermined (I hear some religions have a problem with this, too).<\/p>\n

What you end up with is that aforementioned theme-park ride. Which is cool, if that’s what you’re planning to make, but I’ll bet those Pirates of the Caribbean<\/a> flicks — actually based on a theme-park ride — are more entertaining than this. It’s not to say the movie wasn’t good to look at — I was interested in seeing Jackson’s version of 1930s Times Square, after all — but I never felt much sense of drama, just thrills.<\/p>\n

Give me a pissed-off dwarf any day of the week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around 7:30 last night, I clicked around the channel guide and noticed that King Kong was going to be on HD at 8pm. I wasn’t much interested in it as a movie, but figured it’d have some neat visuals. I hit the rest of the movie channels in the guide, and saw that The Station … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Little, Big”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-lr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1578,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-july-7-2007","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":0},"title":"Unrequired Reading: July 7, 2007","author":"Gil","date":"July 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"You know the drill: lots of neat links after \"more\": Like most people, I assumed authoritarian China would overwhelm Hong Kong after the handover. Now I'm starting to think HK's capitalist fervor has infected the rest of the country. Happy 10th anniversary. * * * An Unrequired Reading post without\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Design"","block_context":{"text":"Design","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/design"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3537,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/apart-the-hole","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":1},"title":"Apart, the Hole","author":"Gil","date":"March 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I saw Synecdoche, New York on Friday afternoon and I've spent this weekend trying to parse what I saw, heard and felt. I've even been struggling with the metaphor of how it's affected me; I don't want to ape the ongoingly-dying lead character by saying it's infected me like a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":325,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/gone-ape","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":2},"title":"Gone Ape","author":"Gil","date":"August 9, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Fay Wray died today.","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":259,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/go-ape-go","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":3},"title":"Go, Ape, Go!","author":"Gil","date":"June 19, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Following up an ape rampage story from several months ago, it seems that investigators finally figured out how Jabari got escaped his exhibit in the Dallas Zoo: he took a running jump over a 12-foot moat and a 14-foot wall.\"All it does is give you pause and you think, 'This\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":148,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/go-ape","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":4},"title":"Go ape!","author":"Gil","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"I love my town. It may not be NYC, but it's still got some funny shit going on.","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":172,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/go-ape-redux","url_meta":{"origin":1329,"position":5},"title":"Go Ape, Redux!","author":"Gil","date":"March 19, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know why I so enjoy stories of gorilla rampages; I just do.","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}