King Kong

Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody
Director: Peter Jackson

We know this one.
Boy meets girl. Falls helplessly in love, would die for her.
Only boy is an ape.
A big ass ape.
Now rope in that guy who did the Lord of The Rings movies.
Now let's break it down.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong doesn’t stray too much from the original: Visionary/Lunatic director Carl Denham (Jack Black) shanghai writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and starving actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) into following him to the mythical Skull Island on what turns out to be the most ill-fated location shoot in the history.

The first act, the journey to the island, is merely time for us to discover that character has lives and dreams and personalities and stuff. Frankly, it's dreary stuff. Thank God there's the island.

Time on the island is one long escape scene as our party land and are beset upon by murderous savages, stampeding dinosaurs, giant bugs and a certain 25-storey tall ape. All that experience on Rings (long breathless fight scenes, hordes of CG creatures) frees Jackson's hand as he unleashes the full arsenal of Skull Island's winged, fanged and generally hungry inhabitants on his actors.

And here is where irony enters stage left.

• Getting Brody and Watts, good as they are, isn't necessary given how little their characters do - or mean. Kong is by far the most able performer (Andy 'Gollum' Serkis, cornering the motion capture market), with the WETA wizards crafting the most expressive non-speaking CG creature ever created.
• Kong also looks a little too much like the Lord of The Rings movies. Everything on the island, the creatures, the cameras angles, have a twin in the Rings movies. Even the savages are human counterparts to the Uruk-Hai.
• Though Jackson takes great pains to establish the kinship between Kong and Ann, the parts of the movie that work best are actually the ones devoid of plot i.e. Kong trying to smash T-Rexes, rocks, planes etc. The scenes between Kong and Ann are draggy and consist mostly of longing, doe-eyed stares in slow mo, bloating the movie's running time to a bum-numbing 3 hours. And since so much is invested in the romance between the roaring ape and his screaming blonde, the human love interest is reduced to a prop.
• We don't know why Kong and Ann love each other. We don't know why the island savages gave him sacrifices. We only know that he didn't eat them. And everything becomes so laboured, we ultimately don’t give a shit. (One possible reason for the female offerings is hinted at via a slightly worrying but familiar hand-motion, but we can – won't – get into that.)

So is it all crap?
Well, no.

Jack Black’s Carl Denham makes for some interesting viewing. His ambition devolves to desperation and then rutlessness as he tries to salvage something, anything, for his movie as things go spectacularly apeshit. Pity Jack doesn’t quite have the range to make the most of his character’s transformation.

And there is Kong. And the moment he bursts onto screen, every time he beats something to a pulp (the T-Rex battle is one of the most violent, but satisfying fights ever put on screen), this much is obvious: A lot of love went into him.
He is a living, breathing, acting creature.
And every scene he was in, he stole.

Wolf Creek

Starring: Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips
Director: Greg McLean

There are very few good horror flicks these days.
Even the big budget remakes like Dark Water and The Grudge invariably resort to cheap scare tactics like things suddenly popping up round the corner and the volume cranked up to ear-splitting levels.
And then you don’t want to watch it again cos you know all the gags.
Know this then: you will most likely only want to watch Wolf Creek once.
But not cos it was cheap.

Apparently based on true events (I know, but stay with me) the plot revolves around three backpackers who go on a road trip into the Aussie outback to visit Wolf Creek, a large meteor crater. Surprise, surprise, the hapless trio get stranded.

Thus begins a series of ass-fuckings like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t wish on a group of loud-mouthed, obnoxious teens any more than you’d want to have been one of those poor sods had the Blair Witch Project actually been real.

No vagrants left for dead returning to exact revenge. No creatures hiding at the bottom of the lake who’ve been deprived of its diet of human food far too long. Just people. People who want to do bad things to you because they can.

Wolf Creek isn’t just violent. It’s vicious.
Director Greg McLean does wonders with his no-name cast, torturing them – and us – not with fear of the unknown, but the naked terror of certainty. This is a knife, it is sharp and cruel, and it is going to be in you.
He drags out every sadistic act and simple scenes become infinite moments of torture so by the time it happens, you’re pleading for mercy along with the characters.

But most of all, McLean is also unsympathetic. There are no mistakes, there is no stopping the onslaught that befalls the backpackers. Any relief is temporary, and any hope introduced is a cruel joke.
For this is the face of true evil:
When you meet a thing that doesn’t need to show you mercy, why would it stop?

And this gradually becomes the show’s downfall. The violence is so unforgiving, so unrelenting that you flinch too often, making the show physically draining. It’s hard-hitting stuff and you’re beaten into submission.

Eyes open or shut, you’re not likely to watch this again.
But you won’t forget that you did.

Paradise Now

Starring: Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal
Director: Hany Abu-Assad

Post 9/11, almost every take on terrorism has fallen into two stereotypes: the extremists or the sympathisers. This is the first movie I’ve seen told from the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves.

Paradise Now tells the story of the last 48 hours of two young Palestinian men, childhood friends Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman). Working dead-end jobs as auto mechanics and barely keeping above the poverty line, the two are informed by a point man for an unnamed Palestinian organization who informs them they have been chosen for a suicide mission to carry out a strike in Tel Aviv. This isn’t 24, so there’s no race to stop them or webs of deceit to unravel. No big setback befalls the two, merely a mix-up in timing and a period of separation when the two are no longer there to reassure each other they’re doing the right thing.

It’s this simple examination of motives – both personal and political – that is the movie’s greatest achievement. No real analysis or conclusion. Just a pause so you can ask yourself “Is this really worth it?”

Hollywood’s grasp on political subjects has always been shaky, first with the Irish, and post 9/11 with the fast and loose interpretation of (invariably) Middle Eastern conflicts. But there’s no posturing here. Saïd and Khaled aren’t religious zealots who’ve been indoctrinated since childhood (Khaled has to read his martyr’s message from a script which he reads in stutters to a video camera).

The film’s clever bit is actually Suha (Lubna Azabal) whose romantic interest in Saïd is a neat way for her to want to stop him going through with the mission. She digs him, so she doesn’t want him to blow himself up so you can buy the stuff she says more easily then if she were some moral idealist with a ‘love all, serve all’ ideology.

The three ultimately represent the full range of viewpoints:
Suha, that there are other alternatives to violence.
Khaled, that uncertainty is not always weakness.
And Saïd, that we all want to believe our lives have some kind of purpose, particularly when we’re called on to give it up.

It’s a simple story in the end.
It’s not that the characters suddenly find morality or remorse.
Merely that everyone wants to live.
It’s all fine and good for someone to die for what he believes in.
Until that someone is you.