'King Kong': A Beauty of a Beast
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 14, 2005; C01
The new "King Kong" answers many important questions:
Can a girl outrun a dinosaur? (Yes.)
Can a tommy gun kill a prehistoric spider? (Yes.)
Can a blonde and a monkey find true, if chaste, love at the top of the Empire State Building? (Yes.)
Can three hours feel like 90 minutes? (Yes.)
Can Jack Black act? (No.)
One hundred eighty-seven minutes of mesmerization, astonishment, thrills, chills, spills, kills and ills, Peter Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic. It's more fun than a barrel of dinosaurs, and in fact it takes us into the center of a barrel of dinosaurs, or at least a dinosaur stampede in which our heroes and 10 or so panicked brontosaurs try to merge lanes without any traffic cones to govern the flow, and the effect is that of being stuck in a keg of thunder lizards bouncing downhill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/13/AR2005121302031_pf.html