Kiss vs. Kong

I put a great movie over in the Recent Updates section of my sidebar yesterday. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a great spoof of the film noir genre that is highly recommended viewing for fans of mysteries and comedies.

On the other hand, I also finally got around to sitting through Peter Jackson's version of King Kong--color me unimpressed. The effects were terrific, of course, but there's no way that the film should have come anywhere near three hours long. Many of the characters and the subplots in which they involved themselves were completely unnecessary, serving only to drag out what could have been a decent sub-two-hour escapist fantasy into a drawn-out Lord of the Rings-esque epic. (For the record, I love the LotR series--the end of Return of the King is a bit drawn out, but I understand the need to be faithful to the novels in that case.) If you're into the CGI-animated action "thing", you'll probably find it worth a viewing, but I can't imagine too many people wanting to own Kong to watch over and over again.