A long post on some movies

* Regular readers might remember my skepticism about "King Kong" being a runaway success at the box office, despite early positive reviews. (Who needs a 3 hour version of a B grade story, no matter how good it looks.) Looks like I was right. ("Narnia" is now at $225 million in the States; "Kong" is $175 million.)

I haven't seen Narnia yet.

* Did see "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" on cable the other night. Although I was tired, and that can certainly dull one's enjoyment of a film, it still seemed to me that it got everything nearly perfectly wrong. All of the characters seemed underplayed, as if a flat delivery would somehow work better than the panic-y, eccentric and much more charming performances given in the TV series. Actually, I read somewhere in the reviews of the movie that Douglas Adams did not like the TV series, and I am curious to know why.

The movie also had far too little of Marvin the robot (for me the funniest character in the book) and far too few extracts from the Guide itself.

The changes in plot were more or less acceptable, and Trillian herself was quite charming, but this movie was for me a very big disappointment overall. It got 60% approval on Rottentomatoes too. How?

* Spielberg's Munich has attracted a lot of controversy in the States. I predict that David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (from the ABC's "At the Movies") will give it high marks, as it apparently can be read as a pretty much "liberal" take on the Middle East conflict, and any movie with a "liberal" sensibility gets an automatic extra star from those two reviewers.

I still have high hopes that I will like the film, but then I happen to think that Spielberg could direct the 'phone book and make it compelling. Even a flawed Spielberg film can be interesting for the ways in which it is flawed. (There is perhaps one exception: "Always", which was both a box office and critical failure in the 1980's. For me, it is the only truely forgettable film he has ever made.) Anyway, Roger Ebert has 2 interviews with Spielberg defending "Munich" from some of the "political" criticisms of it.

* Speaking of Ebert, who writes reasonable reviews, but also has a very liberal outlook and somewhat erratic tastes; he absolutley loathed the recent Australian horror flick "Wolf Creek", giving it zero stars.

David Stratton, meanwhile, shared most of Eberts' reservations, saying this in his review:

" But I do think the film is incredibly sadistic. I think it's foul in some ways in terms of violence. I think it really is thoroughly nasty."

Yet he still gave it 4 stars, though saying he was very "conflicted" about it.

The star rating can be accounted for by his habit of giving any Australian film an automatic 1 to 1.5 star increase simply because it is Australian, and that he probably knows lead actor John Jarrett very well. One suspects that if this had come out of America, local sensitivities would not have overwhelmed his obvious repugnance to the strong violent sadism (most notably directed against the female characters too) of which he and Ebert both complain.

I have never understood the appeal of "horror". Suspense and frights can be satisfying without being gruesome, and I don't understand how writers or directors can take satisfaction from being involved in creating that genre.