Desert Words

This was not a good week for movie viewing for me.

First, I cancelled the premium movie channels off my satellite dish because nothing really worth watching’s been on in months, and the stuff that’s been on that I would watch I already own on DVD.

Second, we caught Mission: Impossible 3 this weekend, and as part of the fun, I bought the 10th Anniversary DVD of the first one. I never had owned it, and the version I picked up only cost $12, and came with a voucher for a free ticket to see the new one, so my thinking was, “What the hell… one of us will get in free, so that’s not a bad deal.”

So we watched the DVD of the first one before heading out to see the third one (the voucher expired today). I can honestly say the first M:I is still an entertaining story, and holds up after 10 years. The story is tight, keeps you guessing, in an almost “Usual Suspects” kind of way, and even today, the idea of watching it again didn’t bore me.

The second M:I was something of a mess, but Dougray Scott’s over the top bad guy performance was a fun diversion. I still am not sure whether the lack fell into John Woo’s direction, or the repeat rewrites the movie went through before and during shooting, but it could have been better.

I have no idea what happened with this third M:I, though. I didn’t get pulled in at all, so I didn’t care about any of the characters or whether they’d make it through their various scrapes alive or not.

The fight scenes and action sequences were nicely choreographed, but some scenes just dragged on unnecessarily, making the movie a little longer than it needed to be.

Speaking of dragging, Peter Jackson’s King Kong was on tap to be viewed this evening. I’m so glad I didn’t pay to see this in the theater, and I’m glad I borrowed the DVD instead of renting it.

Several people had told me how awful this movie was, and I simply could not believe it. Watching the first hour of it made me wonder what the hell movie they were watching, because it was a good movie during that time. Woe is us, that didn’t last the duration of the film.

I’d guess that about 85% of the scenes taking place behind the wall on Skull Island absolutely didn’t need to be there. No one should have wasted their time writing them, and Jackson definitely shouldn’t have wasted our time by filming them. I can’t fathom why all that time was spent rendering so many CG creatures in so many scenes that didn’t matter. Maybe they thought that the audience could be distracted from the fact that the movie was being drawn out for no reason by the technological bells and whistles?

A minimum of 45 minutes should have been cut from the island scenes alone.

Seriously, he could have cut out a lot of scenes on the island and several sequences after Kong’s escape in NYC that were even more horrid, and the theatrical running time of the movie would have been closer to 2:05 or 2:10, saving that extra 50 minutes of fluff and nonsense for “extended scenes” extras on the DVD release. I’m guessing that critics would have been happier, the movie would have made more box office, and made even more money from DVDs with that much extra movie added.

More than once, I sat there thinking to myself, “What were they thinking?”