Scream like a Buffalo

Unlike many folk, I was inside a movie theater on Saturday from about 2 p.m. until about 2 a.m. I paid the matinee price for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and then I stuck around and watched "Hostel", "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "King Kong".

My favorite character in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was the Buffalo General of Jadis the White Witch. Whenever he would get worked up he would throw his head back and scream like a buffalo. I liked Tilda Swindon as Jadis the White Witch, but I can't imagine her playing Nico from the Velvet Underground in the upcoming bio movie. The children in the movie did a good job but they had very fleshy lips, it was actually distracting. I can imagine the casting director saying, "Bring me children with thick lips!" Nevertheless, I would recommend this movie to anybody, a surprisingly good job. Even the boy who played the wicked brother Edmund (the most annoying character in the book) didn't annoy me, I enjoyed imagining him to grow up to be a mod.

A movie I can't recommend to anyone is "Hostel". It's going to be a long time before I agree to see another movie with Quentin Tarantino's name slapped on it. He didn't direct it but he let them use his name, so I'll just assume he likes depictions of sadism in all its glorious forms and I'll always associate the word with him. Sadism can be interesting (the movie Japanese movie "Audition" is interesting) but you won't see anything innovative or imaginative along those lines here. This movie don't understand that yucky isn't scary, it's just yucky. As for blowing the lid off of current American and Euro-culture antipathy, that was a shocker, who would have guessed.

I liked "Memoirs of a Geisha", it looked great and it was very entertaining. Contrary to popular belief, most of the film doesn't involve nudity. In fact, none of the film involves nudity. It's because being Geisha isn't about being naked, it's about making people imagine being naked. Initially I thought, "Why didn't they just have the actors speak Japanese instead of English with Japanese accents?" But the three leads are played by Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh, so they would've been speaking Japanese with Chinese accents. But here's the most ridiculous part: I thought the male lead was played by Chow Yun-Fat, and didn't I feel like a friggin' fool when I found out that it was actually Ken Watanabe. But it was a good movie, I'm looking forward to reading the book.

"King Kong" was good and it didn't seem overly long even at three hours and twenty minutes. About forty-five minutes of that time involves the camera lingering on Naomi Watts' face, but she's pretty so how can a brother complain? The computer animation was perfectly acceptable, entertaining, and not annoying. This is saying a great deal, for there was a lot of computer animation. Depression-era New York looked great and the jungle was galvanized with prehistoric savagery. One horrible scene involved a guy being eaten alive by giant swamp insects that resembled the most harrowing aspects of both male and female genitalia (and with multiple rows of sharp teeth), but if you just keep telling yourself that it's only a cartoon it's endurable to witness. It's a fun movie, don't believe the player haters who say otherwise.