Dumb Things in Otherwise Well-Regarded Movies 1.1

Anna and I rewatched the Peter Jackson King Kong last night. While at times really great, there are so many things in that movie that are fudged, things that used to firmly compel me to stamp scripts with 'PASS'  back when I was doing coverage, followed up with comments along the lines of "script full of overly convenient developments, needs to go through about five more rewrites." I can only guess that producers figured Hey, who cares? It's Peter Jackson! He just made Lord of the Freaking Rings! Seriously, fixing that stuff will fuck everything up. Shut up.

Among the dumb things in this generally well-regarded movie:

• Ann Darrow gets tied up to the thing, and the big monster comes by and yanks her off of the thing. Why does she still have arms?

OK, the knots are really tricky, you have to-aaaaaeeeiii!!

• On the island, it's established that a human can't walk five steps without encountering something awful and huge that wants desperately to eat you. Yet Adrien Brody, a writer from New York, finds Naomi Watts' exact location through the nightmare monster jungle with no apparent difficulty.

• I can accept that a tommy gun might be the right tool for the job to zap away giant crickets trying to eat a person's face off, but the kid doesn't even try to aim carefully -- he wavers and twitches, jerking around with the recoil... You expect to see Brody's head go like a pumpkin. But I guess maybe the kid's a natural. He's got the eye.

Watch the nose, kid!

• How the fuck did they get King Kong on the boat and all the way back to New York, and then into a movie theater?

• Why is there a big black-tie affair at a theater to go and see a giant ape?

• King Kong escapes say an hour after the premier begins, which let's assume was at 10pm, to be generous, then goes on a rampage for about an hour, and then it's suddenly dawn.

You tired? 8 hours of rampaging catches up with you...

• It's cold enough for a lake to be frozen solid enough to support a 10-story ape, yet Naomi Watts wears nothing but an evening dress all throughout the third act, seemingly just fine even at the very top of the Empire State Building, where it would probably be even colder. Windchill!

• Adrien and Naomi are standing and emoting at the very tippy top of the Empire State Building, as if they were just standing in the middle of a sunny field. Even Spiderman would be freaking the fuck out up there.

I know you're cold, but let's scoot in a bit, ok?