crocodile kong dreams
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008I’ve been having funny dreams this week.
Last night I dreamt I was being chased by a 25 foot long crocodile. It was enormous and very very fast. I seemed to spend the whole night running up and down this building trying to avoid it as it inexorably sought me out. Early on in the dream I had a companion, but he got eaten pretty fast. Luckily I woke up before anything too unpleasant happened to me.
Must have been because I watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong on Saturday night! I had problems with quite a lot of that film. I can see how Jackson was pulling out all the stops and making it as big and extreme as possible, and that deserves our applause, but I really didn’t like the screaming racist savage natives on the island, or the implausible dinosaur scenes where all the humans just happened to avoid being trampelled as they skip along in front of them, or the self indulgent utterly unrealistic pit of insects, or the way Kong flung Ann around like a rag doll and she never even got a bruise. In fact the whole middle section on the lost island is just silly – digital special effects with no reference to physics, evolution or biology! And the whole film could have been a lot shorter.
But the beautifully realised and shot 1930s Depression New York was stunning and totally immersive, there was a nice Al Jolson song near the beginning, lots of great actors, and of course the central relationship between Ann Darrow and Kong was just brilliantly done – understated, wordless, achingly doomed, and culminating in the amazing Empire State Building scene. The final scene is a masterpiece of modern cinema! I guess you probably had to sit through the rest so that it could be.