Don’t see it. Dreadful.

It visually fairly well done, but it’s depressing anti-hero stuff. Definitely earned it’s R rating. And the editing… good heavens. When I picked it up, I thought it would be a fun, CIA thriller spy-type thing, but the choice to use secretive terms throughout and the way it bounced around the timeline made for a hard-to-follow tangle of unenjoyable blah.

Yeah, I know, “But it was **real**, man.” Whatever. Root canals are real. I wouldn’t recommend watching one of those either.

Helen and I got a rare movie date, and went to see *[King Kong][1]*. One of us wanted to; the other kindly agreed. We both left impressed. Very well done. Stunning visually. Sometimes a bit much on the modern gooey/buggy creepiness for me, but that’s just the way things are done nowadays for some reason, and it wasn’t too bad. There was definitely a *Lord of the Rings* feel to parts of it, visually.

We saw it on a super-mega-deluxe-biggie-sized screen. We were up a little closer than usual to the screen, which I normally wouldn’t like, but in this case I did. The screen was so big I had to turn my head to see different things, like really being outside. They also had the super-wizza sound system, but the whole surround sound thing just doesn’t add to the picture in general for me. Except for the very deep bass, which isn’t directional and adds a lot, most of it is just distracting to me; like it’s trying so hard to seem real that it screams fake. (My apologies to all you aspiring soundscape artists out there.)

Casting and acting was brilliant. The filling out of the story was very good. My arm will bear the bruises of Helen’s anxiety for a while.

[1]: http://www.kingkongmovie.com/home.html