I finally watched King Kong, aka King Long. I stole that one from Junior. And that’s the truth. While watching it, I never felt like the movie was dragging, but it seems crazy long looking back. Here are some thoughts, scribbled in the dark while watching the movie. Eventually I decided to just watch the movie.

• There’s a scene where Jack Black stops a fruit seller from attacking Naomi Watts after she steals an apple from a food cart. Then Jack stumbles across a magical lamp and Robin Williams comes out.
• Where the hell are the dinosaurs?
• “Adrien! Good to see you man. How’s Solo doing?”
• This ship captain is intense.
• This black guy is even more intense.
• This Chinese guy is intense…ly stereotypical.
• This native kid is scarier than Samara.
• This native grandma is scarier than the kid
• I’m amazed by the power a woman has on a bunch of dudes who haven’t seen another female in ages. To bring her back, they paddle tiny boats through death water to fight a crazy ass tribe that has lava ceremonies to worship a giant gorilla. And I’d probably be doing the same thing.
• At least I’d see dinosaurs, where the hell are they?
• Apparently, the crew killed every single native.
• “Petrie, Cera’s wrong. This isn’t the Great Valley”
• These long necks are pusses, running for miles and miles at top speed. Like Dan going to the Phat Girlz premiere.
• The raptors in Jurassic Park looked better.
• The raptor in Raptor did not.
• This giant worm reminds me of Cell swallowing the androids in Dragon Ball Z
• How’d they get him on the ship? He’s 25 feet tall. They can’t get him on ship, that’s not real.
• Because an island with dinosaurs, bugs that acted in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and a 25-foot gorilla is real.
• The ending was no surprise, but it was still sad.

Not that sad though. I feel for him, but he did cause a lot of deaths in the city. And he was on his way to killing every blonde in New York. They had no other choice. Good movie. It felt half an hour too long, but I have no idea what could have been cut.

I’m giving this the same rating as High School Musical. Now, does this necessarily mean I think a Disney Channel Original Movie and a 3-hour epic directed by Peter Jackson should even be compared? Am I saying that High School Musical is as good as King Kong? Yes.

Other than studying, I find time for everything come finals week. I watch more TV than most of the rest of the quarter combined. Stupid Flash games become crack when textbooks are the other option. Most importantly, I watch scenes from inspiring movies, or often entire movies. ‘Inspiring’ pretty much means violent. The point of all this movie-watching is to fire me up and boost my confidence for the exam. Based on previous performance, it probably doesn’t work.

Here are some scenes I recommend:

Gladiator – Any scene with Maximus being bad (bad, bad, bad, bad meaning good, also meaning pretty much the entire movie)

The Spaniard wrecks the place. Some of the stuff is really gory. I slowed down and paused the movie during the gory parts to convince myself that it wasn’t real—similar to Doug watching that monster movie a second time to see the zipper on the costume. Let me tell you: don’t watch Gladiator’s gory parts in slow motion, that junk looks real.

Troy – Achilles vs. Hector

Fantastic. In Gladiator, Maximus is compared to Hector. Hector loses to Achilles. It’s a good fight. Would Maximus lose to Achilles? It depends on the circumstances. Mainly, who killed whose family member? If Maximus kills Patroclus, Achilles rages and kills Maximus after slaughtering his troops. If Achilles kills Maximus’s wife and son, Maximus finds himself in a series of amazing coincidences and ends up in an arena where he rages and kills Achilles.

Last Samurai – “Samurai come”

This is the scene in the forest when the samurai come on horses through the mist. One of the guys from the Japanese army shoots early, triggering the rest of the guys to lose their minds and fire at will. I think the guy made the right choice. By shooting first, he was able to book it before everyone else. Of course, he was brutally impaled by samurai who snuck up behind the military army. But hey, I don’t know, something-something about honor and being the first to die.

Doom – The FPS Scene

It’s the scene where the film pays homage to the game by switching the action to a first person point of view. My brother recommends this inspiring sequence, as well as the entire movie.

For you single guys out there with a kitchen and no idea what to do with it (Heeeeeeeeey brother), here are two sites to start off with: Cooking for Engineers and Cooking 101.

Pretty much everyone’s seen the Jordan commercial with kids performing classic moves. Here’s the commercial and the actual moves synched up side by side. More goose bumps. It’s also impressive to see the details they kept in timing the other players in the background.

I went ahead and read my copy again. It’s not as bad as the amazon reviewer thought. The dialogue of the main characters is hard to believe. One of the two main characters, a first grader, says things like “You can’t argue with my logic.” Back in first grade I remember saying things along the lines of “Ma and me goed to the store today.”

Bad analogy: It’s like when I was in 10th grade when Smallville started. Tom Welling was supposed to be a freshman–it makes people near the character’s age feel bad and wonder why I’m struggling to grow a mustache while 9th-grade Superman looks super manly.

Pun intended. In both cases, it doesn’t take away from the bigger picture–this book is good and I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything as riveting as Smallville’s first season. The two kids in the book run away for a week on a little less than $30. Of course, the value of money is skewed by the children’s point of view and the era of the plot. Everything sounds cheap but the kids are real tightwads.

A simple calculator shows $30 translating to about $170 today. Why does a first grader have this much money? Still, Rachel Ray needs $40 a day and these kids survived a week on about $12 a day. Soldiers.

Great story.

I finally registered for IMDB.com, and I was surprised to see the message boards filled with what seemed to be middle-schoolers. I thought long and hard about why. Then I realized adults probably aren’t on threads about High School Musical. Yes, a DCOM, as the other members say (Disney Channel Original Movie).

On a side note, it’s the first full length movie offered on iTunes. And I understand why some news stories put quotes around “movie.” But I could care less about that other stuff, I was continuing the tradition of the eccentric fan (read: stalker).

In the end, the search was worth it. She’s not that young, so I don’t feel too bad about myself. Though I don’t know how I feel about watching the movie in its entirety.

The official soundtrack actually made the Billboard Top 200, debuting at #143. But it didn’t end there. In fact, it hasn’t ended. The High School Musical soundtrack is #1 on the Billboard Album charts. I’m in disbelief.

Sike. Riveting movie. It might seem like I’m giving away these coveted review circles. I’m not. Five out of five.