3 Movie Reviews

Rumor Has It has a cute premise. It assumes The Graduate was based on real people and postulates about a third generation finding out about it. Jennifer Aniston plays the daughter of Katharine Ross's character. She's engaged to Mark Ruffalo but isn't too sure about it. She comes home for her sister's wedding and finds out from grandma (Shirely MacLaine) about the family's secret. She tracks down Kevin Costner who Dustin Hoffman's character was apparently based on and there's a little fling. It's ok, but it needed to be funnier. Too much of it was taking the plot seriously.

King Kong surprised me and it shouldn't have. I heard a lot about how realistic the gorilla was and of course the special effects are so lifelike, the dinosaurs look better than in Jurasic Park and how faithful it was to the original and at its heart, it's a love story. Ok. The problem is, this is a movie that's way over the top, pure spectacle. Who would have thought, King Kong, spectacle, I know. There's a dinosaur stampede (yes there were dinosaurs in the original) and men run under their legs and along with them the whole time. For 10 minutes. Like everything in this film, each segement just goes to far and on for too long. It's a 3 hour movie and it could have been a lot shorter and a lot better. I'm curious to see the original again, which was only 100 minutes long.

Munich is another long film. Has Hollywood forgotten the benefits of editing? This is about Mosad's efforts to track down Black September who was responsible for the killing of the 1972 Israeli Olymipic team. It follows a secret Mosad task force (led by Eric Bana) that uses terrorist tactics to track down and kill those responsible. Speilberg tells much of the story visually, many segments have no dialog. At least one of the assassination attempts is very Hitchcockian in how the suspence builds. Speilberg is a master but too much of this film seemed to be him showing off. There's a lot of reinactment of the Olympic kidnapping and that seemed unnecessary to me. It included original footage of Jim McKay reporting the events that seemed too much like, "see what I did here, this was real". The damage the bullets do is graphically shown and there's usually smoke coming out of the various wounds. The film has 3 serious conversations and asks the question, does revenge work to bring about peace? The Israeli government is shown saying yes, but after being an undercover assassin for over a year, Bana wants to know what effect they had, as all those eliminated have been replaced and where does it end? There's a lot of potential here, and much of it was realized, but it's too showy and too long.