Oh What a Serkis, Oh What a Show

Only four more days to wait until we see Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  The nerd and I spent the last week watching The Colbert Report's "Hobbit Week", and if you haven't yet seen it, I suggest you find it on Hulu.  Watching one actor (sorry kids, Colbert's an actor) totally geek out over a novel from his childhood is charming, warming, and smile-inducing.  Watch him match wits with Ian McKellen, out-Hobbit director Peter Jackson and set Martin Freeman up for this joke of all jokes (please wait until the end of the clip):

Also on "Hobbit Week" this week was Andy Serkis.  Every network news station doing a performance capture segment this week will suggest that we know Serkis' work without knowing his face.  Malarky, I say!  For those of us glued to every special feature/behind the scenes extra released, we know that face, those eyes, and the fact that Gollum's voice was inspired by a furball-laden cat.

So, I decided it was high time I sat down and watched the other major Serkis and Jackson collaboration: King Kong.  The DVD was leant to me over a year ago and I just haven't felt like watching it.  I kept reminding myself there are a hundred reasons I would like it.  I kept ultimately deciding I had no pressing interest.  My renewed admiration for Serkis swayed me.

#notimpressed.  

I waited 70 minutes to even see King Kong.  Granted, everyone else watching the movie waited 70 minutes, they just probably had less wine than me.

Then, I had this strange anxiety attack.  As I watched, and the CGI bugs crawled and clicked, I got more and more worked up.  When King Kong fought the giant handful of T. Rexes, I started crying.  When Naomi Watts was hiding from a T. Rex while being chased by a giant bug, I lost it.  We turned the movie off, and put on Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I instead.

Given this, no one in their right mind would take my review seriously.  That's why I blog.

So, the scenery is beautiful, and there are some period accents, and Naomi Watts is a blonde treasure (Side note: I realized that nothing like this would ever happen to me because I'm brunette.  There are zero directors alive or dead who have convinced brunette actresses to sail towards ultimate peril).  King Kong's rare moments of honesty and believability are when you look into his eyes.  And that's a testament to Serkis more than the movie.

Rather than spend some money and time on making those fights convincing, and taking the care to ensure that I believe that our heroine is being carried by a 25 foot simian, I felt like everyone involved said, "Ah, Serkis can handle it.  Look at what he did with Gollum."

Serkis has said he doesn't want a performance capture Academy Award category.  So I wait, alongside thousands of other geeks, for this brilliant, brave, intelligent and humble man to receive his Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

In the mean time, I await with gleeful anticipation my return to Middle Earth this Friday.