Tag Archives: Naomi Watts

Eastern Promises (2007)

Movies are hard to make. Story telling is hard and sometimes it can falter. I think that Eastern Promises is an example of this. Let me qualify that by saying that if the goal of this film had been different, if it had shifted its focus somewhere along the line then it could have been really great. As it was, it had moments that achieved something real and Viggo Mortensen threw in a performance both hard and fast hidden under a polished veneer of ambiguity.

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King Kong (2005)

I didn’t like this film very much. For one thing is was just FAR too long. Throughout the film there were scenes that could have been taken out and it seemed like Peter Jackson was going for some kind of epical final product which was unnecessary. While there were some scenes (the fight with the dinosaurs, Kong in New York) that were really incredible and just fun to watch, there were an equal amount of scenes that seemed gratuitous and didn’t do anything for me. Also the characters were incredibly superficial. You never get to know them on any kind of level, which I’m sure is what he was going for. He was trying to recreate the kind of shallowness of characters from films in the 1930s and he did it well, but if you’re going to establish that sort of basic character development and not go any further than there is no way that you can develop the story as much as they did. It’s one or the other. I will say that I think he shot a lot of the film beautifully. Particularly the scenes with Naomi Watts. I was pretty enamored every time she stared at the camera. I liked Kong a lot too. He looked incredible and they did an excellent job of establishing his relationship with Watts, in fact, now that I think about it they almost went too far with that too. By the end it kind of felt like a bull fight. Just kill him already.