Basket.

Back from another fruitful day out, in which I caught the second movie worth its while this month - Wallace and Gromit. With a suitably creative yet still G-rated plot and chock-full of delightful horror movie spoofs and lovable puns ("Gold bullets?" "Yes, 24 carat (carrot)"), it was one of the few films I found genuinely... fun to watch. Fun. Sometimes, that's all we need.

I've been overdosing it this whole week, though. The other movie I watched this month was of course, King Kong (or tua lei kong - fuck, were the natives speaking Hokkien or what?), yesterday with a Sean that had recently recovered powers of self-locomotion, newly-commissioned-and -determined-to-tekan Roger, jumpy Gen and woman warrior Shuang Ning (America, haha). Sick parrot Yi San (though I believe her illness to be more of the mental sort than physical, what with her tales of some ghost pushing her father into a drain and then following home to haunt him) failed to show, which meant a loss of countless decibels of volume but perhaps also a loss of curious stares from passers-by.

It was a good enough film, but one thing I could not figure out is how the director managed to make it last three hours and not feel overlong. Because the plot is basically:

- Bunch of people find mysterious island with strange creatures and stranger Hokkien-speaking tribesmen with body piercings that look horribly painful and teeth that are just plain horrible.

- Bunch of people want to shoot film on island.

- In the course of this attempt, are captured/brutally murdered/torn to pieces/eaten/crushed by natives/dinosaurs/enormous insects/giant ape that is apparently de facto tinpot dictator.

- Survivors from bunch of people find said ape and captured it after yet more casualties.

- Ape is brought to New York, where it inevitably breaks loose, causes havoc and is inevitably killed for it.

- "Beauty killed the beast."

Yes, three hours? He's an amazing director to pull it off. But he would have been most welcome in my book to cut some scenes involving giant insects/arthropods/leeches or whatever the fuck were those horrible things with fucking suckers, god because, well, I am quite the pussy when it comes to giant insects or any similar creepy-crawlies. Thus, I am better off not seeing enormous roaches about half the size of a human being who need to be killed with machetes. Machetes. Heavens.

Oh, and the giant centipedes get an honourable mention too. The scene where they appear is one of the extremely few movie scenes I've ever seen that have actually made me cringe.

Movie aside, it felt simply wonderful just to be doing something with friends. Especially this particular very special bunch that I've seen so much together with.

Ao1c 2003-04, once more, here's to you all.