Happy New Year! December 31, 2005

Well, the new year is all but around the corner. Can you believe how fast time goes by? Remeber all that BS about Y2K? I was one of those unfortunate IT folk who had to work during on New Years 2000 because of all that crap. We had 500 PCs and 70 servers and nothing happened.

This year should be very interesting for me. I am armed with a completed novel and the knowledge that I will be laid off from my job of 10 years in March. I also have a new novel to begin.

Well, hopefully, I will continue to blog throughout the year. I look forward to reading all of your blogs and finding out what the New Year has in store for you as well!

Drink Up!
Happy New Year!

King Kong Was a Racist December 30, 2005

I had some free time last night and decided that if I ever wanted to see King Kong, then that was the time to do it. I don’t know what I was thinking because it never occured to me that this was a holiday week and every hormonal teenager would be going to the movies at 7:30pm. Shit. I got there and the crowd was ridiculous. I don’t know about you but I hate to pay $10 to see a movie and have it ruined by a group of unruly teenagers ($20 bucks if you count a gallon drum of coke and a small tray of nachos). King Kong is a 3 hour movie too. I may have been able to stand the crowd for an average length movie but no way for an epic.

So I get to the theater, see the crowd, curse myself and leave. I decide that instead of going home, I will rent out the original King Kong (1933). This movie is considered a classic and I haven’t sat down to watch it since I was a kid.

I rent King Kong, go home and pop it into my computer. The movie starts off with 4 minutes of orchestral music played over a still picture with the word Overture written arcoss the screen. My guess is that this is what you watched if you arrived early in to the movies in the old days instead of Coke commercials (a practice which I find to be vile).

I get about 10 minutes into the movie before I decided that something was really odd about this movie. First, its treatment of women is sort of..um..old fashioned. The women in this picture (dig my old style lingo) are depicted as eye candy and incapable of being any use to anyone. The main male love interest constantly talks down to the leading lady. He is also proud of “not liking women” which can get you into trouble aboard a shipload of sea men. Then there is Charlie the cook. Of course Charlie is chinese and only useful when it comes to peeling potatoes. Later on in the picure, when all of the other (white) men on the ship are getting ready to rescue Fay Wray, Charlie wants to help but is told that he is only a cook and would be of no use. All of the black men in the movie are depicted as savages. I am sure that I saw a few white people dressed up and painted black but I could have been imagining things. The funniest bit was when, after Fay Wray or as they call her The Golden Goddess, is abducted by the “savages”, Charlie finds the captain and tells him that she was kidnapped by the “crazy black men.”

All of this is laughable, of course but it still makes you wonder what it was like back in the 30s when these stereotypes were acceptable. Attitudes were certainly different back then! Sheesh!

Still, I have to say that I still enjoyed this movie. The stop motion animation must have been incredible back then and it is still sad at the end when Kong is about to die and all that he can do is pet Fay Wray.

This movie is as close to a chick flick as you will ever get me to watch.