Newsweek‘s Devin Gordon has seen and written about Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14), and right off the top he uses the same “I” word I’ve been using to describe Jackson for the last four years. (What columnist would use such a term, after all, if he/she wasn’t unfairly biased against Jackson?) “Some critics will complain that the film’s length is an act of Oscar-drunk hubris,” Gordon allows, “but while Kong may be indulgent, it’s not pretentious. And it’s certainly never dull. Jackson has honored his favorite film in the best possible way: by recapturing its heart-pounding, escapist glee.” Keep in mind that any journalist-critic would be inclined to show politeness (if not outright gratitude) to Jackson for his goodwill gesture of letting the journo-critic get a world-exclusive look at King Kong, and that this would probably translate into stepping lightly and obliquely in the rendering of any judgments. And yet even with this psychology in place, Gordon has called the film “indulgent.” He also reports there’s a scene between Kong and Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow “on a frozen pond in Central Park that tilts toward the corny.” Asked about the film’s three-hour length, Jackson tells Gordon, “A few people have already asked me why we’re taking twice as long to tell essentially the same story, and I don’t really know. We’ve been asking that ourselves. I’m going to have to come up with a better answer.” That quote alone gives me the willies. Jackson’s Kong is 80 minutes longer than the original, and he doesn’t even know why?

The New World producer Sarah Green is blowing dubious smoke in a piece by New York Times writer Steve Chagollan about Terrence Malick’s latest film, which New Line is opening on 12.25. “First and foremost we’ve created a love story,” Green declares. “We’re definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly; we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story.” It’s too early to riff about The New World — which is in many ways rapturous and magnificent, by the way — but Green is being truthful only in a partial sense, and in an overall looking- at-the-entire-movie sense her statement is a flat-out crock.

The timestamp of each WIRED item is now a Permalink, which means each and every item can be summoned as a separate link, and each HE column has been Permalinked also.

This piece by L.A. Times reporter John Horn about how and why Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) was spoken in English is almost…I was going to say “hilarious” but I think “staggering” is a better term. Especially this paragraph: “American moviegoers aren’t terribly keen on subtitles, but in truth that wasn’t the sole reason that Marshall filmed only the opening segment with Japanese dialogue. Had the actors performed the entire movie in the language, the director says, ‘I never would have known what they were saying.'” My God, the sheer, take-it-or-leave-it bluntness of that statement! If that isn’t a compelling reason to film a Japan-based movie in English, I don’t know what would be.