When I think back to Peter Jackson‘s far-reaching, underwhelming King Kong, which arrives on DVD next month, I think of the sad sequence atop the Empire State Building at the very end, with Kong’s eyes starting to dilate just before he bids his final farewell to Naomi Watts and then slips away, somehow managing a nice clean fall down to 33rd Street without crashing against the jutting-out sides of the building (like his great- grandfather inevitably did in the ’33 version). And that’s all that sticks, really. Portions of the running-around-on-Skull-Island stuff were exciting and amusing, but they’ve been steadly fading since I first saw it, and if you add this to the numbing effect of the first 70 minutes, widely acknowledged as talky and tedious, and you have a film that has not aged well…not at all. Although I still want to watch it one or two more times on DVD.