King Kong is frickin’ awesome. I think from now on, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens should make every movie. Except for the ones by Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers.

Sure, it’s three hours long, and I could tell it was three hours. Not that I was wanting it to be over, just that I was aware of how long it was taking. That’s the closest I can get to a criticism of it — there was nothing in the movie that was bad or completely superfluous, but it still felt like a lot of stuff. I wish they’d spent more time on the island and less with acts 1 and 2. Just about everything that happens on the island is just spectacular, the Tyrannosaurus fight in particular, so I wish there’d been more of that.

I don’t have much to say other than that it’s a damn fine movie, the best I’ve seen this year. I’d heard reports that it was very moving, so I was expecting to get all caught up in that. I didn’t, really; I cared what was happening, but wasn’t particularly moved by it except for the action sequences.

One of the things that impressed me about the Lord of the Rings movies was how Jackson made them as movies, that is, combining elments of horror B-movies, science fiction, fantasy, genuine horror movies, melodrama, pirate movies, battle scenes, etc. to tell what could be a pretty dry fantasy story. King Kong isn’t quite as epic, but it’s definitely a movie made by someone who loves movies and hates pretension. Of course there are all the B-movie elements, but there’s also a sense throughout that it’s all charming and funny. The T. Rex scene isn’t just spectacular, but it’s genuinely funny in how it just keeps building. All the bug scenes are intended for the schock value gross-out, and they’re just fun. And Ann and Kong’s scenes are designed around vaudeville slapstick and a child’s tantrum, and it just works, and it’s just charming. Never too corny to work, and never too absorbed in irony or self-reference. It’s just designed to be enjoyed.

I knew going in that I was going to like Naomi Watts, because I think she’s just great in everything I’ve seen her do. I was surprised that I liked Adrian Brody — he’s pretty much useless to the movie, in retrospect, but while it’s going on you always get the sense that he’s just supposed to be there. What really surprised me was Jack Black; his character is supposed to be smarmy and unethical, but genuinely passionate about what he’s doing, and undeniably charismatic. So it turned out to be perfect casting, and he did a good job with it. He’s actually got more of a character arc than anyone else, including Ann.

And the more I think about it, I guess I have to change my story about not being moved. The best scenes are still the action sequences, but the one that really got me on an emotional level is when they’re back in New York and do the Kong show at the theater. The combination of the ape chained up, and the dancers in black-face, all just hit me as “this is the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.” Even more than the ending. (Which I won’t ruin here.)

The book I’m reading (another Terry Pratchett book, Monstrous Regiment) has a vampire who’s joined the Temperance League and substituted a blood addiction for an addiction to coffee. Somehow that got the idea stuck in my head that I should do the same thing.

Not give up my addiction to blood, of course — I love blood. But I’ve got a costly Coke habit that has not only done a number on my teeth and my breath, but also keeps me perpetually chubby. I figure if I could just get over my aversion to coffee, I’d get all the caffeine — something my body needs anyway, and I like that — without as much of the high fructose corn syrup.

So sometime last week (details are hazy), I went and busted up a Starbuck’s in my initial test run. I’m not even going to go into the whole business about the coffee-drinkers vs. non-coffee-drinkers club, and how the feeling I got looking at the menu must be what normal people feel like when they go into a comic book store. The double whammy of you don’t belong here and you have no idea how this works. (Plus the double grande non-fat mocha latte chino bit was already tired even when LA Story came out).

I ended up with a latte because I heard someone order one one time and I know it has something to do with milk. Tasted like warm milk served in a cup that had been previously used to drink coffee and wasn’t sufficiently cleaned. Not bad, definitely not as bad as my previous attempts at coffee-drinking, but nothing spectacular. I forced myself to like beer and cigarettes, I figured, so I can force myself to like this. The only question was whether it would have any effect — it didn’t seem very strong, and my years of the Coke monkey on my back have built up a pretty significant tolerance to caffeine.

At about 5:30 the next morning, I thought it would probably be a good idea to go to bed. I wasn’t tired yet, but it was starting to get light out so it just seemed like the thing to do. As I stopped vibrating long enough to drift off, I started to wonder what an espresso would do… Maybe Coke Blak is the answer?

Update: Apparently a latte is espresso. Go figure. Well, now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Speaking of cancellation: I don’t want to scare any of the “Lost” fans, but I started watching the series on DVD. And I like it. There’s a good chance I won’t jinx it and get it cancelled though, because I’m not crazy in love with it; I’m merely enjoying it. I’m actually two discs into it already, and I hadn’t realized how many episodes I’ve already seen. Without context, I didn’t like them as much, and so I just remembered all the initial spoilers.

The pilot is still phenomenal, two of the best hours of television ever made. Seriously. The others I’m liking but I’m not blown away yet. I noticed that Paul Dini is a story editor and wrote a couple of the episodes; whether it’s his influence, or just because I know who he is and am making connections that don’t exist, the episodes remind me a lot of the Batman animated series. Tightly written stories with a clear message and interesting symbolism, but a little too “neat.” I don’t want to sound overly critical, because I think they’re very, very good, but there’s just something keeping it just short of great. The symbolism is a little too blatant (Charlie digging out of the cave is just like that moth digging out of a cocoon and look! there’s a moth right there!) and the message is a little bit too clear. But I’ll say again that that’s me being over-critical because the show is so well done otherwise.

And the music is perfect. Unless I’m reading it wrong, it’s by the same guy who does the music for “Alias.” The score doesn’t draw attention to itself, but just works perfectly for setting the mood. And even their song choices work — in “Alias,” whenever they would start playing a song and show a montage of people thinking, it just seemed sappy and obvious, but the couple of times they’ve done it so far on “Lost,” I didn’t even notice it was happening.

Also, I’m going to have to add a couple of things to my “Llorando” post below, apparently: the end of Locke’s story (in “Walkabout”) and the end of Sun’s story (in “House of the Rising Sun”).

Crap, I was just looking on imdb and saw another spoiler in the cast list. Dammit. I’m going to have to hurry and get caught up.

And I’ve got a question for those who’ve already seen season 1: The first few episodes have a lot of flashbacks to the plane crash. Do those go on throughout the season, or are they kept mostly to the beginning of the series? I don’t want to be watching an episode during a plane flight and then all of a sudden have another one of those flashbacks pop up and freak my shit out.

I didn’t even remember that “Alias” moved to Wednesdays until I saw it on the TiVo last night; I’d pretty much written it off since I heard about the cancellation and since the season seemed to be starting off on shaky ground. But last night’s was really pretty good! They’re back with the action scenes and the intrigue and the secret conspiracies and double-crosses, and of course the guest stars. I’ve always liked the drug-induced-dream-sequence-flashback episodes (they’ve done at least three that I can remember) for some reason; I guess the people behind the show realize that and are tapping into that market.

If they can keep it up at this level, and the signs suggest they can, then I’ll be mighty pleased. They’ve got a good villain in Amy Acker and decent support cast with the two new guys and French lady with overbite. (And it’s kind of funny that cutting off somebody’s ear was horrifying and brutal in Reservoir Dogs, but now they show it not only on network TV, but on a network TV series that my mom watches).

The show’s already repeating itself, so it’s good that they can go out on a high note. They’ve always had kick-ass season finales, even before the big cliffhanger, so I can only imagine that a series finale that they’ve had this long to prepare for is going to be huge. I could do without the “somebody’s going to die” stuff in the teaser commercial, since they’ve already blown their wad, cast-member-death-wise, for this season. But still, should be interesting.

Man, I’m pissed. I bought a new extra-huge hard drive for my Mac mini because the internal one sat me down and had a long heartfelt talk with me about how it needed more space. I’m not sure what exactly was taking up so much room; it sure wasn’t my “novel.” I guess all those lengthy fan letters to the G4 TV show hosts and hostesses started to add up. Or else it was all the scratch audio for my “Pieces of Chuck” podcast.

Because I’ve been working with or around computers for the past 16 years of my life, I’m an expert at them and knew exactly the first thing to do when I installed my new hard drive: copy every single document, music file, photo, video, and game file to the new drive and delete them from the old one. And because I’m extra double-plus smart, I made sure to include all my work files in that.

When I woke up this morning afternoon today, I saw that I’d shut down my Mac but left the hard drive running. I turned it off to go take a shower, and that was the last time it was heard from ever again.

I’m pretty sure that not much is lost permanently. It looks like it’s just the enclosure’s power supply that’s bad and the drive is still most likely in good shape. And I backed up just about everything to DVD (except my iTunes library) when I got the new drive; worst case, I’d lose some minor changes to the work stuff and have to restore all my music off the iPod. It was annoying enough a couple weeks ago, when I copied my music over to the new drive without doing it exactly like iTunes wanted me to, so I lost all my ratings, playlists, and my play history.

If nothing else, it’ll encourage me to do more frequent backups in the future. And I have a healthier respect for all ths Web 2.0 business, since I notice my website and Gmail accounts are still golden. Now I just have to mail back the drive (at my expense), wait for them to fix it and mail it back to me, and pray really really hard that they pay attention to my instructions and don’t format the hard drive.

Also: another SFist post about Apple.

If I did have a working links section, then I’d use it to post stuff like the following:

Lore Sjoberg started updating his website again, including this comic strip which I’m convinced that my laughing at will somehow result in my eternal damnation.

That site is also the first I heard of Twink, the “toy piano band,” which is cool stuff for anybody who liked The Carl Stalling Project and/or electronic music. My favorite is The Broken Record, which samples from vintage children’s records. Just about every review I’ve read has a line about its making you laugh out loud at least once, but I’ve got to say it’s true — what gets me is “Alphabent.” Their stuff is on the iTunes Music Store if you’re not into hunting it down, but of course you don’t get the bunny rabbit book.

Wandering around Flickr led to Adam Koford.com. I really like his drawings of Hell, Adoption, and a monkey with a wrench.

Oh yeah, I knew I was forgetting something: Some helpful people on a message board reminded me the name of a toy I had from the early 80s, Parker Bros’ MERLIN. I’d been thinking of it because all the robot-vacuum-beeping was reminding me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Turns out this guy wrote a Merlin simulator for Windows, and he put the original instruction manual on his site (check the Downloads section). Unfortunately, the simulator doesn’t have sound effects as far as I can tell, so there’s no point to the music game. But the other games work, and are a good bit of nostalgia. And a reminder that the thing was a lot cooler as a Space Phone or a Space Car for my action figures than it was as an electronic game.

I put up another post on SFist about Yahoo’s buying the del.icio.us site. It’s a little bit on the ironic side, since I was just thinking how much better it would be if I just had some kind of URL-sharing thing so I didn’ t feel the need to put up a new blog post every time I just wanted to post a link. It was my intention to make the “Links” section of this site exactly that, a total rip-off of the del.icio.us idea, but it’s another one of my neglected projects and probably won’t see any attention anytime soon.

That SFist article was very briefly one of the top stories on Google news again, which is still just weird. I was looking on there for links to other stuff, and there was a blog post I’d written staring back at me. There’s still something unsettling about that; it makes it seem like I’m trying to pass myself off as a “journalist” or something. Journalists actually get interviews and do research and shit; I just get off on pontificating and trying to be funny in equal doses.

Neat! I just found out, from IGN of all places, that the Telltale Games gang has announced their consortium with Steve Purcell to do Sam & Max games. And Steve’s started a new webcomic and an official website (the website just has a teaser image at the moment).

I can’t wait to see what they do with it!