Change Your Image
JackGrace
Reviews
The Self-Destruction of Gia (2003)
Awful
I feel for the director who I'm sure cared very much about this project, but this "documentary" is an object lesson in incompetence. He did get some good interviews with key people in Gia's life ... but you better know who they are because he doesn't identify any of them. It's completely raw footage mixed in with a montage of photos and long, long clips from an interview Gia did. Even the opening credits are terrible. He stayed on the first photo of Gia for so long that I thought the DVD was broken. There are occasional stabs at a soundtrack. I'm sure any kid could put together a more professional tribute on YouTube. It's a sad, sad story, and again, I'm sure the director did his best, but this isn't something that should qualify as a film. Stick to the book or the Angelina Jolie movie.
King Kong (2005)
Very good, almost great
As other reviewers have pointed out, the movie starts slowly and is simply stuffed with superfluous characters. It's as if Peter Jackson wanted to make an epic rather than a great monster movie, and he felt that required lots and lots of characters. He should have fleshed out the Ann-Jack-Kong triangle further. Ann and Kong are by far the most developed characters, but in order to get the full love-triangle effect, we needed more of Jack. The movie seemed to spend lots of time on unnecessary characters and dialogue while the important dialogue seemed to be truncated or missing. That said, much of the movie is a thrill a second. The next day I was still talking with my fellow theater-goers about how, with just half an hour shaved off in the right places, this movie could have been a 10. There's not many movies that I am still talking about the next day. So for all it's problems, a pretty stellar film.