On Monday evening, I caught a showing of “Iron Man“—the movie that seemingly everyone I read or speak to loves and is willing to gush about. There was one problem, though. It bored the fuck out of me. I actually think it kind of overall sucked.

The movie is two and a half hours long. Most of it is buildup, filled with frat-boy banter à la Jon Favreau. While the special effects are good, the action is mediocre and short-lived. The finale…after sitting through all the dull-ass shit, did not rescue me from boredom.

The sad thing is that Iron Man could have been a great movie. Would that a better director had the job. Jon Favreau was not the man for the flick. At best, the movie’s a rental, assuming you can stay awake through it.

A few days ago, after spending a wretched day renewing my ID at the hell that is the Brooklyn DMV, I picked up a copy of “Shadow of the Colossus” for the PS2 to brighten my day. I had no idea what it was about, but chose it because somewhere at some point I’d glanced at a review that raved about it. This is basically how I buy all games as I’ve a decided lack of patience to read gamer sites and magazines. I usually will subscribe to an RSS feed and scan the photos and titles. Games that get a bunch of posts, stick in my memory and usually end up getting purchased in moments of consumer weakness, which is often.

The format of your run-of-the-mill action game is: fight, fight, fight…boss scene. Fight the boss and then it’s back to fight, fight, fight til the next boss scene and the game eventually ends. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose but the boss fights have historically always been my least favorite parts. Give me a room with twenty little baddies that I have to kill á la God of War and I am one happy fucking camper. Games that are boss-heavy usually begin to collect dust shortly after purchase.

SotC is all bosses. There’s nothing else to the game, unless you count running from point A to B. There’s not baddies in between to slay. You go from one boss monster to another and while normally this would have me hating this game, I find myself hooked. SotC doesn’t have just any old bosses. These bastards are HUGE, gorgeously rendered behemoths that combine action, puzzle-solving and strategy to beat. The graphics, scenery and feel are hot shit. Strange, mysterious and moody. There’s little or no dialog in the game so the huge dream-like world sprawled out before you, unoccupied but for the mountainous beasts reminiscent of something out of HP Lovecraft is simply there to wonder about.

The hero of the game is this dinky little fucker, armed with only a sword and bow and a horse to ride. Pitted against giants literally fifty times larger, the little dude has to expose and attack the monster’s weak points. This is accomplished by figuring out how and managing to climb the boss, get to his weak spots and stab the fuck out of them before you lose your grip and fall. Tense shit.

There’s something to be said about a game revolving around my least enjoyed facet of the action genre that manages to completely entertain me. SotC is a great game on so many levels, from the concept to the anime-like look. It’s a short game, there being only sixteen bosses to battle, which sucks since this is a game that keeps you wanting to see more. More bosses, more areas, more everything.

Last night I watched King Kong. I’ve read a lot of reviews calling it the best movie of the year — some practically drooling over the film. Maybe it’s something they’re smoking or perhaps it’s an all around dumbing of the senses from having a career reviewing American mainstream films, but I found the flick to be a serious steaming pile of shit, much like something a 25 foot tall gorilla might excrete and then fling in protest at having been subjected to such lame drivel.

As you may already have been warned, the movie is about three hours long. The first hour is a tortuous drag of unconvincing stage sets, bad acting and even worse dialog. I’m talking about lines so shitty, I was tempted to rupture my eardrums with my house keys to avoid listening to it and only the knowledge that according to everything I read, the movie was going to get better if I could just survive till the island scenes kept me seated when normally I definitely would have walked out.

King Kong does have some good points to it. Once the ape appears and the action kicked in, I found myself thinking of that much abused cliché that critics use when praising such films — a rollercoaster ride. For once, I think it’s an appropriate analogy. The effects are the best I think I’ve ever seen and the action choreography (primarily involving CGI characters) is mind-boggling. On these merits, I think the movie is worth seeing in the theater, especially to get the full effect from the sound. Kong makes some pretty bad-ass noise.

The other positive thing that struck me later, after leaving the theater was that at no point in the film did I look at Kong and think of him as a CGI animation. His movements, expressions, detail and above all, sounds were utterly convincing. I didn’t see the result of many hours of wireframe animation and texture-mapping. I saw a solid, real character, interacting flawlessly with real-life actors. Think Gollum to the third power.

But all this seat-of-your-pants action can’t make a three hour movie bearable, especially when more than half of it is dialog and not involving apes, dinosaurs and giant insects. The acting is just terrible. Jack Black is almost embarrassing to watch and Naomi Watts was straight-up retarded. As usual, I felt myself wanting to magically leap into the film and kick the living shit out of Adrien Brody, mainly just for being who he is. He has the kind of face that make me want to disfigure it.

The lines are at times so lousy, as to be laughable when it’s obvious that the intended response was supposed to be tears. It’s a brainless, Bazooka gum wrapper script. In my opinion, things would’ve have been much better if they cut it all out and just showed me an hour and a half of Kong kicking the shit out off stuff.

If you’re going to see it, see it in the theaters, but show up about an hour and twenty minutes late. You’ll save yourself a lot of mind-numbing moments and save yourself from feeling too cheated after you get out all stiff-legged from sitting too long.

It’s possible that I’m being a bit too nit-picky, but the one thing that really bothers me now that I think back on what I saw was this: The movie is about a twenty-five foot tall gorilla. He’s real looking, running around, bellowing and ripping the tongues out of big, mean dinosaurs, yet he has no genitals.

If he’s twenty-five feet, there should be something like a five-foot johnson, swaying in the wind. His balls alone should be knocking down small trees, but for some reason, they’re just not there. WTF? Is he a eunuch? Does this explain why he’s the only ape on the island? Is this why he’s so pissed off all the time? I’d be pretty mad, if I were him.