I don’t often have a visceral reaction to a movie. Usually I laugh, I’m bored, I’m intrigued. It’s not often, however, that I feel the need to flee a theater because of what’s on the screen. Darin grabbed my hand and whispered, “It’ll be okay, really.”

Tsotsi was a difficult movie for me to take, because a lot of the movie is about a baby in danger. I’m going to go ahead and spoil something for anyone who might go see this movie and might have the same reaction I did:

The baby turns out okay.

Tsotsi is a South African movie about the titular character, a baby-faced criminal who doesn’t even have a real name (“Tsotsi” means “Thug”). He and his band of cronies go out and night and do crimes in the glittering modern city of Johannesburg, with Tsotsi picking their victims, and then they escape to the run-down ghetto of the township on the outskirts of town, where everyone lives in concrete buildings topped with tin roofs. One night his compatriot Butcher kills their victim, primarily for the fun of it, and in the ensuing blame game Tsotsi beats up another member of their gang, Teacher Boy. Upset about what he’s done, Tsotsi runs out into the night, across the field, ending up at a posh upscale community. A woman in a BMW gets out of her car to fiddle with the automatic gate opener and Tsotsi jumps into her car. When she yells at him to stop, he shoots her, then drives off.

Only when he’s miles away does he discover that there’s an infant in the back seat.

What happens as a result — to Tsotsi, to the infant, to the woman he’s shot, to her husband, to his friends — is not “big” in the way it would be in a Hollywood movie. Tsotsi does not automatically morph into a nice guy — he has no idea how to be a nice guy. He doesn’t even automatically become a good caregiver, having had no care himself, raising himself from an early age. But things do change for him: his perceptions of himself, of other people, his relationships to his friends.

One of the most interesting things about Tsotsi is how there are so many factors in the story that are simply there: never called out, never given as excuses. Several times during the story we see giant billboards (they must be all over Johannesburg) alerting people to the dangers of HIV/AIDS. The destruction AIDS has wreaked on South Africa looms over both Tsotsi personally and larger segments of the society — the scene at the children’s camp is devastating. The divide between the poverty of Tsotsi’s township and the upscale elegance of the people he robs is gigantic — they might as well be on different planets. The BMW Tsotsi abandons is stripped bare by the time the cops find it. The only hope Tsotsi finds is this little baby. What it gives him the hope to do is strange.

Darin really liked this movie. I had a much more difficult time watching it. It’s definitely a welcome change from standard Hollywood fare, though — so many times we’ve walked out of movies and within seconds we can barely remember a damn thing about it (one reason I didn’t write up anything about The Matador, amongst other movies that I’ve completely forgotten). I can see why Tsotsi won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film — it’s not an easy story, by any means. But if you’re looking for something a little stronger and more resonant, this is probably a good choice.

“‘Why did the twenty-five-foot tall gorilla climb the building?’ ‘You had me at twenty-five-foot tall gorilla.'” — Darin, in the car last night coming home from the movie.

Oh, what a disappointment King Kong was. I don’t know what cut of the movie all these raving reviewers have seen, but could it possibly have been this three-hour-and-fifteen minute extravaganza?

Let me sum up this movie in two words: slow motion.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of scenes in this movie where the film literally goes to slow motion, and does so to no apparent end that I could figure out. Slow motion film always reminds me of shows like “A Current Affair,” where they put the footage of the alleged perp in slow motion not only to make him seem more sinister, but because they just don’t have that much footage of him to begin with and need to stretch it out.

But the movie itself also unfolds at a slow motion pace. Director Peter Jackson is going to do everything in depth here: when you have a $200m. budget, fleshing out not one, not two, but possibly seven or eight different vignettes on How Bad The Depression Is seems like a good idea. Or, as I said to Darin, “Did you catch that Naomi Watts was in vaudeville? Don’t worry, because you’ll have six more opportunities to get up to speed on that.”

It’s an hour before we get to Skull Island, and it’s another hour before Kong gets to New York. (I’m not exactly sure of those numbers, actually, because Act 3 in this pic — Kong in NYC — moves at an ungodly, and illogical, speed. Suddenly Kong is on stage in New York — and Jack-the-playwright’s new play is opening the same night! With uh, what: the world’s shortest rehearsal time ever?) When the movie is on Skull Island — one gigantic action scene — the problems just keep piling up: we have brutal savages, giant gorillas, T-Rexes, and a humongous collection of the world’s most ravenous man-sized insects. (I couldn’t even play the insect part of World of Warcraft. I had my eyes closed for the insect bits of this movie.) When Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts fell into a river during their escape, I actually expected another detour with sharks or something.

My general reaction to the frenetic, well-produced goings-on is: Who cares? Yes, there’s lots happening, but I wasn’t particularly invested in any of it. Possibly the problem is how damn long the movie goes on for: maybe if it had been “People go to island, people find Kong, people bring him to NYC to a coldwater five-story walkup, then shoot him off tall building when he looks for a Rm W Vu” it might have meant more. But the movie never sells me on the grand tragedy of this giant gorilla who connects with a blonde chick and then falls off the Empire State Building. I mean, what: were they going to get married or something? Nope, sorry, not feeling it. Mostly wanted the movie over.

Jack Black, as the movie producer who finds and exploits Kong, has one mode, one facial expression in this movie. Naomi Watts has pretty much just one of each too: one more closeup of her looking searchingly at (insert one: Kong, love interest Adrien Brody, mates from vaudeville act) and I was going to scream. The special effects are amazing — my comment was, “It’s great how you’re actively watching a scene that has no element that ever existed in real life” — and if you’re interested in seeing this movie, see it in the theater.

But see it soon. I can’t imagine King Kong is going to be around for long. The theater we went to last night was mostly empty.