I’ve been looking for over a week now for a topic to kick-start my No Man’s Blog. They say that the first line is the hardest..or is it first cut is the deepest…? Now there’s an interesting detour to channel my first-post-anxiety. I immediately googled "first time is the" and interestingly enough (yet somewhat disappointing) 7 out of the first 10 results were related to a film called First Time is the Last Time. Never heard of it and the fact that it has only six votes at the IMDb suggests to me that something is wrong with google. 

However,  the first hit took me to a website called thinkexist.com. It is a social-search database dedicated to quotations. Similar to Flickr and De.licio.us, (if you’re not familiar with social-software or web 2.0 trends take a look at this article) it uses tags to help you find and define quotations on every topic you can think of. So my search for ‘first time is the’…took me to a quote by Emil Ludwig that reads:

The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender

The two other google results were related to First Time Brazilian Bikini Wax and First Time Triathlon.

I’ve been toying with the idea of blogging for a couple of months now and finally, last week, on a lazy morning during my holiday in Israel, i made the move and registered my No Man’s Blog. One of these days i will post something about the significance of naming, but for now  i would  just add that the name refers to the somewhat absurd idea for someone like myself to start a weblog…

We went to see King Kong yesterday and half hour into the movie i was happy to realise that this is going to be the topic for my first-ever-post. Before i start talking about it, it is perhaps important to note that just like Udy my best mate I find it very, very rare for a movie longer than 2 hours to justify its length.(I also, personally quite dislike blockbusting monsters…) Despite the amazing visuals, Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong was way too long and excessive for me – 190 minutes (!!!). Now, since i am neither a film critique, nor have i seen the original film I want to make two personal observations, one related to racism and the other to courage:

At some point when the crew gets to the island on the first time and meets the natives, I could not resist my ‘racial-representations-instinct’ which made me wonder: what happens (psychologically) for the lay person who watches the exclusively white crew (indeed there was one black person on the ship, even a hero at some point)  arrive to the island and meet the black, scary, creepy, diabolical natives? The scene is very intense and foreboding. The creepy natives were surrounded by fantastic symbols of death and destruction. I was wondering whether its just my sensitivity or even my own dormant, unconscious racism that made me think what does it do, on the unconscious level, for people (children and adult alike)  to watch this extremely explicit negative depiction of black people? I thought about Frantz Fanon and his brilliant books ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ and ‘Black Skin White Mask’  where he pioneered the study into the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer.

Later, in  another spine-chilling scene, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) flee Kong (the natives bestowed her to the beast) only to be chased by three horrifying T-rexes. At some point she manages to escape the T-rex horrendous jaws by crawling into a hollow trunk. The T-rex jaws almost gets her but she manages to crawl deeper into the hollow trunk where its too narrow for the beast to get her. The director gives us exactly 2 seconds to breath before some giant, terrifying reptile starts crawling towards her face. At this point is was so asked-for for her to scream "I’m a celebrity get me out of here!…" I had about 5 seconds ‘window-of-opportunity’ to shout it loud for her but didn’t have the guts to do it. I wondered what if? or whats the worse that could have happened?