Thumbs down on these blockbusters

AMONG my many jobs this time of year, including taking down the Christmas tree, I mean the holiday tree, and cleaning up after the cat, is to see movies. They’re free to members of the Writers Guild of America so that we might vote with some intelligence on who wrote the best scripts in 2005.

It doesn’t matter which film in its entirety was best or which director more daring because they are beyond our meager abilities to analyze. Although good writing is rarely considered important to the quality of a movie, it is still necessary to put something down on paper that the actors can read or have read to them. Our job is to vote on the writer who did it best. I have a few modest comments on three of the, uh, “blockbusters.”

I don’t think we are sworn to secrecy in the WGA, where freedom of expression is important, so I’ll tell you flat out that I’m not impressed so far with any of the movies I’ve seen. The most hyped effort, “Munich,” was a cosmic disappointment, which is a phrase I doubt will ever be included on a billboard or in a full-page ad.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is based on the attack at the 1972 Olympics by a Palestinian group called Black September during which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered. One can easily conclude, given the horrific nature of the event, that there was a movie there, all right, but this one wasn’t it.

What we saw on the screen was a series of vengeance shootings and bombings by Israeli agents that systematically killed most of those responsible for the raid, one right after another. Boom, there goes one planner, bang, there goes another, and so on ad nauseam. It’s the dramatic equivalent of Wyatt Earp and the boys taking out the Clanton gang at the OK Corral.

I’m guessing that director Steven Spielberg created the movie the way God created Earth, pretty much all by himself, because he’s the equivalent of a super deity in Hollywood. No one is going to tell God that the Earth could just as well be created in five days instead of seven, if you get my meaning. God is God, after all.

One left the theater feeling guilty for not being horrified at the events portrayed and for placing the quality of the popcorn over the impact of the film. We should have been sad. We should have been angry. We should have cried.

“Syriana” was another of what trailer-writers like to call a “bold effort” at defining the greed and chaos relative to the Middle East. It told us what we already know, that American oil barons are evil and that impoverished people, in this case Arabs, are susceptible to suggestions planted by evil people on the other side, in this case Islamic fundamentalists with agendas of their own.

But the story flowed and the people in it acted like real people, even though George Clooney can’t hide his dimples behind a beard and Matt Damon is too baby-faced to be taken seriously. It’s like trying to negotiate a complicated international oil deal with your little brother. But the story held up, which is all that I’m supposed to consider, since there is no category for dimples or cute faces.

“King Kong,” on the other hand, is only an updated version of the two giant ape movies of the same name that preceded it. While I’ve always enjoyed the indiscriminate smashing and roaring of a monster primate, I never could figure out what he did with the women the natives gave him as sacrifices. Did he eat them? Force them to dance naked for his simian pleasure? Or just keep them around as pets?

King Kong’s woman in the 1933 version was Fay Wray; his woman in the 1976 version, Jessica Lange; and in the current version, Naomi Watts. They are all, you know, pretty tasty, but I’ve never been able to accept the idea that anything as mindless as what ostensibly is a giant monkey could ever fall in love with a bird-sized human, however gratifying her appearance. But, then again, seeing petite and pretty women with bald, tattooed, 300-pound outlaw bikers is common, so who knows?

I’m not sure what category the movie would fall in. Maybe best script involving an ape, or best script involving a trans-species love affair. At any rate, it’s another big-time special effects feature with Kong doing to Manhattan what Godzilla does periodically to Tokyo. Cars are flipped, screaming New Yorkers tossed about like peanuts and buildings crumpled like milk cartons. Script? I don’t think there was one. Who needs a script when the star is a gorilla?

It just goes to show that you can’t make a movie better than the original. I’ve seen the old black-and-white version a dozen times and it somehow always works. The others don’t. It isn’t that I oppose the idea of a giant ape running amok. I’m a sci-fi nut. I think the whole world is surreal. It’s just that the current “Kong” doesn’t suspend disbelief. I want to believe, if only for a moment, that love can bloom between species. And then I want to see their children.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.