A year has passed, and with it a brazilian tons of tsouris; 2006, welcome. It has been a long and glorious end-times hiatus since last we met in Gutterland, friends. Long and glorious. Premonitions about our death are of course premature—are we not here with you right now?—and beg so many questions: Has no one heard of secrets? Has no one a hobby of their own? We'd love to bring you up to date, to tell you—nay, to truly share with you—all the long and glorious things that have transpired since our last emission. But naturally we can't. Some things are ours, ours alone. Ours! Ours! Ours!

One thing we can relate are the gleanings of a spate of holiday film viewing—with an eye, as always, for the architectural and urbane. The Post, as ever, brings the important news about King Kong. It is, as they say and you know, "enough to drive movie fans bananas because it's full of king-sized mistakes." They cite a slew of rather obnoxious continuity gaffes (moving plates, self-cleaning costumes; the usual), but we would like to add to that an amazing urban design screw-up of primping primate proportions: the period set of Ye Olde Nieue Yorke that erstwhile wizard Peter Jackson assembled is lined—no: studded—with lamp posts of a retro-nostalgic type that only began to appear en masse in NYC in the early 1990s. And not where Kong saw them. Erp. Call rewrite. And, yes, it's the same infernal bishop's crook that, in a prior life, HM used to decry with some regularity in the Times. How we miss him.

Moving on, we were pleased, too, to catch the just-out and back-in-form Woody Allen thriller. More pleased, even, when, a bit of a ways in, Larry's latest love was co-opted as set designer and major action started to go down inside the Gherkin. Brilliant. And then there's the thrill of seeing Herzog and DeMeuron's Tate Modern, not sung, not aggrandized, but called out, as any visitor there can attest, for the circuity of its circulation, in this instance, almost enough to keep Jonathan Rhys Meyers from finding, and then, of course, eventually boning and killing—for love or money?—our very own Scarlett. Glorious.

· 'Kong' Phooey, Say Film Flub Counters [NYP]

Posted in Gutter Talk