If you can get rid of most of the stupid things in the Jurassic Park Franchise, synthesize most of the best action beats, and cast it with a little flair, you will get a movie like this. It exists, it is fun while you watch it, but it is not essential, it does not say anything profound, and it still has plenty of stupidity that is fairly original.
I don’t know that there’s much to say about a new Jurassic World film. After all you get dinosaurs chasing people, eating people, and people making sacrifices or showing themselves to be scum. So it’s pretty much the same story every time out. The main variations involve the actors people and how are the characters going to screw each other over. Oh and whether or not the dinosaurs are going to be interesting.
For the most part the dinosaurs in this particular Edition are interesting. The premise of the film has scientists in Pursuit of DNA from three specific varieties of dinosaur. One that is found in the ocean, one that is found on the land, and big surprise one that flies in the sky. That seems to set up a pretty straightforward path for our adventurers to travel.
Scarlett Johansson plays a mercenary who is tasked with getting the team there on to the island and then helping them secure the live DNA samples that they need. She has a team of Misfits, many of whom are really just food for the dinosaurs, an evil Overlord who is there to exploit nature, so we get some moral story included. And then there’s a random family of shipwreck survivors who get included in the Expedition so that we can have kids and people who aren’t used to carrying around heavy weaponry.
It’s all creative enough fun to kill a Saturday afternoon in the summertime. There is a little bit of tie in to previous variations of the series. For instance we start off in Manhattan with a brachiosaur slowly expiring in a local park. There’s a mild climate change theme, it mostly goes nowhere except to justify a trip to the equator. Marashala Ali is Johansson’s Main support, and he’s a good actor who is wasted in a largely thankless part. When we get to the climax of the film, we get the stupidest third act twist imaginable, and whatever suspension of disbelief we had up to this point is lost.
Anyway go ahead and turn off your brain, get yourself an extra large soda and don’t worry if you have to run to the bathroom during the movie, you’re not going to miss anything important. Because there’s nothing really important here, just some fun watching dinosaurs chase and eat people.
It seems like there were dozens of “Jaws” rip-offs in the late seventies. Killer Orcas, Grizzlies, and in this film, genetically modified piranha that can strip a man to the bone in minutes. This was an exploitation picture that launched the career of director Joe Dante. It has only a little of the sideways humor that characterizes his best films, but it does try to keep the audience engaged with frequent piranha victims every few minutes.
The formula is a clear set of beats stolen from “Jaws”. We start with a titillating experience that results in death, followed up by a slow discovery of what is happening, and then a series of denials of reality by officials. One of the main differences is that the obnoxious character who is trying to dismiss the whole thing, gets a comeuppance, unlike the mayor in the shark movie.
Bradford Dillman was a seventies staple as a suspicious official or businessman, and he was in a ton of TV shows of the era. Here he plays a drunk hermit like loser, who hets turned into an action hero for no particular reason. Heather Menzies, who played one of the Von Trapp children in “The Sound of Music” and Strother Martin’s daughter in Sssssss, is a bounty hunter who gets caught up in the action, and veteran horror icon Kevin McCarthy starts a long association with director Dante, playing a crazed scientist. Don’t ask why there is a small lizard man walking around the laboratory in the early part of the film. It never becomes important and it is simply a loose thread.
“Piranha” is an efficient, low budget fright film. The film makers do the best they can with their resources and imaginations. Although many consider it a cult classic, it simply feels standard for the times. But of course those were my times so I loved it.
I have to admit something here that is a repeat of a prior realization. I really like sports movies about sports that I have no interest in otherwise. My favorite sports films over the years have been hockey films, but I have never been to a hockey game and I think I may only have watched a complete one, once on television. Auto racing will take a close second place. I have no desire to spend a day in the stands watching cars drive by at high speeds, but I am more than willing to spend a couple of hours in a movie theater doing the same thing. In the last decade I have seen, “Ford vs. Ferrari“, “Rush” and “Gran Turismo“, and enjoyed them far more than I would expect given my disinterest in motor sports. You can now add “F 1” to the list.
This movie is pretty conventional from a plot point of view. A talented driver, who missed a shot at the biggest prize in his field, gets a chance at redemption, but must compete with a younger version of himself to succeed. It helps that the star is charismatic and Brad Pitt fills the bill on all counts. He is incredibly watchable, even in a helmet that hides eighty percent of his face. I have seen this movie compared to “Days of Thunder”, largely because the plot points are not dissimilar and that film also relied on star power to give the audiences what they want.
The biggest success of this movie however is making the technology behind Formula One racing, feel accessible to outsiders and novices like me. I have known plenty of gearheads in my life, but I have never been one of them. You add a layer of mechanical engineering and physics to the mix, and suddenly the garage is more of a laboratory and a lot more interesting. Director Joseph Kosinski made “Top Gun Maverick” a couple of years ago, and it is clear he knows how to get the best out of action scenes in vehicles. The camera work and editing of the races is thrilling and envelops you with tension and excitement. This is one of the most entertaining films of the year.
It is not my intention to slight the other actors in the movie, they are fine. I think Damson Idris has a bright future in films, but Pitt is the show here and if you are not a fan, you could easily become one. This is a movie star, action driven, summer blockbuster that pushes all the right buttons and fives us the thrills tha we want for a couple of hours, without having to sit through a whole race. Like hockey films, these racing movies cut out all the stuff that non-fans don’t care about, and feeds us the dessert served with a little movie star sauce on the top.
Most of the entries coming up will be brief, I am still trying to catch up on posts for all the theatrical screenings in the last couple of weeks. I cannot however, skimp on my opinions about this particular film. “Zodiac” has been one of our family favorites since we saw it in it’s original theatrical release. Over the years, it has become a default movie for us. Whenever we have trouble deciding what we should watch , someone inevitably suggests “Zodiac” as an alternative and nine times out of ten, we are watching it again. This screening at the Paramount Theater was the first time I have seen it in a theater since 2007, and it is the first time since I started blogging, that it gets included on this project.
I was eleven years old when the Zodiac killings started drawing press attention across the state of California. So I was old enough to be aware of the story, but still young enough that it did not obsess me the way that it did the characters portrayed in the story. Robert Graysmith , as portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a cartoonist for a San Francisco newspaper, one that received messages from the killer. His tangential connection lead to an intense desire to know who the killer was, and he wrote the book this movie is based on. Director David Fincher, portrays the writer as an innocent bystander, watching the horror play out around him. Gyllenhaal looks like a baby-faced kid among the police and newspaper professionals that surround the case. His sincerity is achingly displayed on his face as he asks questions of his colleague Paul Avery, who is covering the Zodiac for the paper. Avery is played by a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. Avery is also presented as an obsessive, but his pursuit is more professional and it consumes him in a different way than Graysmith.
The third leg of the tripod that the story of the investigation rests on is Dave Toschi, a police inspector in charge of the S.F. part of the investigation. Mark Ruffalo plays Toschi as an overwhelmed professional, frustrated by jurisdictional impediments and inconsistent evidence. The two newspaper guys supplement and interfere with his task, but ultimately, it is Toschi who gets to chillingly interrogate a suspect that seems to fit the information that they have. All three of these men get moments of horror as they confront individuals or places that may be a key to solving the crimes. Downey Jr. is playing a character who descends into alcohol and drug use as his paranoia and professional life collide. There is an honesty about those destructive forces that may be a reflection of his real life struggles in the years that preceded this film. Ruffalo seems to be calmly frustrated reacting to both the killer and his amateur pair of Zodiac hunters.
Everyone in the movie is top notch in their performances, but I will single out two of the supporting players to show how well the movie is put together. Toschi has a partner, Bill Armstrong, played by Antony Edwards. Armstrong is a dedicated professional but he remains more impartial than Toschi. He is analytical but not obsessive. Edwards exudes competence with an aura of detachment. He wants to solve the case as much as his partner, but he doesn’t let the frustrations of the case overwhelm him. Edwards is the cool straight man to Ruffalo’s, only slightly warmer counterpart. They make a great team.
The second outstanding secondary performance is by John Carrol Lynch, who plays the eventual main suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen. We only see Allen in the context of the investigations. There are no scenes where he is depicted as the killer engaged in the crimes. We learn about his character in interviews with his former friends and family. When Toschi, Armstrong and two other law enforcement personnel question him at work in the break room of the facility he works at, all sorts of alarms are going off in our heads as the cops listen with gapped mouths to the explanations and information that Allen shares. Lynch is calmly aloof as he spills suspicious conduct and details to the investigators. His face never reveals a fear that he is trapped, or that he is on alert in the face of the questions he is getting. His quiet comment “I am not the Zodiac. And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.” is as chilling as some of the murders that we see depicted in the film.
The verisimilitude of the film is found in a thousand places in the movie. The location shots are all consistent with the era. There is a sequence with Melvin Belli, a famous attorney who was a celebrity because of the lawsuits and clients he was involved with His depiction reflects the commercial television practices of the time. Toschi is shown attending a special screening of “Dirty Harry” which is a film that has a character inspired by the real life criminal he is pursuing. One of the most haunting and realistic uses of music of the time occurs in the attack on the couple in a car at the start of the film. Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy” man plays out over the scene, and you can almost smell the aura of the 1960 descending on the moment.
I would not classify this as a horror film, just as I would not say “The Silence of the Lambs” is a horror film. There are certainly frightening moments but the key is realistic suspense. These are thrillers with horror elements. The creepiest scene takes place in a basement, and there is no blood, weapon or violence shown, but the hair on the back of your neck will certainly stand up at the moment. Charles Fleisher, who is best known as the voice of “Roger Rabbit”, provides an additional supporting character to make this movie the masterpiece that it is.
“Zodiac” was not a huge success when it was first released, but there has been a lot of reassessment in the last two decades and I think you will find that this movie will hold your attention, frighten you and haunt you for a long time. I am happy to have had a chance to see it again in it’s natural habitat and I encourage everyone to spend some time with this excellent film.
I was a big fan of the original “28 Days Later” from 2002, and I also appreciated the sequel “28 Weeks Later” as well. I expected a “28 Months” movie fifteen years ago but it never materialized. So instead, almost 28 years after the original (really only 23) we get a legacy sequel which tries to restore the franchise to life, which is an odd thing considering that many people consider it a zombie film. Regardless of how it is classified, the new film stays relatively true to the preceding movies, with a couple of variations that are bootstrapped in to make the story feel more substantial and original.
An idyllic community has been established on a coastal island, which is only accessible on a bridge that is only accessible during low tide. While there is a threat of infection from the mainland, that possibility is remote. The bigger issues facing the community are limited resources, lost knowledge and in one case, the absence of medical facilities that might be life saving. The community has become a cult of rituals, meant to perpetuate the group and prepare youngsters who were born into this cloistered society, how to deal with the world they live in. The first act of the film is a father-son bonding ritual which involves confronting the outside world, killing some of it, and surviving the terrors that exist on the mainland. Spike, a twelve year old who trusts his father and adores his mother, gets confronted with a confounding situation when his expedition reveals things about his Dad and the world that his mend is not ready to handle.
If there is a weakness in the story, it is not in the action or characters but rather in the short sighted thinking of a kid. His motives are pure but his method is nuts and he should know that. The story becomes a quest for help that lays past the sections of the map that in the old days would be labeled “Here there be dragons”. Spike is resourceful, but there are a couple of convenient moments that solve problems that he would have been unable to manage on his own. There is a good deal of tension in this middle section, as the threat of rage-infected humans looms around every corner. he action is intense, and the escapes are narrow, and the complications are interesting.
The third act is mystical and disturbing, and it is almost a polemic on euthanasia. Ralph Fiennes appears as the most interesting character in the story, and his narrative, while a little preachy, does give us some issues to think about. The conclusion of the movie will throw you off, but I understand that if you live in Great Britain, it will make a lot more sense. There are apparently two sequels coming so Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays the dad, will probably be back after disappearing from act two and most of act three. Jodie Comer will be missing for an obvious reason, but that should not surprise anyone who makes it into the movie for twenty minutes. By the way, the opening, which is a revisit to the onset of the zombie apocalypse, is smashing. Those sequences in these kinds of films usually are.
Although listed as part of the Summer Classic Film Series, this screening of “When Harry Met Sally” was a combined event with author Katherine Center and one of the city’s most famous couples, Jared and Genevieve Padalecki. As such it required a separate admission from our Premier Passes. We spent an interesting hour as the couple interviewed the author about her summer romance novels and her latest product.
The conversation was filled with warm jokes and shared romantic experiences. It was billed as an evening of romance and I guess you could say that for the fans of the authors work, it was a success. Amanda has the book and when she is done with it I will attempt to read it as well. What really brought me to the event however was the chance to return to one of the perfect Romantic Comedies of the 1980s, and a pairing of actors that was magical.
When I wrote about the film as part of my TCMFF coverage a few years ago, I mentioned that it was the movie that I took my wife to see for our anniversary that year. When we watched the clips of the old married couples, which were dispersed throughout the film, we laughed and imagined the stories we would be telling when we were that age. We made it to 38 years together, but we didn’t get a chance to tell the stories like those couples in the film. I will do a little of that here. Unlike Harry and Sally, we met in High School, not at the end of college. Our senior year was full of rivalry flirtations since she went to a different school than I did. Although Harry initially hits on Sally, he is not smitten with her and they part ways. Dee and I went differently, although I was hesitant at first, the more time we spent together, the greater the attraction for both of us. I never mocked her food selections at a restaurant, she was not used to eating out and we split a lot of meals.
The kibitzing between Harry and Sally however, was something we shared with the characters. Both of us were smart-alecks and had fun teasing each other or ragging on others under our breath. Harry has twisted philosophical comments through out the film, and Sally has incisive insights into men and women that reflect Harry’s behaviors. They are a great match although they resist the pull of romance for most of the film. We never did that part, we dove full in. Billy Crystal has a deflective way of commenting on everything, and that style of humor turns out to be perfect for the tone of the film. Meg Ryan was at the height of her “cute” stage and she played the insecurity of Sally perfectly. Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher practically steal the movie as their best friends who find love in each others arms and wonder what Harry and Sally are doing with all the dance.
Nora Ephron was the queen of the smart romantic comedy and her screenplay here is marvelously witty and not overly sentimental, in spite of the old couples inclusion. Director Rob Reiner was in the middle of one of the greatest runs of fil ms by a director ever, with “The Princess Bride’ right behind him, and “Misery” and “A Few Good Men” coming up next. The synergy of the actors and creatives make you want to order whatever they were all having for lunch.
We all hope that Harry and Sally will be our story, where we fall in love with our best friend and find long term happiness. I don’t mean to brag, but that is exactly what I did. What a lucky guy.
Let’s face it, if Sean Connery is in a movie, I want to see it. Sunday we did two Sean Connery films. Highlander” and “The Untouchables”. That is a very satisfying Father’s Day. 12 years ago we did a different double feature of Sean Connery films, “Goldfinger” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. If you would enjoy a little piece of history, below is a vlog post I did for that event.
We went to see the film again this week, almost exactly a year after our last big screen viewing, which you can read about here: Last Crusade 2024.
I don’t have a lot of new things to say, I have written about the film many times before, but as I promise in the header, “If I Saw it in a Theater, you will read about it here.”
The chemistry between Connery and Harrison Ford is incredible, It’s too bad they did not get a chance to work together again, because I could imagine an action film like “The Hunt for Red October” with a cerebral thriller featuring these two great actors. I love the scene between them on the airship where Indy is reminiscing about their strained relationship and Dr. Jones Senior takes him to task for leaving just as he got interesting. The flummoxed look on Harrison Ford’s face and the defiant tone in Connery’s voice made for a humorous but also personal moment in the film.
Connery also got to ham it up with Denholm Elliot in several scenes and leave us with a much better impression of his character than the stern and cold father that Indy remembers. When in doubt, ALWAYS see “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, and always see it on a big screen.
I saw this film with my wife when it first came out and we enjoyed it but frankly, I did not think it was a great film. It is a popcorn picture that looks a little cheaper than it should. They must have spent most of the budget on Sean Connery for his brief time in the story. I enjoyed Christopher Lambert in “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan” two years before. He was okay in this film, but it was clear that he was going to get by on physical charisma in his career and not acting chops. Clancy Brown on the other hand, understood the assignment and went full on nuts. He mugs and hams it up, just the way his character should.
Sean Connery, shows up for the second act and plays the part of a mentor to Lambert’s Conner MacLeod. Much ridicule has been made over the years of his being cast as an Arab, from Spain, with a Scottish Accent. However, it may not be inconceivable that in the 1200 years he was alive, he picked up some traits from all the places that he’s lived. Also, if that is the credibility stretcher for you, you have not been paying attention.
The best element of the movie is the notion that immortality takes it’s greatest toll on those that we love and must leave as they die. MacLeod suffers from his loss obviously, but the strain on his Scottish wife was pretty well drawn in the film. Another character from the 20th Century illustrates it as well. I don’t want to give the movie too much credit, it is still a cheesy piece of pop fantasy, but it is completely watchable and I enjoyed the revisit.
Local Director and friend of the Paramount, Robert Rodriguez, hosted and scheduled this program. He does a nice job talking about the films and the film makers that he had connections with. He shared his story about this movie in the conversation you can listen to below.
The Untouchables (1987)
The second film in our double feature is the terrific Brian DePalma movie, “The Untouchables”. It is impossible to imagine a better Sean Connery part (with the exception of the film I will be writing about next). Connery plays a put upon beat cop, who has resisted temptation and played straight with the law instead of getting into bed with mobsters. He becomes a mentor to the enthusiastic but as yet untested Elliot Ness, a Treasury agent, in pursuit of Al Capone.
The relationship between Ness and Jimmy Malone (Connery) is funny, fatherly and frustrating at times. Jimmy needs to trust Ness and Ness takes some getting used to because of some tentative characteristics. The team gets substantially enhanced by Andy Garcia as a rookie cop, with deadly shooting skills, who gets drafted into their unit. Garcia is fine in the action scenes but doesn’t have as much to say in the rest of the plot. Charles Martin Smith however, as Treasury Accountant and agent Oscar Wallace, is a delight in bringing a spark to the team because of his distinctive background. He is the square peg that they find a way to fit in.
The bad guys are pretty vivid with Robert DeNiro hamming it up as Capone. Billy Drago is a chilling Frank Nitti and his comeuppance is one of the great satisfactions of the film. DeNiro’s scene with a baseball bat in his hand is his big moment on screen. The scene is directed with the usual style of Brian DePalma, it is elegant, and suddenly violent in an ugly way. The two big set pieces of the film are the border raid and the train station shootout. Both of these are strongly enhanced by my favorite Ennio Morricone score.
I have seen this movie dozens of times, and probably a half dozen times on the big screen. My first viewing was at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood when the movie opened in 1987, it remains another hallmark moment in my Dome history. I am glad I can now pair it with a screening at the beautiful Paramount Theater in Austin.
Frankly, there may not be a more charming film in existence than “Babe”. The story of an orphan pig who tries to find his place in the hierarchy of the farm is just too sweet not to love. It charmed the hell out of us back in 1995 when my kids were seven and nine. I took the youngest with me to this screening, she is now thirty-seven and she still loves it. (She will deny it, but I suspect it played a big part in her aversion to pork).
This film won the Academy Awards for effects the year it came out, over the shots of a space launch and rescue mission in “Apollo 13”. That win should be an indicator as to how animation and CGI were soon to dominate the film landscape. This was also the same year as “Toy Story” so you can feel the earthquake and aftershocks with those two movies.
James Cromwell received a big boost to his career after this, and we were very sad that we missed him at the TCM Film Festival, talking about this movie, back in April. We did get to see it on the big screen through the “Paramount Summer Classic Film Series” and although it was promoted as a kids matinee, there were plenty of adults there to share in the pleasure of our talking pig hero “Babe”. The relationship between Farmer Hoggett and his pig is a complicated one with a couple of grim moments, but Cromwell makes a joyous human who learns to trust his instincts and his porker buddy.
The Greek Chorus of Mice that introduce the various chapters of the story, are still amusing 30 years later, and when the lead sheepdog, swallows his pride to get help for “Babe” from the sheep, we get a few life lessons as well. I do think having a duck do the rooster’s duties would be a lot of fun here at the house.
This movie was such a change up from the shark serial killer movie of the previous evening. Maybe all double features should work this was as a one-two punch, start with something hard hitting and then finish with something heartwarming. Two good days at the movies.
It was fifty years ago, this month, that “Jaws” the greatest film of the last eighty years, first dropped into our collective culture. Ever since that day, film makers have been striving to recapture the essence of the film. Some have stuck to the basic horror narrative, using the sharks as a monster to hook us into watching. A few films (especially TV movies) have tried to parody shark films into action comedies with varying degrees of success. Only occasionally, has a shark film created a aura that was reminiscent of the classic, “The Shallows” being the most recent example I can think of. This new film, “Dangerous Animals” tries a different approach and succeeds in getting the tension right, and the horror appropriate. It is not anything close to the quality of film that “Jaws” is, but it has some things going for it that make it my favorite film of the year so far.
If you watch the trailer, you will understand the premise very quickly. We have a serial killer whose method of murder is feeding his live victims to ravenous sharks while the victim is still alive. This is potentially a gruesome horror film that could be classified as exploitation, except for the fact that director, Sean Byrne, has learned his Spielberg lessons well. Instead of extended scenes of sharks dismembering the poor subjects of the killers plans, we see just enough to be terrified, but not enough to be revolted. There is blood in the violence, but it is not the over the top fountains of a horror film like “The Monkey”. If ever a horror movie could claim to be in gory good taste, this one is probably it.
The big advantage that this movie has over other exploitation films is that it has two dynamic characters that are really interesting. The main character is Hassie Harrison, as Zephyr, an itinerant American, surfing the coast of Australia. She is emotionally damaged, we can see that, but she is not unreachable as her one night stand with a friendly local explores. She is also not a mere damsel in distress. She is smart, resilient, and relentless in trying to fight back against the antagonist. Zephyr is not simply going to resign herself to a fate that she becomes an eyewitness to, she is going to struggle in any way possible to keep living. She may not be the easiest character to love, but she is clearly one that we are happy to root for, time and time again.
One of the faults of some thrillers is the good luck that the victims sometimes run into, which allow them to escape and give us unearned hope. This movie turns that trope on it’s head. It is the killer who ends up with all the good luck on his side as he repeatedly thwarts Zephyr in her escape plans. Jai Courtney is Tucker, the deranged serial killer who can mask his evil with an avuncular round of “Baby Shark” one moment, and then a knife in the throat the next. I have seen in in half a dozen other movies over the last few years and he always seemed to me to be a guy who was just missing it. An actor who would have occasional moments but never enough to be memorable. He was bland as you could get. This film however, gives him a part that is screaming for some charisma, and he delivers. Courtney has the glint in his eye of a maniac, and the physical form of a damaged brute. It is impossible to take your eyes off him when he is on screen and that says something because his counterpart is attractive as heck and in a bathing suit for most of the film.
The script allows us to believe a few things that are unbelievable. The brief fling that Zephyr has with local Moses, becomes for him an obsession, only in a good way. The fact that Moses and Zephyr are surfers and they are connected by a particular beachfront spot, becomes a key point in building up a chance that Tucker could somehow be derailed. Zephyr knows what is coming because she also meets Heather, a fellow pawn in Tucker’s twisted game. If there is any heart in the film outside of the truncated love story, it is in the few minutes that Heather and Zephyr share as they await their fate.
Sharks are in the film, but first time screenwriter Nick Lepard and director Byrne, seem to know that the fish are the least dangerous animals in the food chain of this thriller. Their role is kept to a supporting part, which makes them all the more effective when they do come into play. For some reason, this film is not getting many screens or much publicity, which is really unfortunate because, like the mother of all shark films, it is really not a horror film as much as it is a thriller. I know it is produced in partnership with Shudder, which is a horror outlet, but you are selling the movie short if you keep it in that box. This is a great twist on the great white, and in spite of the fact that it is being promoted as from the producers of the excretable “Longlegs” you should seek it out.
Kirkham A Movie A Day 