Jurassic Park

The fact that Jurassic Park is twenty years old makes me feel older than I’d like to think I am. It’s hard to believe that it was two decades ago that a wide eyed seven year old me took a trip to the local cinema for what was only my second cinematic experience at the time. The film was a sensation with children, adults and critics and became the highest grossing movie of all time. Although I loved the film, there was a part of me who secretly hated it as it opened children’s eyes to the dinosaur world, something which I naively thought only I liked. Suddenly all my friends had dinosaur toys too and it annoyed me that they’d stolen my thing. It was the equivalent of that cool, underground band you like appearing on TV and going mainstream. Despite my anger over the film taking dinosaurs mainstream, it was pretty much the best thing my seven year old eyes had ever seen.

Twenty years, two sequels and about a dozen viewings later I heard that Universal were bringing Jurassic Park back to the big screen in 3D. Part of that sentence made me very happy but I was rather sceptical about the ‘3D’ element. I was even offered the chance to join a critics screening in New York City of all places, six months ago while on holiday there. I was unfortunately unable to make it though as I’d left my girlfriend shopping somewhere and knowing that she never notices her phone ringing and wouldn’t be able to make it to the theatre in time anyway, I had to decline, something which was deeply disappointing. All was not lost though as although I had to wait nearly half a year, I was eventually able to see the film on one of the largest screens in the country, the IMAX screen in Manchester.

Lincoln

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln takes a small chunk of Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable life and brings to the big screen a momentous moment in American history. Set in the early months of 1865 with the Civil War still raging after four years, US President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis), fresh off the back of a second election win is trying to pass the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution which will abolish slavery for good from the United States. The issue, which was one of the reasons America became divided in the first place is just as divisive in the House of Representatives where Lincoln and his Republican Party need a two-thirds majority for the Amendment to pass. Through rhetoric, barter, pleading and persistence, Lincoln and his staff try to sway the votes of twenty lame duck Democrats before the session comes to a close.

Lincoln is a fascinating film which treats its audience as intellectual equals and doesn’t shy away from long passages of legal and political spiel. Having studied Politics and University and with an interest in the American Civil War, the film was always going to grab my attention but even those who know little of the period will find some interest in the deeply woven script and fantastic performances.

Schindler's List

As the Germans are relocating the city’s Jews into a self contained ghetto, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) arrives in Krakow to make his fortune from war profiteering. Having lavished gifts and charm on the ruling Nazis, Schindler persuades the influential Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to oversee his business of manufacturing mess kits. By hiring Jews, Schindler has a seemingly ever lasting supply of cheap/free labour and gets rich quick but his attitude towards the treatment of the Jews changes when he witnesses the clearing of the ghetto. While before he turned a blind eye, he soon became more interested in the plight of his workers until finally trying to save over a thousand from certain death at great cost and risk to himself.

Undoubtedly one of the most powerful and films of the last twenty years, Schindler’s List has become the foremost film for telling the story of humanities darkest and most irrepressible days. Despite incredibly moving films such as The Pianist and Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List stands alone at the top as not only a moving and distressing portrayal of humanity at its worst and best but also as a sublime exercise of film making. For me Schindler’s List of one of the rarest of films for which I have no criticism whatsoever. I can’t think of a single shot, line or movement which could be improved.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

As soon as I hear the opening notes of John Williams’ iconic Jurassic Park score I can’t help but smile and be transported back to the mid 1990s and to a time when Jurassic Park was pretty much all the boys my age would talk and think about. I experienced the Jurassic Park smile recently when I re-watched the sequel to the 1993 film for what must be at least the eighth time. The smile stuck with me for the opening hour and a half as I reminisced about when I’d first seen the film and remembered what was coming next. Some of the things that made this sequel good are still evident but unfortunately so are the aspects that made it bad.

Four years on from the Jurassic Park Incident as it is now know, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is assembling a team to explore, catalogue and protect the Dinosaur inhabitants of a second island, close to the original known as Site B. For this mission he recruits a reluctant Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a man who has been publicly and academically chastised for talking about the Jurassic Park Incident. Malcolm is understandably hesitant about mixing with Dinosaurs again until he learns that his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already on the island. So, he travels to the island along with equipment specialist Eddie (Richard Schiff), photographer Nick (Vince Vaughn) and a stowaway to rescue Sarah but not only come up against Dinosaurs but the InGen Corporation who want to further exploit the animals for profit.  

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Science Fiction drama remains today one of the most highly decorated and successful Sci-Fi films of all time, garnering eight Oscar nominations and two wins for cinematography and sound editing. The film was also nominated for nine BAFTAS and four Golden Globes. I’d been looking forward to seeing it for a long time and when I noticed it was on offer on Blu-Ray at HMV I jumped at the chance to buy it. As is often the case when you hear so much positivity about a film before you see it, Close Encounters didn’t live up to my expectations but is still a very good film with obvious influences on the last thirty-five years of Science Fiction.

While investigating a large scale power cut, electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has a close encounter with what appears to be a UFO. As he follows the flashing lights in the sky he comes across others who have spotted the phenomenon including single mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) and her young son Barry. Their claims are met with scepticism but neither can get the image of a mountain out of their head and when they discover what the image is, feel uncontrollably drawn towards it. Meanwhile Scientists are working on linguistic and musical possibilities in case aliens ever make themselves known to humanity.  

The Adventures of Tintin

Known in the UK as The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, this film charts a particular adventure of Hergé’s famous comic book creation Tintin. Young Belgian reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) buys an old model ship at a market. Straight away he is approached by two men who offer to buy the ship from him for any price. After he declines Tintin’s ship is stolen and while tracking it down he uncovers a mystery involving lost treasure. With the help of his intrepid dog Snowy and a drunken Sea Captain called Haddock (Andy Serkis), Tintin sets out to find the hidden loot and uncover the secret of the Unicorn. 

I used to watch Tintin cartoons when I was very young and though can’t remember much about them now, I do remember enjoying them. I wish I could say the same for this film. I’d read that the film was an adventure in the mould of Indiana Jones but I found the plot incredibly dull and predictable. The film was saved only by some first rate animation and a typically impressive John Williams score.

The Color Purple

"I'm poor, black, I might even be ugly, but dear God, I'm here. I'm here."

It’s 1909 and a young girl who has had to endure terrible sexual abuse from her father, baring him two children in the process, is given to another man as a wife. Despite being freed from her father’s clutches this is extremely painful for her as it means she is separated from her sister to whom she is very close. Her new life is no better than her last as she soon discovers that she is to be treated like a servant by her new husband, a man much older than her and who shows her no love, affection or kindness. Tasked with raising his children (one of which is barely younger than her), maintaining the house and satisfying him sexually, the film follows her life over the course of the next thirty or so years as she and other black female characters have to endure some of the worst of the racism, sexism and poverty that people had to face during those times.

The Goonies

The Goonies is a reminder of a time when little boys didn’t sit around at home playing video games or trying to spot Beyonce’s nipples on MTV but went out into the world and had adventures. This is one of the last of those adventures.

A group of friends who call themselves The Goonies are threatened by the expansion of a Country Club. The club are threatening to tear down their houses meaning the friends will all have to move away. One of the boys, Mikey (Sean Austin) finds a map in amongst his father’s antiques which he believes leads to hidden pirate treasure. Along with his older brother (Josh Brolin) and friends (Corey Feldman, Jonathan Ke Quan and Jeff Cohen) Mikey sets out on an adventure to find the hidden gold.

This is exactly the kind of fun 80s movie that Super 8 was trying to replicate and having now seen The Goonies I realise how successful that film was at taking the best of the genre and mixing it with something more modern. The Goonies is full of great adventure and made me wish I was one of them, in a tunnel under the town trying to outwit baddies. It made me feel young again. The film felt more adventurous and fun that the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean and cost a fraction to produce. It is really good fun and features some very funny characters speaking very funny lines. The main characters are stereotypical 80s kids but the film gets away with feeling caricatured. It is maybe that they seem stereotypical to me watching in 2012 but that they are actually the characters upon witch my stereotypes were based.

The chase and constant attempts to outwit the bad guys was reminiscent of another great family action adventure of the time, Home Alone which was directed by The Goonies writer, Chris Columbus. As with Home Alone I felt young while watching and as much a part of the action as I do with any 3D film. And like any good family film, it isn’t afraid to scare the younger viewers slightly.

The film is not without faults. The dialogue feels quite cheesy and at times it did get a bit boring but to be fair, I am not a child or teenager. The acting was also a bit mixed. John Brolin was fine, as were the bad guys Anne Ramsey, Joe Pantoliano and Robert Davi. I thought that Goonies Sean Austin and Jeff Cohen were also good but the rest weren’t. For me, this film had plenty of nostalgia and made me think back to watching the likes of E.T and Indiana Jones with my family as a child. The clothes, bikes and dialogue also reminded me of being a young child (the film is one year older than I am). Overall, I really enjoyed the film and it is that rare film that the whole family can watch and enjoy.   

7/10 

Hereafter

In recent years I’ve come to expect good things from Director Clint Eastwood and actor Matt Damon (I still say it in the Team America voice) but I was disappointed with Hereafter.

The film’s protagonist, Damon plays George Lonegan, a man who can communicate with the dead. Lonegan does his best to hide his power after an earlier career making money from it left him unable to get close to people for fear of what he might discover. To him, his gift is in fact a curse. This is shown to be the case when his psychic readings wreck the beginnings of a promising new relationship.

Damon shares a moment of tenderness with love interest Bryce Dallas Howard

The two other strands to this story about a young boy who loses his twin in a car crash and a Frenchwoman caught up in the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 are unfortunately dull. While the Tsunami scene itself is exciting, you are left feeling detached and wondering where all the locals were. (Most of the victims appear to be European).

The acting is for the most part, terrible. Some actors seem as though they are reading their lines off a piece of card in front of them for the first time. It must be said however that Matt Damon delivers a believable performance of a man troubled by his gift. 

It is perhaps difficult to get into a film about a psychic as the profession is in my opinion a disgusting attempt to use pseudoscience and guesswork to con bereaved people out of money. I could see past this in The Sixth Sense though so perhaps the fact that I was thinking about what bollocks psychic abilities are tells me that I was not gripped by the film.     

5/10

War Horse

I’d been looking forward to Steven Spielberg’s War Horse for months and had squeezed my girlfriend’s hand each time I’d seen the trailer in the cinema. Unfortunately I left the film feeling disappointed. For me, a person with a deep fascination with the First World War, I felt there was a lot of Horse before we got to the War. I understand that the film is called War Horse so would obviously contain a lot of ‘horse’ but being unfamiliar with the source material my only knowledge of the story was the films trailer which was more Saving Private Ryan than Black Beauty.

The film however was not terrible and for me the touching scene featuring barbed-wire in No Mans Land was a standout. I felt that the film could have lost one of the strands which made up the story. Instead of the story with the old French man and his granddaughter, I’d have preferred to have seen more of the trenches, but this could well be due to my interest in the war.

One of my main problems with the film and which spoiled it for me was that the French and German characters all spoke English. This is a particular bugbear of mine and I think that the sorts of people who go to see War Horse are not the sort of people who would mind subtitles. It is not Ratatouille. This became even more stupid when two German characters were speaking English to each other while a German officer in the background spoke German.

I can understand why many people have found the film sad but as someone with no particular love for horses I felt indifferent towards it and didn't spend enough time with any ofhe hman characters to feel anything for them either.

War Horse is not a bad film but I found my excitement of the trailer nowhere near matched my enthusiasm for the film as a whole.

6/10