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.  

Looper

I was lucky enough to get to a preview screening of Looper a full five days before its UK and USA release and boy was it worth getting in early. Looper is a smart and twisting Science Fiction thriller which plays with the ideas and rules of time travel to create a tense film which leads you down unexpected alleys, confounding your ideas and expectations.

It’s 2042 and in thirty years time travel will be invented. Although immediately outlawed the machines are used by the mob to send people back in time for execution thus destroying all evidence of murder. The people who carry out the killing are called Loopers. One of these Loopers is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who conducts his job with the utmost professionalism despite a few personal issues. One day though to his shock, he looks up at the tarpaulin ready for the arrival of his next victim when the man who appears in front of him is the older version of himself (Bruce Willis).

Killing Them Softly

In a rare switch around audiences in the UK, including myself are able to see a new release a full two months ahead of our cousins across the water. The release in the States has been put back for a couple of reasons including to increase its chance of awards success early next year. If this film is even in contention for major awards then I’ll eat my shoe (providing ‘my shoe’ is actually a veggie burger or similar). The film is nowhere near good enough to be in contention for awards and I have a hard time calling it good.

Two men, Frankie and Russell (Scoot McNairy – Monsters and Ben Mendelsohn – Animal Kingdom) rip off a card game run by small time gangster Markie (Ray Liotta) having been tipped off by Johnny (Vincent Curatola – The Sopranos). The heat is soon on them though and Frankie, Russell, Johnny and Markie come under the suspicion local hit man Jackie (Brad Pitt) who also brings down aging hit man Mickey (James Gandolfini) to help out.

Brick

I usually write a review almost immediately after seeing a film and due to time constraints generally write just one draft. Thankfully I’ve waited until the following morning to write something about Brick as the extra few hours has allowed me to work it around in my head and appreciate some of the finer details of the film which last night I just thought were confusing and dull.

High School student Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a bit of a loner these days after breaking up with his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) and reporting his friend to the School’s Vice Principle. Brendan receives an unexpected and garbled phone call from Emily who talks about items such as a brick and a pin and something about Frisco before abruptly hanging up. Concerned for her safety Brendan goes about tracking her down but finds he is too late to help so then sets out to discover what the pin is, who or what is Frisco and what it all has to do with Emily and a brick.

A Lonely Place to Die

A group of five friends are on holiday, hiking and climbing around the remote mountains of Northern Scotland when they chance upon a strange noise. Tracking it down they discover a pipe sticking out of the ground and what appears to be a girl trapped in a box underground. After setting her free they begin their trek to the nearest town to report a kidnapping but are chased every step of the way by the shady men who put the girl in the hole in the first place.

I have a vague recollection of the film’s title and my girlfriend assures me that we wanted to see it so she borrowed it from a friend. I wish she hadn’t bothered. The plot is ok but doesn’t go deep enough and the acting and dialogue seem like they were done by people who understood the concept but had never actually seen it practiced.

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.  

Fantastic Mr. Fox

When I first saw Fantastic Mr. Fox at the cinema in 2009 I fell asleep. I think this is the only time I’ve ever slept through a film and although there were mitigating circumstances I still feel bad as Wes Anderson is one of my favourite Directors. I’ve loved all of his pre Mr. Fox films and Moonrise Kingdom is one of my favourite films of 2012 so far. One of the reasons I fell asleep three years ago was because I was bored by the film but due to my love of Anderson’s work I felt the need to go back and reassess it. Unfortunately my first viewing experience was very similar to my second; the film bored me and I consider it Anderson’s worst film by quite some distance.

Based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name the plot centres upon a fox (George Clooney) who despite promising his wife (Meryl Streep) that he would stop killing farmer’s chickens for a living, can’t resist one final spree in which he goes for three local farms, run by the meanest farmers around.

My Name is Khan

My Name is Khan is a film that comes tantalisingly close to perfection but misses out due to a mixture of a disappointing third act over simplified view of the world. Nevertheless it is an excellent film, telling the story of a pre and post-9/11 world through the eyes of Indian’s living in America.

Rizwan Khan (Shahrukh Khan) is a mildly autistic Muslim man who moves to America after the death of his mother in India. There, he meets and falls in love with a Hindu woman Mandira (Kajol) who works as a successful hairdresser in San Francisco. The film is split into three very distinct acts with the first being an often light hearted, cute and funny look at romance, tolerance and love. Khan says that the western world views history in two epochs; BC and AD but he would add a third, 9/11. Following 9/11 the lives of the Indian characters, whether Sikh, Hindu or Muslim change for the worse as racial profiling, racist attacks and xenophobia takes hold thanks to the anti-Muslim hysteria of the post-9/11 world. There is an appalling tragedy around the halfway mark which sets up the third act in which Khan travels America to meet the President and tell him “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist”.

Amores Perros

The first film in Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘death’ trilogy (followed by 21 Grams and Babel) is a sombre and at times difficult to watch drama set in Mexico City around the themes of class, loyalty and cruelty. The film is constructed via three interlocking stories which come together by means of a car crash. The film is non-linear and dips from one story to the next, slowly building up a picture as to how and where each character fits into the wider story.

Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) uses his brother’s dog to make money in organised dog fights and is in love with his brother’s pregnant wife Susana (Vanessa Bauche). One day he and a friend are being chased by crooks when he crashes his car into another, being driven by the model and actress Valeria (Goya Toledo) who is in the midst of an affair with Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero), a married magazine publisher. At the scene of the crash is a down and out, vagrant man ‘El Chivo’ (Emilio Echevarria) who pushes a scrap metal cart around but hides a deeply hidden and cheerless past. The three strands only come together for the car crash scene, colliding like three marbles before being spun into differing trajectories. The film had me gripped from start to finish but left me wanting more from at least two of the three strands.

God Bless America

Once every few years a film will come along that feels as though it was made just for you. If you’ve seen God Bless America then I hope that you enjoyed it but I must tell you now, this film was made exclusively for me. Seriously, writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait must have snuck into my room one night with some sort of brain scanner and lifted the idea from this movie from my head. I’ve had numerous conversations with my girlfriend about the wonders of living in a world where you could just choose people who annoy or anger you to stop existing. I wouldn’t like to ever kill someone but it would be lovely if there was some switch that when flicked could just transport all of the mean, cruel, talentless, waster dickheads to some far away island where they could live out their lives without being of bother to the people whose lives they make a misery.

God Bless America takes some of my darkest thoughts, blows them up and adds some violence and a coherent story to make a fantastic satire of modern Western Civilisation. Frank Murdoch (Joel Murray) is a middle aged man who is annoyed by his neighbours and sickened by the putridness of society. After losing his job and being diagnosed with a brain tumour he decides enough is enough and travels to Virginia where he kills an obnoxious teenage girl who was the ‘star’ of a particularly blood pressure raising episode of My Super Sweet 16. A classmate of the girl called Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) sees the murder and persuades Frank to take her on a killing spree, shooting those who spread hatred and fear and people who are repellent, abhorrent or disrespectful.