Continued ...
19 July 2001

OH WELL:  What is there to say about Jurassic Park III?  I am a fan of Joe Johnston.   I am a fan of Taylor and Payne.  Sam Neill is one of the nicest, smartest actors I’ve had the pleasure of hanging with for an evening.  Wm. H Macy is cool.  Tea Leoni’s performance in The Family Man showed real movie star chops.  CG has gotten better and better and better. 

So what the hell happened?!?!?!

The film opens with a parasailing sequence with matte work so lame that it made me wish for some good old-fashioned rear projection.  The whole sequence is terrible.   And though it does get better… it never gets a lot better.

Almost everything in the movie is a kind of gigantic blur.  Sam Neill’s character is, apparently, supposed to be a little stiff.  But he’s not stiff enough for it to be fun when he turns into Indiana Jones.  (Yes, I noticed the hat and leather strap across the chest.)  Laura Dern’s character from the original returns and there are some very subtle digs at Jeff Goldblum, with whom Dern was mating at the time of The Lost World.  But why was she really there?   Where was the value for the audience, other than to include a great actress in a nothing role?  Do we really believe that a woman who looks like Tea Leoni married a guy like Wm. H Macy and then divorced him because he wasn’t adventurous enough?  That has to be why she married him in the first place?!?!?!  

But these are not the biggest problems.  The simple truth is, the story doesn’t matter to us.  The film never really decides what the central drive is going to be.  In the first film, the dinos ran amuck as innocents tried to survive.  In the sequel, the team chooses to face the danger and finds that humans still aren’t powerful enough to control nature.  This one sets up the idea of mercenaries… then takes it back.  It suggests the use of heavy firepower against the dinosaurs… then takes it back.  It sets up Sam Neill’s good guy versus unlikable self-indulgent schmucks… then takes it back... mostly. 

You want a great movie?  Put Taylor & Payne’s  Tracey Flick on the island and see whether the raptors survive her!  Put Sam Neill on the island with a bunch of students who ARE smart enough to, perhaps, tame the wild… and challenge them beyond their wits.  If dinosaurs are really evolving into great intelligence on this island, how would they react to massive firepower?  How did early man react to fire or later, to the first knife or the first gun?   Let’s see Jaws on an island of dinosaurs… remember, they got into a cage and went into the water on purpose before they realized that the shark could eat half of their boat and use them for toothpicks?  For whatever reasons, JPIII dumped all the hubris of man before the first act was over.  New CG ain’t enough for me to be happy.

It’s pretty much up to the monkeys now… please, please, please, please, please!!!!!

READER OF THE DAY:  The Freaky B writes:  “Mate, can't you give people simpler names like "Jim" or "Bob"? Reading that tirade in which "Reverse Bee Gee" railed against insults "The Back" hurled at "Not Peggy or Mama," I felt as if I were reading a printout from The German Enigma Cipher Machine!”

This one came from Chicago Joe: “Wow, great column today.  Every once in a while you really challenge and even elevate the way I think about this stuff.  But because I am unable to compliment another man with out including some sort of insult I hasten to add that you are, for unspecified reasons, a complete prick.

So the entire domestic release is just a marketing tool for the "ancillaries"?  You know I think that idea had been floating around half-formed at the back of my mind.  It explains a lot, like why the studios are so rabid about protecting video and DVD returns from actors (or at least it suggests a more complex reason than simply "greed").  There's a lot to chew over there.

I read this thing in Variety about the, so far, disappointing summer.  As a street-level moviegoer I concur.  But I'm excited about this next half of the year in a way I've not been years, with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, The Royal Tenebaums, Adaptation, Fellowship of The Ring, Apocalypse Now Redux, Heist, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Majestic, The Musketeer, Ali, and the big one for me, Gangs of New York all on the way.  I'm sure I forgot a few very promising titles (I don't give a rat's ass about the Harry Potter picture).  This could finish as one of the great years.”

E ME:  Have you give up yet?