The Shack

Year 10, Day 194 - 7/13/18 - Movie #2,990

BEFORE:  Today is Friday the 13th, which has a reputation for being unlucky, or for some people it's a justification to watch or program slasher films.  Well, I save my horror films for October, so call me crazy, but the 13th is just another day - by my reckoning it should fall on a Friday about 1/7 of the time, and it's a big fuss over nothing.

It's also the final Manhattanhenge of 2018, that's one of two times each year where the setting sun aligns with the east-west numbered streets of Manhattan, so if you stand on a wide cross-street, like 14th or 42nd, and avoid getting run over, you can get a great view of the sun setting over New Jersey, right between the tall buildings of Manhattan.  I went out to see it four years ago, and caught some great pictures from Times Square, I think this time I'll try a different street, and move further east, which some people say creates a more dramatic effect.  I'll explain my reasons later for bringing these things up before watching THIS particular movie.

Now, I do own a copy of the book "The Shack", but it's been residing on the heater in my bedroom for several years - I must have started it at some point, realized it was a bunch of religious claptrap, and never picked it up again.  Watching the movie version tonight will at least save me some time, now I'll never need to finish reading it.

Octavia Spencer carries over from "Fruitvale Station".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Collateral Beauty" (Movie #2,899)

THE PLOT: A grieving man receives a mysterious, personal invitation to meet with God at a place called "The Shack".

AFTER: It's a tough film to get through, if you're an agnostic/skeptic like I am.  I eased my way out of the Catholic religion in my late teens, occasionally went to a Presbyterian church when I was married the first time, but by my late twenties, I was out again.  The reason I brought up Friday the 13th and Manhattanhenge earlier is that they both represent perfectly natural phenomenons that people have attached some weird mystical meanings to, and the science-based explanations are more simple, yet less widespread.

If anything bad happens to you on Friday the 13th, you may of course draw a conclusion that this happened to you because of bad luck, bad mojo, whatever.  But if that SAME thing happened to you on Thursday the 12th, or Saturday the 14th, you wouldn't even try to make any connection, you'd just say, "Well, a bad thing happened," and that would be it.  Similarly with the sun setting at a particular angle with reference to Manhattan architecture, if someone discovered this thousands of years from now, after the Hunger Games/Apocalypse/Dinosaur take-over, they might try to attribute some meaning to the alignment.  But simple science tells us that because of the tilt in the Earth's axis, combined with the planet's revolution around the sun, the sun is going to set in a slightly different spot on the horizon each night, and then after the summer solstice, it's going to start edging back the other way.  So for two of those nights, it's going to set in a particular spot, and then line up.

The problem is, human culture placed certain meanings on things years ago, and even though we know more than humans from thousands of years ago, our culture and our language has not caught up.  We still say "the sun rises" and "the sun sets" when of course it does no such thing - the sun is staying in the same place, relative to our solar system, and the earth is turning, creating the illusion that the sun is moving across the sky, and then sinking below the horizon.  We don't FEEL the earth moving, but we can SEE the sun moving, so that's what we call it - but instead "the sun is setting" we should say "the earth is turning, moving me into shadow".

And that's how I feel about religion - people looking for answers to things they didn't quite understand made up stories to fill in the gaps, based on what they saw or experienced, and those stories are still with us, even though modern science can offer very little proof that they happened. Was Jesus alive, did he die on the cross, did he rise again?  Well, that's what the stories say, but there's not one bit of hard evidence for any of that.  The Bible is filled with great stories like that, but they were all written for the purposes of creating a society (and for some entertainment value) in order to convince people to behave a certain way.  Somebody obviously felt that the world would be a better place with less theft and murders in it, so they created an afterlife with a points-based reward system to shame people into not robbing and killing so much.

And then these modern novelists and screenwriters try to build on the mythologies that came before, only they're convinced they can do it better, they can mix it up and change it around and make it more appealing to today's audiences, but really, it's the height of arrogance to say, "This is the way that life and death works, I've just decided."  Well, what if I choose to believe otherwise, or perhaps think for myself?  Look, if you want to create a galaxy far, far away and tell me how the Force works, that's one thing, but you're messing with people's LIVES here.  How many people don't get out and live their best life because they're focused on the next life instead of this one?  And then what if THIS one turns out to be all you get?

This story is very cagey, though - the lead character, Mack, slips on the ice early on and hits his head. So, then everything he experiences at the Shack could be in his own imagination, obviously.  And so therefore his subconscious is telling him what he needs to hear, in order to heal - that God forgives everyone, even the bad people, and he should too.  I like the codicil, however, that he can still stay MAD at the person who took his daughter from him, but he has to learn to forgive him.  That's a very fine legal distinction, but perhaps it is an important part of the grieving process.  Even if he could take God out of the equation, which I don't think he's capable of doing, that idea could still have some merit.  But it's buried under SO much religious B.S.

We're supposed to believe after the "Wisdom" character posits her points - like "How do you decide which one of your kids goes to heaven, and which one goes to hell?" (This is like a religious version of that party game, the one that asks you if you'd rather fight a duck the size of a horse, or a hundred horses the size of a duck...). Sure, God's got a tough row to hoe - but wait, I thought God was all powerful, so this contradicts that.  Why can't God determine some kind of eternal punishment-based system that is also easy for him to manage?  Why does it need to be difficult for him/her?

The answer, of course, to that question - and other ones like "Why does God allow there to BE bad people?" is that they all presume the existence of God in the first place.  When you take that part out, you're left with "Why are there bad people?" which is a much easier question to answer - they benefit from the things they do, or they were damaged somehow and this is their way of dealing with it, or they never learned to be good.  See?  Easy-peasy.

But hey, keep on believing that God lives in a shack with his/her other two personas, and they make dinners and weed gardens and do other things that are probably all metaphors and lessons, in that preachy God way.  (And it keeps bouncing between winter and spring, because heaven has no respect for continuity whatsoever.)  God can't even make you a salad, apparently, without driving home some point about sin or how much she loves you.  Especially you, God needs your love and faith so much that she can't even see that if she loves EVERYONE in a special way, then that's not really special, is it? It's like when Alex Trebek wishes "Good luck" to all three contestants at the start of Jeopardy! -  it negates itself and therefore becomes meaningless.

NITPICK POINT: Mack takes the fact that there are no footprints in the snow around the mailbox as "proof" that the letter came from God.  What a crock.  First of all, it contradicts that parable about walking on the beach with Jesus (because even the Lord leaves footprints, duh) and it couldn't possibly be that someone put the letter in the mailbox, walked away, and THEN it started to snow, could it?  Or that after they walked away it snowed very hard, and that new snow covered up their prints?  Give me a freakin' break.

Also starring Sam Worthington (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Radha Mitchell (last seen in "Olympus Has Fallen"), Tim McGraw (last seen in "Tomorrowland"), Graham Greene (last seen in "Maverick"), Avraham Aviv Alush, Sumire Matsubara, Alice Braga (last seen in "On the Road"), Megan Charpentier, Gage Munroe (last seen in "Immortals"), Amélie Eve, Ryan Robbins (last seen in "Warcraft"), Jordyn Ashley Olson, Derek Hamilton, Tanya Hubbard, Carson Reaume, Lane Edwards, Kendall Cross, Chris Britton, Jay Brazeau, Ty Olsson

RATING: 3 out of 10 life-jackets

Fruitvale Station

Year 10, Day 193 - 7/12/18 - Movie #2,989

BEFORE: Michael B. Jordan carries over from "Fahrenheit 451", to a film from the director of "Black Panther" that I've heard good things about, but still managed to learn nearly nothing about.  I'll watch just about anything right now that gets me one step closer to the Summer Rock Concert, even if it costs me $2.99 to watch this On Demand.

THE PLOT: The story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, who crosses paths with friends, enemies, family and strangers on the last day of 2008.

AFTER: This is another of those based-on-a-true event type movies, though again, I was unfamiliar with the story of Oscar Grant and what happened to him, and in my mind, the film slipped up by showing us the incident in question right away, then flashing back to show us how things came to that point.  Which of course is very trendy these days, "Atomic Blonde" did basically the same thing, showing us the end (or an important moment near the end) and then proceeding with the flashbacks.  And you know I hate this sort of structure - at one point in "Fruitvale Station" Oscar flashes back to the previous year, when he was in prison, but that's a flashback WITHIN a flashback.  That shouldn't be allowed, not ever, because people don't live like that, all jumping around in time.  Start at the beginning, end at the end, I always say.

Other than that flashback, which really should be ignored and discounted, because it doesn't really add anything to the story that couldn't have been stated with a line or two of dialogue, the film shows a day in the life of Oscar Grant, and good things happen during the day, and bad things happen during that day, and it's all very normal and mundane, umm, until it isn't.  That may seem frustrating, but it's the point of the film (and I think the only point, unfortunately, because the film doesn't seem able to dive too deeply into the causes of the incident, or the backgrounds of the others involved). 

Look, I'm not going to get into the debate over Black Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter, or even All Lives Matter, because I don't really have a dog in that fight, and I don't think those statements should be contradictory or exclusionary, but that's the way that everyone seems to use them.  This film won a bunch of prizes at Cannes and Sundance and such, but it's just not in my wheelhouse.  I didn't even pick up on who the guy on the train was, and how he knew Oscar from before.  I guess I should have paid more attention?

This was supposed to be a week of sci-fi and fantasy films and this one doesn't fit in with that topic at all, so I'm just going to use it for the link I need and move on.

Also starring Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Melonie Diaz (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Ahna O'Reilly (last seen in "CBGB"), Kevin Durand (last seen in "Hard Time: Hostage Hotel"), Chad Michael Murray, Ariana Neal (also last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Caroline Lesley, Jonez Cain, Trestin George, Marjorie Crump-Shears.

RATING: 5 out of 10 crab legs

Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

Year 10, Day 192 - 7/11/18 - Movie #2,988

BEFORE: I'm less than a week away from kicking off the Summer Rock Concert series, perhaps the longest chain I've ever put together on one topic.  But this will help clear away a lot of the films on my Netflix list, even if it doesn't directly reduce the numbers on my watchlist.  I've only got about 13 of the films on physical media, less than a third, but hey, I'm trying to move toward more streaming and on-demand use anyway, so this helps push me in that direction.  I shouldn't have to wait for a film to hit premium cable in order to view it, not when I have so many other options available to me, including Academy screeners (when they choose to work, that is).

Sofia Boutella carries over from "Atomic Blonde", and the question is, can I link from here to the Beatles in under a week?  You know that I can...

THE PLOT: In a terrifying future, Guy Montag, whose job as a fireman is to burn all books, questions his actions after meeting a young woman and begins to rebel against society.

AFTER: Of course, I've seen the 1966 film version of this story, which was directed by Francois Truffaut - his only English-language film, apparently.  And anything made in 1966 would probably seem dated - though that film from over 50 years ago seems to have predicted the popularity of reality TV and its impact on viewers choosing to live vicariously through its cast members.  Bradbury might have been ahead of his time, but there's no question that as a movie, this story may have been in need of an update.  These dystopian future films usually portray a time that logically results from current events, but seem sort of JUST out of our current reach.  Anyway, at the time the book was written, people thought that TV was a huge threat to books and education, so that's the germ of an idea that was then extrapolated out to the extreme - naturally a writer would be in favor of preserving the written word from such external mind-killing menaces.

That being said, I'm not sure this film, which made substantial changes to the original story, went about things the right way.  For starters, there are a lot of references to a sort of internet, which of course was not around when either the novel or the 1966 movie was made.  Here the web is called "The Nine" and contains only three books - the Bible, "Moby Dick" and "To the Lighthouse", only they're all in some kind of emoji form.  Makes sense, people in the future would naturally get lazier and lazier, and the need for pictographs over words would mean that people wouldn't have to work as hard.  And beyond those three books, what more would people need?

Ah, but there's the "Dark Nine", part of the internet that's used for uploading and downloading all the classic books, so people can read them before the firemen burn them.  Yes, this is still a future where firemen don't put out fires, but instead they start them, to burn all the books.  OK, so what do they call the people who put out the fires after the firemen start them?  Fire-stoppers?  Anti-firemen?  This is all a little unclear.

The second problem, after changing the story to reflect internet technology, comes in reminding the younger viewers what a "book" is.  Yeah, good luck with that.  But I guess you have to do that before pointing out why burning them is bad, and what that represents.  Even then, one of today's teens would probably think, "What's the big deal if somebody burns that book, I could just download another copy to my e-reader or find it posted on the web somewhere - or better yet, I could just watch the movie version and save myself some time."  Ah, so now the firemen have to burn not only books, but also VHS tapes, DVDs and computer servers too.  OK, the story's getting a little weaker by this point, but it's still workable.

They kept the part where a bunch of renegade people decide to preserve books by each memorizing one, and then they identify themselves by the book they've chosen.  One person becomes the living embodiment of "The Grapes of Wrath", another learns to recite "David Copperfield" from cover to cover, and eventually former fireman Guy Montag chooses to commit Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" to memory to preserve it, and I've got to think that if I had to memorize a book, that's probably the one I'd choose.  But just how reliable is each person's memory?  Couldn't the story change slightly with every telling, if the person memorizing it wasn't 100% accurate?  This always bothered me just a tiny bit.

This remake also throws in a few jabs at overly P.C. culture, as fire Captain Beatty explains that certain books were removed from the libraries because they were sexist books written by men, or racist books written by white people - "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is often found on lists of banned books because it uses the "N" word, but anyone familiar with the context in the story would realize that Jim the slave character is portrayed as a regular human, not as property, that the book is really anti-racist in its overall message, so banning it is really like throwing the baby out with the bath-water.  With that in mind, I can kind of see where they were going with this idea, but it just doesn't work - we've seen over the years that the banning and burning of books usually comes from conservative sources, liberals are more likely to be free-thinkers and protectors of free speech, therefore much less likely to ban books.  Unless Captain Beatty is lying here, and trying to cover up the real reason that books were banned, which is possible, however the use of the P.C. dodge is therefore quite misguided.

The final plot point concerns something called OMNIS, which is some kind of storage system that takes advantage of the limitless capacity of DNA, umm, or something, but this is never fully explained either, so the science seems clunky at best.  And where the DNA is stored, and where it ends up just seems like an unanswered question or a dangling plot point, so I'm not sure why someone took the story in this direction in the first place.

At one point we see that there is a burning book authored by Ray Bradbury, which means that in the fictional universe the Bradbury created, there is also an author named Ray Bradbury, but then it becomes unclear if that fictional version ever wrote a book called "Fahrenheit 451", or if that would be too meta.  I met the real Bradbury one time, at the Sundance Film Festival of all places, back in 1998.  Someone had filmed a version of his short story "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit", and cast a number of Latino actors in it, like Esai Morales, Edward James Olmos and Liz Torres (along with Joe Mantegna and Sid Caesar) and Bradbury attended the premiere screening.  I somehow found the nerve to talk to him and get his autograph, and this was VERY early in my autograph-seeking career.

Speaking of multi-cultural casting, changing Guy Montag to an African-American character seems like an interesting move at first, but then they don't really do anything with it.  Based on the argument I made last night about a lesbian spy, it's still an important move to make, but I just think it should mean something when it's done.  But the opposite holds true for the flashbacks that Montag has here about his father - they go nowhere, and prove nothing, so why include them?

See this for Michael Shannon's performance, he smolders (as usual) while the books burn, but there's not much else going on here, except for visual nods to "Blade Runner", and if you want those, why not just watch "Blade Runner"?  Now, if the film had chosen to make a more coherent argument by depicting a society where everyone's always staring at their phones and playing "Candy Crush" instead of reading books, it might have come closer to making a more relevant point.

Also starring Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Black Panther"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Lilly Singh (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Andy McQueen, Khandi Alexander (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Dylan Taylor, Saad Siddiqui, Grace Lynn Kung, Keir Dullea (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Raoul Bhaneja, Lynne Griffin, Joe Pingue (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Ted Dykstra, Jane Moffat (last seen in "Superstar"), Sean Jones, Ted Whittall (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Aaron Davis, Warren Belle and the voice of Cindy Katz.

RATING: 4 out of 10 protesting eels

Atomic Blonde

Year 10, Day 191 - 7/10/18 - Movie #2,987

BEFORE: Well, that was an action-packed film yesterday, with lots of dinosaur-based thrills.  Let's keep the action rolling with a spy film from last year.  Toby Jones carries over from "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom".

THE PLOT: An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a list of double agents.

AFTER:  Well, this one really got away from me, with all of its twists and turns and double-crosses.  I had to read the Wiki plot summary to find out what really happened, underneath all the changes.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I did following it.

Here's what I know - a very sexy British agent named Lorraine (which seems like a contradiction of sorts, that's not a very sexy name at all...) is sent to Berlin, just days before the end of the Cold War, to get her hands on a very special list (secret code name: "The list", where do they come up with these names?) that has the identities of agents on both sides.  So I get that, everybody wants this list, and it exists in two forms, one is a guy who memorized it.

So everybody wants either the list or this guy, but the guy just wants to get himself and his family across the Berlin Wall, from the East side to the West side.  Which was no easy task back in those days, when East Berlin was controlled by the Soviets.  And it's bitter irony to see so many agents going to such trouble to either get this guy across the border (or prevent that) when all they had to do was WAIT THREE MORE DAYS for the wall to come down.  Come on, didn't they have any clue that this was going to happen?  Seems like an awful lot of fuss and bother for no good reason, or is that just me? 

Sure, there's action a-plenty, and a big sequence in the middle where Charlize Theron's character takes out like 10 or 12 guys, one by one, with guns and knives and judo and such.  But what does it all add up to in the end?  And way too much time-jumping, as we toggle between the things happening, and the debriefing taking place 10 days later where everyone's talking about the EXACT SAME THINGS that we just saw happening.  Was this framing device really necessary, it added nothing to the story, and in most cases, didn't even explain what was happening any better, it was just more talky-talky that slowed down the action.

Look, this is why I hate time-jumping so much - the film opens in Berlin, with an agent getting killed, then flashes to "Ten Days Later" where people are talking about the agent getting killed, and we see the agent who was sent to investigate, she's giving her side of the story.  So then we flash BACK to one day after the agent was killed - but we were JUST THERE, we could have continued forward narratively from that point, there was no need to flash ten days into the future just to return to the past a minute later.  All this did was make the film even more confusing than it was before, and it was already pretty confusing. 

OK, so she's a lesbian, or at least swings both ways.  Big deal, which is to say, OK, great, but we should probably be at a point in our understanding of other humans where this should NOT be a big deal.  Right?  What does it say about me that I was more excited by all the 80's songs in this film than the sex scenes?

And hey, James McAvoy is still having a great year, this makes eight appearances for him so far in 2018, and there are still a lot of chances for more, though nothing else with him is on the docket.  But we'll be seeing him mentioned for sure in the year-end countdown - it probably didn't hurt that he was in (essentially) the same film three times over, and I watched all three of those.

Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "North Country"), James McAvoy (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), John Goodman (last seen in "Trumbo"), Til Schweiger (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Eddie Marsan (also last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Bill Skarsgard (ditto), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Star Trek: Beyond"), James Faulkner (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Sam Hargrave, Roland Moller, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Daniel Bernhardt, Barbara Sukowa (last seen in "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing"), with archive footage of Kurt Loder, Ronald Reagan.

RATING: 4 out of 10 tiny bottles of Stoli

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Year 10, Day 190 - 7/9/18 - Movie #2,986

BEFORE: It's time to go back to that dangerous world, where everything is frustrating and dangerous and could kill you if you're not careful.  No, not "Jurassic Park", I'm talking about Comic-Con.  After 15 years of flying out to San Diego and giving up a week of my life each year, my body is getting ready for my annual trip.  The only problem is, I'm not going this year, I finally convinced my boss that paying for the booth and the travel costs, shipping costs, etc. is a money-losing venture.  The prices of everything kept going up, and our profit each year kept going down.

The problem is, I'm still getting the stress dreams, right on schedule.  I had the dream the other night I was setting up my booth, and I suddenly realize I've forgotten the posters that I wanted to hang behind our table, or I never shipped the merchandise to arrive on time, and now it's too late to get anything there - plus, there are celebrities appearing at a booth just a few rows over, and I can't possibly get there in time!  Then I wake up in a cold sweat and realize that I'm still in New York, the convention doesn't start for another week, and oh, yeah, I'm not even going this year.

It didn't help that I had to get a suitcase fixed by bringing it with me to work, there's a place I know that's been fixing suitcases since the Eisenhower administration, they've got photos on their walls of that time they fixed a bag for Jerry Lewis or Goldie Hawn while they were in town and had a luggage-based emergency.  I've got to get a hole in the bag fixed before our vacation in October, but I happened to pick the day that I normally would have brought that bag to the office to fill it up with the supplies I'd need during Comic-Con, so the sense memory was still there.  It's a wonder that I didn't act on reflex and fill up the bag with posters, Sharpies, paper clips and those little cardboard stands that hold DVDs - something I've done many times while barely thinking about it.

If you think about it, Comic-Con is a lot like "Jurassic Park" - it's very crowded, it's tropically hot, difficult to get around and there are tons of "dinosaurs" about (people like me, who still read paper comic books and sell DVDs when all the kids are streaming movies...).  Plus, I was only slightly joking when I said the place is dangerous, I mean, what sort of idiot put the Convention Center on the other side of a busy highway AND two sets of train tracks, making the migration of 100,000 geeks to the Gaslamp District a potentially deadly operation?

Anyway, you probably guessed this is where I've been heading, with Bryce Dallas Howard carrying over again from "Pete's Dragon" to make for a three-peat.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jurassic World" (Movie #2,095)

AFTER: It's really 2015 all over again - back then when I came back from Comic-Con, I had a very sci-fi/action string of films waiting for me, which included two films with Charlize Theron ("Aeon Flux" and "The Astronaut's Wife") then "Jurassic World" and a couple of tech films ("Transcendence" and "Jobs") followed by "The Lego Movie".  Now, as the time for Comic-Con is approaching again (even if I'm not going) I'm back on "Jurassic World", I've got a film with Charlize Theron coming up tomorrow and a few more from the sci-fi/action vein, which would have been a GREAT set-up if I hadn't taken myself off that crazy Comic-Con treadmill.  (Sorry, no Legos this time around...)

In some ways, this is just what I needed, to be scared out of my wits by some of those "OH, CRAP!" moments when the dinosaurs attack.  Great, now I can stop having the Comic-Con set-up stress dreams and start having the "There's a dinosaur about to eat me!" stress dream - not to mention the falling off a cliff stress dream, the "I'm in a vehicle under water and it's sinking and I CAN'T SWIM!" stress dream, and the "I'm on an island and the volcano just blowed up and there's HOT LAVA EVERYWHERE!" stress dream.  So, yeah, umm, thanks for that, I guess.

But once you crack the code on the "Jurassic Park" movies, and really, come on, you've had four chances before this to do so...the dinosaurs only (mostly) eat the BAD people, right?  Umm, yeah, except for all those park guests in the last one.  Well, let's pretend they were all bad people.  But here the scientists have been hard at work, making some changes to the DNA codes here and there, instilling into the dinosaurs a true appreciation for dramatic irony, as well as comic timing.  So a dino can't just EAT somebody, it has to be at the right time.  They either have to be someone who's evil and deserves it, or they're rich (and therefore evil and deserves it) and even then, it has to come at an unexpected time, like after one of those "He's standing right behind me, isn't he?" moments.  THEN the reaction shot complete with bloodcurdling scream, THEN the chomp.  Really, it's just a matter of moving around a couple RNA receptors once you isolate the gene for irony.

Speaking of that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but I saw the preview (you might say "trailer", but I say "preview", because they don't "trail" after the films any more, they're shown before...) for this "Jurassic World" sequel SO many times, I practically had it memorized.  I think I've been out to the movies __ times so far in 2018 (let's see, "Black Panther", "Avengers: Infinity War", "Solo", "Deadpool 2", "Ready Player One", "Isle of Dogs") and I think they ran this preview before ALL of those...  And there were two very big problems I had with the trailer - one was dialogue from Jeff Goldblum's character as he testified before Congress about the dino situation.  He said, "These creatures were here before us.  And if we're not careful...they're going to be here after."  HUH?  This made no sense to me at the time, if he was fighting to save the dinosaurs, why didn't he say, "And if we're not careful, they WON'T be here after?"  Ah, but I didn't understand the context, in the film it was clear that he was pointing out that HUMANS were on the brink of extinction, and that the dinosaurs would be here after we're all gone due to climate change, pollution and mucking around with genetics.  His character was actually advocating for the dinosaurs to NOT be rescued from the island, because they never should have been created in the first place, and that inaction was the better form of action at that point, with the island likely to become inhabitable.

The other glaring mistake in the trailer was that scene where a couple characters are running from the volcano, surrounded by dinosaurs on all sides, and they climb into one of those plexiglass rolling gyrospheres, with a dino (Carnotaurus?) stalking them very closely.  Just when things look bleak, a T. Rex comes BOOM, slam out of nowhere and takes out the other dino.  Which is nuts, because that means somehow a T. Rex was able to sneak up on them!  Which, if you've seen any of the previous movies, you'll know is just impossible, the T. Rex has ZERO stealth capabilities, and in fact will wait until you've poured yourself a glass of water or positioned yourself next to a puddle before it approaches, just so you can see the water shake with every footstep as he draws near.  Again, remember, these dinosaurs were bred with an understanding of dramatic tension.  I'm sad to say, this mistake DID carry forward into the movie itself, so it counts as NITPICK POINT #1.

Now, for NITPICK POINT #2, I have to go back to my review of "Jurassic World" from 2015, where there were two young kids at the park, because we always have to have dinosaurs chasing kids for some reason, it heightens the difference between the giant, savage dino and the young, innocent, very screamy kids.  They went out of their way in "Jurassic World" to tell us that one of the young boys was a dinosaur expert, knew all their names and everything about them, and then failed to use this as a coherent plot point in any way.  So, then, umm, why was it there?  There's something very much like that here, and it concerns the young girl, the granddaughter of the crazy billionaire who was somehow a partner of the original crazy billionaire, only we've never heard him mentioned before, not once, not ever.

Anyway, this kid (who you just know is going to get chased by dinosaurs at some point, because come on, why else would she be there) has something unique about her, but when it's revealed, you might think it would be important, but it's just not.  It similarly serves no practical purpose whatsoever, so why the HELL is it part of the story?  She could have just been a regular kid, the heir to the crazy billionaire's fortune, and she would have exactly the same impact to the story as she does with this other fact in her bio.  I don't know, is she going to be important to the next JW film somehow?  Is some 18-year old girl with a budding interest in dinosaurs going to save the world in that one?  Or is she going to finance the new Jurassic Park, where all the proper safety measures are in place, and everyone comes to the park, things go smoothly, the dinosaurs are treated well and everybody has a good time?  Honestly, that would be the most shocking or surprising film to make at this point, now that we've had FIVE films where everything goes horribly wrong.  Keep trying, guys, you'll get it right next time, I'm sure...

Surprisingly, the preview didn't give everything away, because for once it only showed things that happen in the first half of a movie.  After the plot turn, there's a whole new territory to explore, umm, that is, unless you saw the second "Jurassic Park" movie, in which case, same old shit.  But the film manages to be timely on a few fronts, one thing that comes to mind is that Hawaiian volcano that erupted just two months ago, and is still active.  From the amount of press coverage, you'd think that maybe all of Hawaii is being destroyed, but it's really just a small part, and hey, more lava flowing into the ocean means that technically, Hawaii is getting bigger.  So once it's safe, there will be more island to enjoy!  This leads me to think that maybe, just maybe, parts of the fictional Isla Nublar will still come out OK, and even if it doesn't, don't forget about Isla Sorna, the other dino island that was seen in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III".  (You forgot about Isla Sorna, didn't you?  That's OK, they'll probably remind you about it in the next "Jurassic World" film...)

Another timely plot contrivance concerns the "Eat the rich" philosophy, which I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet as a symptom of Hollywood's rampant leftist socialism.  But it's also a key time right now for human DNA experimentation, I just saw a segment on "The John Oliver Show" about how people are using something called CRISPR to tinker with the genetic code of their pets, or even themselves.  And this is being done by people at home, the kits only cost about $100, and I'm sure they come with absolutely no long-term repercussions whatsoever.  What could possibly go wrong with people changing their own DNA to make themselves thinner or more muscular without diet or exercise?  It's not like DNA gets passed down to future generations or anything like that...  Wait a minute....it does?  Oh, crap, then we're all doomed.

I know that real scientists have been working on re-creating the ancient wooly mammoth, because really, doesn't our world need more wooly mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers while we're at it?  But even after finding a well-preserved mammoth, all they've been able to make so far in the real world looks like an elephant with male pattern baldness - that's not encouraging, so maybe it just wasn't meant to be.  Maybe we should be working on preserving the elephants tigers that we STILL HAVE before we go mucking about with genetics trying to bring back the old ones.  Someone's saving the DNA of tigers, whales and elephants somewhere, right?  So maybe if they die out some future generation could conceivably bring them back, after we solve global warming and figure out how to get all the plastic out of the oceans?  Hello?  Anyone?

Who knew that the world one day would be like it is now, where we've all got one foot in the grave and the other on the proverbial banana peel, and just one epidemic or not enough attention paid to the rising temperature is going to put us over the tipping point?  And it's kind of like those oxygen masks on the airplanes, we have to save ourselves first before we can save the other species, or maybe not?  Maybe we should let the humans die out, or a fair number of them, and that way one of the other intelligent species on the planet could step up to the plate.  I mean, we had our shot and I think we kind of blew it.  Can you tell me for sure that the dolphins couldn't do a better job of running things?  Once the ocean levels rise, that is, and those of use who can't grow gills via mutation end up living on top of very tall mountains or treading water for a decade.  (Note to self: invest in a houseboat.)  Now it's just a question of WHAT's going to take us down, whether it will be global warming, the simian flu or somebody messing with everyone's DNA.

Before I go, any other NITPICK POINTS?  Oh, yeah, that scene where Jeff Goldblum's scientist character testifies before Congress about what to do vis-a-vis the dinosaur situation.  That's ridiculous, because when has a Congressional hearing ever managed to accomplish anything?  Ha ha, that's very humorous, but obviously very inaccurate also.  Why wasn't there any reference like "A Congressional hearing?  Maybe you don't understand, we need something to get DONE!"

Also starring Chris Pratt (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Ted Levine (last seen in "Bleed For This"), Rafe Spall (last seen in "A Good Year"), Toby Jones (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), B.D. Wong (last seen in "Seven Years in Tibet"), James Cromwell (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Justice Smith, Geraldine Chaplin (last seen in "A Monster Calls"), Jeff Goldblum (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Isabella Sermon, Daniella Pineda (last seen in "Sleeping With Other People"), Kevin Layne, Peter Jason (last seen in "Heartbreak Ridge"), Alex Dower, with cameos from Michael Papajohn, Max Baker (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!")

RATING: 7 out of 10 diorama displays

Pete's Dragon (2016)

Year 10, Day 189 - 7/8/18 - Movie #2,985

BEFORE: 2016 was something of a banner year for movies - so far I've seen at least 100 films that were released in that year, with another 12 still on the list.  There was "Rogue One", "Suicide Squad", "Deadpool", "Arrival", "Batman v. Superman" and "X-Men: Apocalypse", just to name a few - and for kids movies, there was "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", "Sing", "Moana", "A Monster Calls", "The Secret Life of Pets", "The Jungle Book", "Zootopia", "Finding Dory", "The BFG", and "Ice Age: Collision Course", and "Kung Fu Panda 3", all competing for the attention of parents.  Is it any wonder that this re-make of "Pete's Dragon" got lost in the shuffle?

I was shown the original "Pete's Dragon" Disney film when I was a kid, and I burned it to DVD recently when TCM ran it, so I was able to put both films together on one DVD, back before my DVR died and I lost the ability to dub films off the movie channels.  Perhaps if I have time this weekend I should watch the old 1977 version for comparative purposes.  Maybe it just doesn't hold up if you're not a kid any more, but then again, that one had songs and real hand-drawn animation, so maybe it will be better than this modernized version, there's only one way to find out.

Bryce Dallas Howard carries over from "Gold", and sets me up for another trip to the movie theater tomorrow night.

THE PLOT: The adventures of an orphaned boy named Pete and his best friend Elliot, who just happens to be a dragon.

AFTER: I see where they were going with this one, but how exciting can ONE dragon be, compared with a whole theme park full of dinosaurs?  Maybe I'm getting hung up on the design of the CGI dragon character here, but it just looks kind of odd, like they started with Sully from "Monsters, Inc." and just expanded him out to dragon-size and shape.

Plus, the story is so simplistic, a boy gets orphaned on a car trip with his parents, and survives in the forest by teaming up with a dragon, that somehow doesn't choose to eat him.  I guess it eats wolves and bears instead?  Redford's character is an older man who claimed to have an encounter with a dragon himself when he was a young boy, so are we supposed to assume that this was the SAME dragon, or a different one?  This is very unclear, the story never even bothers to think about this.  I say it would have been a nice touch if the dragon recognized the boy, now an old man, from their previous meeting, but again, the story doesn't go there.

Instead we're led to believe that loggers are bad, hunters are bad, park rangers are good, which really seems too simple to believe.  Don't we still need loggers, at least responsible ones?  And not all hunters can be redneck meatheads, I'm sure some of them might have a few brains somewhere.  So this really feels like a bunch of city-folk made a film about what it's like to live out in the country, where there might be Bigfoots, (Bigfeet?) chupacabras, and why not, maybe even a dragon or two, if you know where to look.

Plus, the dragon can turn invisible, which is kind of where they lost me.  I could believe that the dragon could blend in, camouflage-style, in the greens and browns of the forest, but disappearing completely is another matter.  I think this story element carried over from the 1977 Disney film, but it's just not believable.  But then again, nothing here really is.  At least with the "Jurassic Park" films there's one foot (or at least a big toe) in the science world, with DNA samples and gene-splicing and embryo implantation, and here it's just, "Oh, yeah, dragons are a thing."  Plus, doesn't the film "How to Train Your Dragon" show 6 or 7 kinds of dragons?  And this film has just one, how boring.

OK, I just took a really long break, during which I re-watched the original 1977 "Pete's Dragon", for comparative purposes.  I don't think I've watched the film since I was a kid, so let's say 40 years or so.  It's a very corny, very silly film, with a lot of slapstick and not a lot of sense.  About the only thing the remake has in common with it are the characters of Pete and Elliot, the boy and the dragon, everything else is different.  In the original the orphaned Pete arrived in the town of Pashamaquoddy (presumably in Maine, based on all the lobster traps) sometime in the early 1900's (after electricity was introduced but before cars, it seems) along with his occasionally invisible, possibly imaginary dragon friend.  Questions about the reality of the dragon are compounded by the inebriation of the adults that happen to see him.  Pete's running away from the Gogans, a family of hillbillies that bought him from an orphanage in order to make him work their fields, and then have fun abusing him.  (This was back when you could make fun of hillbillies, and also child abuse...). Pete meets Nora and Lampie, a father-daughter pair of helpful lighthouse-keepers, after causing much ruckus in the town square with his invisible dragon, and then a pair of shady snake-oil salesmen who would love to catch a dragon and use it to make more phony medicines.  Pete sends Elliot off to find a lost sailor, the intended of Nora, while living in the lighthouse and slowly forming a family bond - then the Gogans show up in town, and everyone tries to catch both Pete and the dragon for their own personal gain.

You just couldn't make a film like that today - the hokey musical had its time, which came and went, but the film does have animation from Don Bluth (back before he left Disney to do his own thing) and stars like Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Helen Reddy and Shelley Winters.  (Also, a pre-Grease Jeff Conway as one of the Gogan boys, Jim Backus as the town's mayor and Charlie Callas as the voice of Elliot...).  And kids might not realize (but as an adult, I sure did) that making the dragon invisible half the time isn't just a convenient plot point, but a great way to keep a film's animation and effects budget down.  Just make a bunch of things fall down around the set, and say that an invisible dragon is knocking it over, it's diabolically genius.

So, I think they did what they could to modernize the story of Pete's Dragon, here, but unfortunately it just can't compete.   Even after moving the story to (I'm guessing) the Pacific Northwest, and taking out the silly songs and slapstick comedy, it's still missing something - maybe the heart from the original Disney film?  It's like they wanted to make a whole movie out of that shot in "Jurassic Park" where everyone stares slack-jawed upon seeing the dinosaurs for the first time - hoping that the same sense of wonder gets transferred to the audience, but that's just not enough in the end.  Maybe a kid might think differently, but I have to judge this film (and now the original, too) as an adult.

Also starring Oakes Fegley (last seen in "This Is Where I Leave You"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Lovelace"), Karl Urban (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Oona Laurence (last seen in "The Beguiled"), Robert Redford (last seen in "Truth"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last heard in "Cars 3"), Marcus Henderson (last seen in "Get Out"), Aaron Jackson, Phil Grieve, Jim McLarty, Ian Harcourt, Steve Barr, Levi Alexander, and the voice of John Kassir,

RATING: 5 out of 10 tranquilizer darts