- That’s what I’m calling the second one: Jurassic Parker.
- Even though the sequel is mostly unlike the original in every way including how Postlethwaitey it is.
- The first film has utterly no Pete Postlethwaite.
- Which, to some, makes it inferior.
- The vast majority of critics prefer the first, even labeling it a classic, but the second movie is deeply weird and dark and the characters so damnably stupid that you’re rooting for them to be lunchified within seconds of their introductions.
- Only four people get eaten in the first (according to the tenets of Without Research): the zookeeper in the opening scene, Newman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jonathan Price.
- And only Newman fully deserved it.
- Jonathan Price does abandon the children in the first T-Rex attack, but that can be ascribed to panic.
- The rest is just cheap anti-lawyer animus; his whole character is drawn that way, even though he’s absolutely right the entire time.
- Forget about the dinosaurs.
- Leave out the dinosaur portion of the equation and think of it how they taught us in economics class.
- John Hammond had an idea for a new widget.
- If realized, this widget would bring a high profit.
- Interested parties gave John Hammond capital to build the widgets.
- The widgets just ate a guy.
- Don’t the investors at this point have not just the legal right to examine the factory, but the fiduciary obligation to do so?
- I would argue that they do.
- Spielberg and the writers disagree.
- Lawyers get in the way of Great Men, and John Hammond is one.
- For example, if lawyers had their way, John Hammond would appear in the second film only via tele-link from prison, where he would be spending the rest of his wheezy, avuncular life.
- Along with every other human being along the way who knew about Jurassic Park and didn’t immediately call in an airstrike.
- MILITARY CELL PHONE NOISE
- “Aye-aye?”
- “Oh, yeah, hi. I need you to bring some ships down here and kill an island.”
- “Who is this?”
- “My name’s Randy. I was flown in to do some of the finish work on the banistering all throughout the resort. I’m a master carpenter, local 547 out of San Diego, how are you, and you need to bring, like, the Iowa over here and shoot this whole island until it doesn’t exist any more.”
- “Uh-huh. Randy?”
- “Randy Vandewater. It’s Dutch, but I’m American through and through. I’m gonna read you the coordinates and–“
- “Randy, this is not how it works. Civilians don’t get to call in military strikes. Most people in the military don’t get to call in strikes, come to think about it. Very few people are authorized to have artillery sent to where they’re pointing. And y’know what? It’s a good policy. So, Randy, you have yourself a good day.”
- “There’s dinosaurs.”
- “Oh, shit, hombre, why didn’t you say so? The Navy is on that shit.”
- Everyone is complicit in the tragedies of Jurassic Park.
- It’s a cliché at this point to note how strikingly well the CG has held up, and it’s similarly cliché to mention how much of the “CG” is practical.
- They just built dinosaurs out of metal and latex.
- Spielberg wants a T-Rex, Spielberg gets a T-Rex.
- The leads work in the first; not as much the second.
- Sam Neil and Laura Dern are the white bread to Jeff Goldblum’s spicy, cured meats and cheeses.
- It’s good white bread.
- Handmade and fresh.
- But they were just Handsome Guy and Blonde Girl.
- Goldblum’s where your action is.
- He’s wearing leather blazers.
- He’s greasier than your uncle’s dick on Monday morning.
- He’s delivering his lines as though he had auto-tuned the words to a Coleman Hawkins’ solo.
- Goldblum’s the key to it all, man.
- But in the second movie, they fuck up the Goldblum.
- They surround him with a pre-bloat Vince Vaughn, who is some sort of nature photographer/secret agent for PETA, and Julianne Moore, who is doing less.
- Julianne Moore is giving precisely the amount of effort required of a show business professional, and not one iota more.
- I say this as a fan of Ms. Moore’s, and someone who’s seen many of her films.
- She is capable of better work.
- And shackle him with a kid, because the Park ain’t quite Jurassic unless a child or two is in danger.
- This does not work for two reasons: casting and Jeff Goldblum Is Weird Around Children.
- The actress who played the daughter was (and, I’m assuming, still is) African-American.
- Not mixed.
- We’re not talking a Rashida Jones-type situation.
- And she just pops up on-screen and goes “Dad!” and Goldblum goes “My daughter!” or something like that, and it’s very confusing for a minute.
- But then you think, “Adoption.”
- Or maybe not.
- The movie does not let us know.
- It lets Vince Vaughn and Toby from the West Wing joke about it and look like assholes.
- And other people’s relationships are none of our business, especially when it comes to family matters.
- Yet: my curiosity remained.
- One line!
- One line could’ve fixed it:
- “Ah, Dr. Malcolm, thank you for coming. I hear you’ve been so sad since your wife left you and your three adopted black children.”
- One line.
- And then that line’s like Chekhov’s Gun: you’re now waiting for the black kid to show up.
- When she does?
- Oh, there’s that adopted black child John Hammond was talking about.
- (In reality, Spielberg had adopted some kids around that time. They were black kids, and maybe he thought that they’d never seen an onscreen representation of the relationship he had with ’em. Which is sweet, and makes me a dick for goofing on, but it was just so distracting. How about you pan past a picture of Goldblum and his three adopted black kids and the wife’s got a post-it note over her face?)
- The second reason the daughter character doesn’t work is that Jeff Goldblum Is Weird Around Children.
- Not bad weird.
- Not the kind of weird that make you rethink your position on Jeff Goldblum.
- Just awkward and confused.
- Goldblum, you see, seduces.
- Men, women, coffee shops and nightclubs: Goldblum seduces.
- Every line is a come-on.
- This does not work with children.
- Think about Jeff Goldblum’s oeuvre.
- Don’t oeuvre-think it though.
- Booo!
- Yeah, that was dreadful.
- Anyway, getting back to Goldblum and his body of work: notice a lot of “Dad” roles in there?
- Tom Hanks plays Dad.
- Jeff Goldblum plays the uncle who never got married.
- Reasons Jurassic Parker Is Better Than The Original
- Pete Postlethwaite.
- Pete Postlethwaite’s head. (Name a better head. I’m talking the whole picture: face, skull, everything. The man’s noggin exhibits the Golden Ratio in myriad ways; it has been noted by scientists. )
- Peter Stormare as “Foreign Mercenary Who Doesn’t Like Dinosaurs.”
- The jeeps in the dinosaur hunt scene have passenger’s seats that slide out to give the occupant more room to shoot, and the 8-year-old in me would greatly enjoy playing with that toy.
- The final reel, in which a T-Rex wanders through suburban San Diego, is so dumb I can’t believe it stuck to the film; I love it so.
- And then there’s the final shot, which is the moron cherry atop the shitheaded cake: the T-Rex, having been wrangled back aboard the ship, being escorted back to Isla Nublar under Navy protection.
- Like, eight ships real close around.
- Instead of–and don’t get ahead of me–killing the monster and setting its nest on fire.
- Isla Nublar is a foreign country to America, I would assume?
- Because that makes letting a T-Rex loose in San Diego an act of war.
- None of these movies discuss the political reality that any American president would be forced to bomb these islands off the planet.
- Politically, “destroy the monsters” is a no-brainer; even No-Brain could figure this one out.
- Your church groups are going to support it, your chambers of commerce are gonna be for it, and the housewives in the Midwest love the idea.
- We can’t have dinosaurs infiltrating America and refusing to assimilate, or speak our language, or not eat our children.
- Or worse.
- Some dinosaurs rape.
- Paleontologists don’t like to talk about it, but it’s true.
- Facts don’t care about your feelings, and the facts are: some dinosaurs rape.
- You’ve lost the plot, haven’t you?
- I have, yes.
- Take five, slugger.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: jurassic park
THE JURASSIC PARK UNIVERSE – AROUND LUNCHTIME
“Jenkins!”
“Yes, sir?”
“I had an idea.”
“Sir, I’ve told you this a thousand times: there is already a miniature version of golf. It’s called miniature golf. It’s right in the name, sir.”
“This is a different idea, you flippant boob. My mind’s racing with them. I don’t know why people talk bad about this fentanyl. It’s rooty, it’s tooty, it’s fresh, and it’s fruity. Top notch Hero Juice.”
“Are you calling fentanyl Hero Juice now, sir?”
“Makes you feel like a damned Superfriend! Look out, I’m Green Arrow! I’ve got you in my sights!”
CHAIR THROWING NOISE
“That was a chair, sir.”
“Chair arrow.”
“You called me in about an idea, sir?”
“Ah. Yes. Jenkins, do you know anything about genetics?”
“We’re not making dinosaurs again, sir.”
“Oh, why not? They’re so cool and it’s always so much fun.”
“Because the same thing has happened all five other times we made dinosaurs.”
“Jenkins, by ‘we’ you mean DINO-REX, the Department of INternational Operatives: Resuscitation of EXtinct animals? The secret organization that was secretly behind all the other secret organizations that have created dinosaurs since the initial 1997 trial?”
“Thank you for taking the exposition, sir.”
“I felt a little bad about the chair thing.”
“What chair thing, sir?”
“Oh, there’s my Jenkins. Now be a pal and get to work on the dinosaur plan.”
“I can’t, sir. We can’t. Maybe we as a business need to pivot. What about mammoths? People would absolutely pay for mammoths.”
“Mammoths are just hippie elephants, Jenkins. They’re not sexy. No one is flying to an island to see a shaggy Dumbo. ‘Look, children. It’s lumbering over there.’ Where’s the pizzazz? No, no, no. Dinosaurs.”
“They’re going to eat people again. They’re going to get loose almost immediately and at the worst possible time, and then they’re going to eat people again. That’s their whole act, sir.”
“Not the plant-eaters. Don’t paint the duckbills with the allosaur’s brush.”
“Ah. No, sir. The plant-eaters did not eat any people. You have that right. They have, however, killed dozens over the course of the five trials. A triceratops ran through a crowd last time. That’ll kill you just as good as being eaten. And a brachiosaur straight-up stepped on a guy once.”
“Nostrils on the top of their skulls. Wild design, the brachiosaur. Let’s make a bunch of those this time. Ooh, give me a stegosaurus, too. Wait, wait! Two! Two stegosauri and I wanna watch how they do it. How do you think they do it, Jenkins?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Carefully.”
“There you go.”
“Jests notwithstanding, that’s a calculated risk going in for the steg puss. You gotta want it.”
“Please, sir.”
“You gotta want it bad. Reminds me of my first wife.”
“Wasn’t she eaten by a dinosaur?”
“No. Wait. Yes. She was. I thought you were talking about my second wife.”
“Who was also eaten by a dinosaur.”
“Partially eaten. Not consumed. At least not the top half. We found her top half, and thank God we did.”
“A sense of closure.”
“Insurance purposes.”
“They always get out, sir. We’re trapped in a cycle of retelling the Frankenstein story. Every time we make the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs get out and behave rudely.”
“Ah, Jenkins, but who is the true Frankenstein: Frankenstein or the dinosaurs?”
“What?”
“Get to cooking! Bring me the phone that has B.D. Wong’s phone number in it. He vibes me.”
“B.D. Wong does not vibe you, sir.”
“He lets me know. Many men of his persuasion have advertised their feelings to me in a similar fashion. I thank them with a firm handshake and a pre-printed business card listing the eleven reasons I am not a homosexual.”
“You really had those made?”
BUSINESS CARD HANDING-OVER NOISE
“Oh, sir. Number one: not sexually attracted to men. Okay, I guess that’s fair.”
“I’ve experimented, Jenkins! Been to clubs in the part of town you don’t tell your mother about. I have been squeezed and fondled. Passed around like a basketball when the Globetrotters do their famous Magic Circle.”
“You never know where the ball’s going to go, sir.”
“Precisely. I was set upon. There was a gang of them, and they were the meat chunks and I was the gravy.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it’s disgusting.”
“But! No attraction. I performed sexually out of politeness, curiosity, and intoxication. And personal satisfaction, Jenkins.”
“Number two: homosexuals always telling me not to make dinosaurs.”
“Straight people, too, but I don’t have to turn down their advances. Forget about that card and focus on my dinosaurs. We need a cover story. Let’s just do theme park again.”
“No one will buy another theme park so soon. The armies of the world would send warships to bomb the island to rubble followed by drones armed with hellfire missiles. We gotta wait another decade before we pull the theme park gag again.”
“We breed them in secret and sell them to the military.”
“We’ve done that, like, three times already and the military guys get eaten. Each time. Why would an army even want a dinosaur? Wouldn’t any organization competent enough to afford the ludicrous overhead of housing, feeding, and training militarized raptors also know a squad of War Dinos was just the worst possible idea?”
“You would think! But, no. They keep coming back. I had a breakthrough, though.”
“About the dinosaurs?”
“Oh, yes. Those new islands that China just created.”
“That would create an international incident, sir.”
“Of course it would. It’s fucking dinosaurs, Jenkins. Everybody on the planet would hear about it. All the countries. Chinese Navy protects us. We promise that the dinosaurs won’t get loose in Shanghai.”
“Are they going to?”
“Immediately. I’m thinking about skipping the island and shipping the suckers straight from the lab right into the city center. In transport, of course, Stick Protocol is in effect.”
“Stick Protocol, sir?”
“We poke the animals with sticks.”
“Why, sir?”
“Angers them! Oh, it’s going to be wonderful. I’m gonna airdrop an ankylosaur on a family.”
“Won’t the Chinese be mad?”
“Oh, yes. Steaming. We’ll get Goldblum to make a speech at them, and maybe they’ll sign on for another trial. The Saudis will let us do anything we want. You know that. Madder than a rooster in handcuffs, the Saudis. They’ll build us another island. And while they’re building it, I’ll siphon off enough money to build a couple of other islands in secret and populate those with genetically-modified raptors or whatever.”
“Please don’t ‘or whatever’ genetically-modified raptors, sir. Are you modifying raptors’ genetics again, sir?”
“Again? No, I’m no doing it again. I never stopped.”
“Dammit. Stop making supermonsters, sir.”
“It’s so easy and fun! My new one can teleport up to 18 yards.”
“Jesus, don’t make that. Sir, please. Let’s use our mind-boggling science abilities to help humanity. Or let’s use them to make money in a way that doesn’t end with people getting eaten.”
“That’s every business, Jenkins. The Hoover Dam ate men! The assembly line at Ford ate men! That’s capitalism, Jenkins. It is industry and it is not some theory about the world. It is the way things are, Jenkins. Life is tough. Men get eaten.”
“Literally, sir. Literally masticated between another creature’s teeth while friends and family look on in horror. Repositioned in the mouth. Thrown back down the throat. Eaten.”
“A metaphor is the same thing as the real thing.”
“That’s a trap. That sentence is a trap and I won’t follow you down that alley. Sir: we cannot keep making dinosaurs.”
“And yet we must! Jenkins, allow me to quote from the Rabbi Hillel: If not us, who? If not now, when? Jenkins, I believe the rabbi was talking about making dinosaurs when he said those words.”
“He wasn’t, sir.”
“Damn you, boy, I’m gonna make dinosaurs and set the fuckers loose in densely-populated areas until the day I die, most likely via dinosaur. This is my destiny, Jenkins. For I am Doctor Jurassicpark, the secret villain of all the Jurassic Parks and mwah ha ha HAHAHACCCHHH.”
“You okay?”
“My cough is back. I’m gonna have a nip of Fenta.”
“Fenta?”
“Fanta with fentanyl in it.”
“Should’ve guessed.”
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