5 Ways “Jurassic World” Dropped the Ball

“Jurassic World.” A review two blog posts in the making. See what I did there? Sure you do. Anyway, there was a lot of positivity yesterday as we talked about my overall thoughts on the dino sequel as well as five ways that it managed to exceed my expectations and be really awesome. 

                Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t all ice cream cones and cat videos. There were a few pretty glaring warts that need to be addressed. Some parts were less-than great, others were downright pretty bad or just dumb in a way that I couldn’t accept or live with. This list is made up of those parts. Here are the 5 Ways “Jurassic World” Dropped the Ball.

'Wish I Was Here' isn't bad no matter what I say for the next 900 words

I’ve promised myself that I won’t mention Zach Braff’s 2004 writer/director/actor debut feature or compare his latest effort in those fields, “Wish I Was Here” to it in any way during this post. That way I can really focus on “Wish I Was Here” as its own entity.

                In fact, this clarifying sentence you’re reading now will be the last time I’ll even vaguely hint at it. Just go ahead and put it right out of your brain. Right. Out.

                So 2004’s “Garden State” was really awesome and … Shish kabobs! Sorry. Starting now. Get it out of your mind, will you? Geez.

 “Wish I Was Here.” That’s what we’re talking about.

                This movie, the new one, it’s not bad. If you head over to Rottentomatoes.com, it looks really bad, but it’s not. It’s rough around the edges. The first act is decidedly not great, plot points are introduced and forgotten about on occasion and some of the plot threads we did stick with, I’m not sure we needed to.  

                But it also features that blend of laugh out loud funny and poignant “What does it all mean” moments that the world expects, nay, demands from a Braff movie.

                In “Wish I was Here” Braff plays a guy who is what would kindly be described as a struggling actor. More accurately, he’s a long-term unemployed guy who occasionally shows up to be rejected at auditions.  He’s married to Kate Hudson, who supports the family by doing data entry for the water department and has two kids, a daughter, tweener Grace, who’s really into their Jewish heritage and the younger one, Tucker, who’s into video games or something.

Review: 1 a.m. going on 1 a.m.: Thoughts on 'Blackfish' (Part 2)

There’s one scene in particular that’s just absolutely terrifying. Spoiler alert, by the way. It’s home video of a trainer during a whale performance at Sea World. At one point the whale, not Tilikum, decides to grab the trainer’s foot in its mouth and drag him down to the bottom of the pool. It holds him there for what must have felt like an eternity before surfacing again, never letting go of the man’s foot.

The whole time you can clearly see this guy’s face and look in his eyes as he faces almost certain death. But he never panics. You see him breathing deeply while stroking the whale and whispering to it and then it goes down again, holds him at the bottom and surfaces again.

Same thing. He doesn’t panic. He keeps breathing slowly and stroking the whale, hoping to convince it to let him go and it does. But then it grabs his other foot and pulls him down again.

As this is going on, other trainers have divided the pool in half with a huge net, the idea being that if he could get away long enough to swim over the net, the whale wouldn’t be able to follow, but that was it. That was the best they could do for this guy.

Review: 1 a.m. going on 1 a.m.: Thoughts on 'Blackfish' (Part 1)

www.hipandtrippy.com

Over the weekend we did that whole Daylight savings time thing and “fell back” as the kids say.

Some people, smart ones, used the extra hour to catch up on sleep.

Not being one of those smart ones, I used my extra hour to get one step ahead of my Netflix queue and watch a documentary about killer whales in captivity called “Blackfish.”

The doc had previously occupied the number one spot on my Netflix DVD queue, but then it turned up on CNN late last Saturday night/early Sunday morning at midnight, so my choice was made for me.

And after watching the movie, I have to say, there’s something deeply unsettling about clicking on the guide button to check what time something ends and seeing 1 a.m. followed by another 1 a.m.

It’s the type of thing that could send you into a psychotic episode in the middle of the night when you’re fending off sleep tooth and nail.

 What about “Blackfish?”

Review: 'Insidious: Chapter 2' is kinda sorta a mixed bag

Over the weekend I ventured to theaters to see one of the more anticipated horror offerings of the year: “Insidious: Chapter 2.”

                I enjoyed the first film very much when I saw it many moons ago, so I had moderately high expectations for the sequel.

                Anyway, after a brief opening where we meet young Josh, young Josh’s mom and young Josh’s two psychic pals, we flash forward to the more or less present day and we pick up where the first film left off.

So spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the first one yet, but then why would you be seeing the sequel anyway? Who knows, people are weird.

Anyway there we meet present day Josh (the lovely Patrick Wilson), his present day wife Renai (the lovelier Rose Byrne), their family, some paranormal investigators and one of the psychic’s from Josh’s youth, who is now dead.

Lost yet? Hopefully not.

Back to the aftermath from part one. Josh has just pulled his young son back from the land of the dead, but somehow in the process, his psychic helper has gone and gotten herself strangled. Now dead psychics usually arouse police suspicion and cops don’t usually take “The spirits killed her” as an excuse.

Naturally, everyone thinks Josh killed her, even Renai isn’t so sure. Who spells Renee like that, by the way? Josh isn’t really helping his case because he keeps acting like a crazy robot person.

And since this is a movie about ghosts, more supernatural stuff starts going down, this time involving an apparition in a nurse’s uniform – not the sexy kind either – and most of it is centered around Josh and Renai’s infant daughter.   

Enough with the plot summary, let's get to your biggest question, is part two any good?

Well, if you’re familiar with part one, never fear, the delightful paranormal investigating team of Specs (Leigh Whannell, who’s also wrote the screenplay) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) are back and once again steal the show. In fact, I haven’t seen part one in a bit as I said, but it seems like they have way more to do this time around, nearly splitting screen time with our lovely leading couple.

That’s definitely a good thing. The rest of the movie is kind of hit or miss.

It retains a lot of the amusement park haunted mansion feel of part one, only that movie kept the leash on the campiness a little bit better. The screwiness of part two sometimes overshadows the pretty dark stuff that’s supposed to be going on.   

Wilson especially falls victim to a lot of cringe worthy, over-the-top lines and situations, especially during his robotic, post-trip-to-the-land-of-the-dead phase.

The movie still relies super-heavily on boo scares and most especially on insanely loud musical stings to make audiences jump. Thinking back on it now, there isn’t much tension to be found here, outside of maybe the opening trip to the past and pretty awesome bit involving a tin-can phone the kids build.

There are some other jumpy moments, but nothing that burns like the wall-to-wall tension I remember from part one.

Part two’s storyline seems a little overwritten, too. Part of that is probably to give the paranormal investigators something more to do. There ends up being a ton of stuff to follow and it sometimes gets confusing.

For example at a certain point it  became a chore to remember who exactly was possessing who.

And one of the spirit’s motivations: an abusive mother who imbued a good deal of sexual confusion on him, isn’t all that original. Not only that, but it sort of clashes with the ample humor provided by Specs and Carl, as well as the intentional or not humor of watching Patrick Wilson walk around like a malfunctioning terminator.

Much of the third act is spent in the spooky spirit world which remains the franchise's signature set piece. Lots of creepy rolling mists, endless shadows and the occasional spirit jumping out at you. Although, again, it wasn't really easy to follow how and why the things that happened there impacted the real world.

End result? “Insidious: Chapter 2” is a good, not great movie. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you jump, even if the jumps feel a little less earned this time around. I’m right in the middle on it, but I’d recommend checking it out if only to fill the void left by the “Paranormal Activity” franchise this Halloween season.

Grade: C+   

Review: 'Pacific Rim' is an absolute blast

godzilla2012.blogspot.com

As a young lad, my “Godzilla” toys occupied a good deal of my time. They weren’t my favorites, my “Terminator 2” toys held that crown, but the “Godzilla” crew was high on my list.

                I had a big, sorta-crummily painted Godzilla whose arms and legs you could move, but only in a pretty unrealistic motion. I hate a big brownish pterodactyl my dad got surprised me with one day when he picked me up from school. Even though it was just a dinosaur, I happily pretended it was Godzilla’s sometimes winged-friend, sometimes winged-foe, Rodan.

                One Christmas I also acquired a fun little set of Godzilla’s entire catalogue of co-monsters, although they were much smaller than the other two, which kind of limited cross-over opportunities, but when you’re a kid, you make due.

                All of this is just a wildly long-winded way of telling you that I was pretty psyched when I first heard about Guillermo del Toro’s monsters vs. robots slugfest “Pacific Rim.”

                If there’s one man who I trust implicitly with my beloved childhood memories of wearing out my VHS copies of Japanese monster movies, it’s del Toro, a guy who I’m sure was doing the same thing when he was a boy. Maybe to this day, even.

Reviews: 'Monsters U' and 'Despicable Me 2'

Over the last week or so, my lady friend and I ventured out to our local movie houses to see a pair of kids’ movies.

                First up was “Monsters University,” Pixar’s prequel to its 2001 hit “Monsters, Inc.”

                “Monsters, Inc.” was never really all that high up in Pixar’s catalogue for me. It’s not particularly low either, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the middle. I’ve seen it once, thought it was fine and don’t plan on seeking it out or avoiding it for that matter.

                And that’s kind of pretty much exactly how I feel about “Monsters University.” It was fine. Occasionally it was very funny, but the story suffered from the prequel curse of predictability.

                It’s essentially “When Mike met Sully.” Spoiler alert … seriously … They don’t start out as best friends. In fact, they’re kind of enemies. Mike is the lovable underdog out to prove himself to the world, Sully is the kid from the famous family. They both wind up in MU’s famed scarer program, start competing with each other and run afoul of the dean and get kicked out said program.

                Of course, there just so happens to be a major scaring contest coming up and Mike bets the dean that if they win, they can rejoin the scarer program. The only catch is they need the help of the dorkiest, least scary frat on campus in order to win.

                Can Mike and Sully turn their lovable bands of doofs into terror machines? You’ll just have to watch the movie to find out.  

                If there’s one lesson I learned from “Monsters University” --- see what I did there? --- it’s that Charlie Day needs to be in everything. The fact that he’s not the most in-demand comedic actor out there right now is one of our nation’s greatest shames.

                Day makes everything better. He plays a lower case “n” shaped monster that’s in Mike and Sully’s frat. Not surprisingly, Day can lay claim to nearly all of the movie’s biggest laughs. Without him, I’m not saying this could have been “Cars 2” territory, but who knows? I won’t say it officially, because I never actually saw “Cars 2,” but I heard stories.

                “Monsters University” doesn’t live up to some of Pixar’s heavyweights, but it’s OK. I think my lady friend liked it more than I did.

It’s funny enough and well-paced enough that, even though it’s predictable, it never crosses over into boring. Also, Billy Crystal and John Goodman are back as the main monsters and they’re pretty awesome too.

                But Charlie Day, ya’ll. Charlie Day.  

                Not long after we saw “Monsters Unviersity,” we checked out the sequel to a movie we both really loved, 2010’s “Despicable Me.”

A night spent with Vin Diesel and The Rock studying the manly arts

Last night myself and some brethren journeyed out into the wilds of the Philadelphia suburbs to see the ode to masculinity that is “Fast & Furious 6,” or as the opening credits dubbed it “Furious 6.” True story.

                All these hours later, I still can’t tell if that’s cool or not.

                Whatever you’d like to call it, this movie picks up where its predecessor, 2011’s “Fast Five,” left off.

                Don’t worry. I’m not going to summarize the other four installments of the franchise, because, well, I haven’t seen them. Until The Rock joined the franchise in part five, it wasn’t even on my radar. After all, I know nothing about cars and I drive super slow, so what could a franchise dedicated to folks who live their lives a quarter mile at a time hold for a guy like me, who lives his life doing 5 under the speed limit?

                But then they hired The Rock and everything changed. Part five saw our hero Dom Toretta (Vin Diesel) and his lovable gang of street racers and thieves doing battle with a sinister Brazilian drug lord, while being pursued by a relentless and heavily muscled cop (The Rock).

                Spoiler alert: The anti-heroes beat the drug lord by working with the cop, a tenuous bond is formed and we all go our separate ways. Until now.