5 Ways ‘Jurassic World’ Was Really Awesome

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Now that “Jurassic World” made Scrooge McDuck-level coin over the weekend, it’s time for me to share my two cents. I mean that’s what everyone’s been waiting for right? What does that anonymous internet guy who writes 800 words on getting menaced by swans think about this pop cultural phenomenon?  

                Well wait no more. I enjoyed the movie. It was big dumb fun. I’d give it a solid B.

                It’s been 20+ years since the events of the first movie and the genetic-engineering conglomerate InGen has finally managed to open the island-based dinosaur theme park of its dreams. Humanity is pretty psyched about this for a while but then something happens. We get kind of sick of it. That’s right, people – with our ever-shortening attention spans – have grown weary of seeing animals of unfathomable sizes from millions of years in the past walking around in the present. Attendance is dropping off and InGen decides the only way to reverse course is to give us something bigger and scarier than silly old T-Rexes and raptors. So they cook up a genetically-engineered hybrid dino that is made up of all of the scariest parts of other animals. Needless to say, this goes poorly and eventually the hybrid (called the Indominus Rex) gets out and runs amok on the island. From there it’s up to Jurassic World’s chief of handsome and raptor training Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), its Director of Operations or whatever, to get the situation sorted out. Oh and also they have to find Dearing’s teenage and pre-teen nephews who are lost on the island (because kids) and deal with the scheming of Hoskins, (Vincent D’Onofrio) who seems to be InGen’s Director of Shady-Doings and who naturally wants the island’s raptors for his own dastardly machinations.

                There’s a lot to like about “Jurassic World” and so let’s stick to that for this post. Let’s make this post 5 Ways ‘Jurassic World’ Was Really Awesome since we’re all still riding high on a dinosaur and Pratt-fueled wave of good vibrations. 

Review: 'Interstellar' isn't Nolan's finest, but it ain't terrible

I’m what you'd call a Christopher Nolan fanboy. That admission should give you some context on how to take it when I say that I thought his space and time-hopping epic "Interstellar" was a bit of a mixed bag.  

                The long and short of “Interstellar” is that the Earth is dying. Some new disease is wiping out all of our crops and humanity needs to find itself somewhere else to go. A few years back, NASA sent manned probes through a mysterious wormhole to see what they could see in the way of habitable planets in far off galaxies. Now, it’s time for a new crew to go out, crunch the data from those probes and settle on a place to restart humanity.
                The new crew consists of hotshot pilot-turned farmer Matthew McConaughey, science person Anne Hathaway, the bad guy from “Ghost Rider” who is also a science person and an African American science person. Don’t think I’m being dismissive of the rest of the crew. Their back-stories and in some cases present-stories are treated as pretty inconsequential by the movie. The rest of the crew is just sorta hanging out in the neighborhood of the action.

                The movie's main story follows the crew as they inspect three planets which seem like they might make for a good place for humans to put up their feet. We also cut back to life on Earth, which isn't going great for McConaughey’s kids what with the ever-present massive dust storms kicked up by the fading planet and the lack of food and so forth. I won’t go too in depth on the kids as their situation plays out as one of the movie’s better surprises, but there’s a daughter who’s quite bright and an aspiring scientist and a boy who is also quite bright, but who’s being shoehorned into a life of farming because people need food not intellectuals.

Good & Bad: '24: Live Another Day' (6/23/14)

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24: Live Another Day Hour 9

Plot: Uuuuuggghhh.

                Perhaps more of an explanation is in order: Uuuuuuggggggggggggghhhhhhhaaaahhhh.

                So last week, President Heller stood in the center of Wembley Stadium and took a full-on Mama Stark drone-strike right to the chest, effectively sacrificing himself to save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives all across England. One old man dies, hundreds of thousands of men and women and questionings of assorted ages get to live.

                In exchange for the right to explode the President, Mama Stark promised to destroy all of the drones she’d hijacked, which she immediately began doing once Heller was confirmed to have been blowed up.

                Only … Heller didn’t exactly keep to his side of the bargain. Thanks to some video trickery by Chloe, he’s alive and well.

                Mama Stark realizes she’s been duped and manages to save one last drone, which she plans to do nasty, nasty things with.

                Since Chloe has totally hacked Stark Terrorism, Inc., she’s able to pretty easily figure out where they’re holed up. Soon Jack lands a helicopter on the roof of the building and begins his assault from up top, while Kate and her team storm the building from below.

                Jack gets there first, throws Mama Stark’s son out of the window, shoots her in the leg, stops the drone from blowing up a subway station and then throws Mama Stark out the window too, because … he felt like it?

                Meanwhile, the mystery of Johnny Depp-bearded tech’s death – he’s dead, by the way – gets unraveled and all fingers point to Benjamin Bratt.

                Bratt makes a deal with Michael Wincott, who’s apparently become a straight-up bad guy at this point: If Wincott helps him get out of London alive, he can have Mama Stark’s drone-control device. Turns out, said device is actually good for controlling all sorts of military devices, which could prove problematic for America and the world.

                The episode ends with Chloe rejoining Wincott (because she doesn’t know he’s evil), who’s on his way to meet up with Bratt and get a hold of the device while Jack is in pursuit of the whole gang.

Good & Bad: '24: Live Another Day' (5/26/14)

TheGuardian.com

Last week’s “24” ended with Jack Bauer about to be murdered by marines until CIA Agent Kate Morgan swooped in and was all “No way brah,” and made Jack her prisoner.

                This week’s episode opens with Jack still not murdered by marines, but Kate seems to have a pretty loose interpretation of what it means to make someone your prisoner. In Kate’s world, it means dramatically announce that you’re making someone your prisoner and then immediately give that person to someone you don’t know and abandon the area.

Jack survives Kate’s indifferent style of prisoner-taking, but he doesn’t do a heck of a lot else. He spends most of it off-screen, in transit from the US Embassy to where the President is hanging out. When he arrives, Jack gives President Heller the old “Bauer Way or the highway” speech about how to handle the whole killer drone situation. Jack’s way, in this instance, means letting Bauer get in touch with an arms dealer who works with Mama Stark and who probably knows where she is. Rather than put Jack back in the field, Heller chooses highway.

Jack is sent off to pretend to be cats with his former lady love Audrey and the pair rub their faces all over each other for an extended period of time.

Over in Mama Stark’s terrorist lair, she’s kinda bummed about that whole cutting off her own daughter’s finger to force her son-in-law to pilot the drones thing. Daughter Simone and son-in-law Naveed ain’t thrilled about it either. First chance he gets, Naveed scurries away to tell Simone he has set up a trap for Mama Stark: Apparently he left a video she made unencrypted so the Feds should be able to find their whereabouts pretty easy. Simone seems on board. But when the Feds, led by Kate’s ex-partner and also Benjamin Bratt, show up to raid what they think is Mama Stark’s terrorist lair, they’re drone-striked all to hell. Mama Stark totally knew about the double cross and she kills Naveed, putting an end to countless more hilariously doomed-to-fail plots. Simone has a chance to save her husband, but she doesn’t because Naveed is/was a miserable judge of character.

Mama Stark is pretty pleased though, as she has successfully managed to take control of six drones before the Feds, with help from Chloe, Michael Wincott and that flight key Jack liberated from the embassy, realize what’s up. Now she wants President Heller to turn himself in or she’ll drone-strike more stuff.

Sadly, Michael Wincott and Chloe part ways when he wants to stop helping the Feds, but Chloe is just too happy to be back into her old role as the voice in an attractive blonde person’s ear, only this time it’s Kate’s not Jack’s.

In one hour, President Heller loses control of six untraceable and heavily armed military drones to terrorists, has to admit this to the British Prime Minister, learns that his Chief of Staff has been keeping the downside of drone warfare (dead babies) from him, then has to watch on TV with said Prime Minister when one of those drones blows up the team Heller sent to reclaim them.

Review: 'Godzilla' is back on the case and that is awesome

Releasing a movie about giant monsters stomping their way through the world’s major cities on the weekend of my birthday? Well gosh, that’s just about the best present a guy could ask for.

                I’m happy to report I won’t be needing a gift receipt as this latest incarnation of “Godzilla,” which was directed by Gareth Edwards off of a script from Max Borenstein, is a quite enjoyable entry into the 60 year-old (!) franchise.

                At the center of the chaos is Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a guy with a tough name and a tougher job: He disposes of bombs for the US Navy. When he was but a small boy with a tough name, his mother (Juliette Binoche) was killed in an meltdown at the Japanese nuclear power plant where both she and Ford’s father, Joe, (Bryan Cranston) worked.

                 Joe becomes obsessed with the idea that it was no accident that killed his wife and that the company that owned the plant is covering something up.

                Eventually, Joe gets busted trying to sneak into the still-quarantined area around the plant to search for clues. This forces now-adult Ford to leave his own wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their little boy behind and go get his father out of jail.

                Of course, Joe immediately goes right back into the quarantine zone – which is mysteriously not very radioactive – dragging Ford along for the ride and this time they both get caught.

                They’re taken to the old plant where they meet a scientist who’s been studying strange phenomena taking place at the plant and beyond for years, Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe). While there, Joe’s fears are confirmed: The company has been covering something up and whatever that something is, it’s about to wake up.

                From that point we do the usual monster movie stuff. Cities are destroyed, Ford struggles to get home to his wife and kid, the military hopes to nuke their problems away while Dr. Serizawa, who carries around a watch his father gave him which stopped during the Hiroshima blast, pleads for alternatives.

                I’m hesitant to get into much more detail than that because, at least to me, “Godzilla” has a few surprises up its gigantic sleeves and that’s a rare thing to pull off in today’s spoiler-loving world.

                So moving away from the story, the obvious question going in to “Godzilla” was, will it be better than last year’s “Pacific Rim” – a movie that so lovingly paid tribute to Godzilla and his giant beastly friends from yesteryear?

                Well, as good as this take on “Godzilla” is, it doesn’t quite manage to surpass “Pacific Rim.”

                Part of the reason, and part of the problem with “Godzilla,” is there’s just the teeniest, tiniest bit of giant monster fatigue coming so soon the heels of “Pacific Rim.” There’s a decent amount of crossover between the two movies in theme, look and action and so something that may have been a ten last year, maybe it’s down to an eight or nine this time around.

                There’s one scene in particular in “Godzilla” where something, not saying what, takes flight. It’s still awesome, but the exact same thing happened last year in “Pacific Rim” and when I saw it then, I was downright giddy.

Review: 'RoboCop' remake really, really ... meh

My expectations going in to the new “RoboCop” movie were pretty low to begin with as I walked into a matinee show yesterday.

                I didn’t read any reviews or anything like that, but some of the recent TV spots and the PG-13 rating didn’t do much to get my hopes up.  

                So it’s not exactly accurate to say I was disappointed by what unfolded. In a lot of ways, I got pretty much what I expected, which adds up to my “meh” feelings about this one.

                It’s 2028 and OmniCorp is a giant, Halliburton-y corporation specializing in robotics, more specifically in drones built for warfare. The drones have mostly worked in the Middle East, so it wants to bring the technology home to America.

But the American people don’t like the idea of putting life or death decisions in the metal hands of machines, at least not American lives anyway because duh, so Omni’s CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) decides to meet everyone halfway, by sticking a man – or parts of one – in a robotic suit.

                Just so happens that right around that time, Officer Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is critically injured by a car bomb in the line of duty. In an effort to give him a second chance, his wife (Abbie Cornish) signs Murphy’s body over to Omni, thus giving us RoboCop.

                The biggest problem I had with this remake is one that was nagging me after watching a few of the movie’s trailers. Even the good ones didn’t seem to have a big bad, supervillain-type. If you knew the old movies, they you could guess that Omni would fill that role in some way, but the trailers weren’t pushing anything.