Film: Jurassic World Trailer

Finals are here, so there's not been much for me to do these last couple of days. I've managed to avoid spontaneous combustion by maintaining a few scraps of busywork here and there but it's mostly negligible things.

Having said that, I figure this would be an appropriate time for me to discuss something that hopefully many of us are looking forward to: the return of two classic franchises in both Jurassic World and Star Wars Episode VII.

Let's start with Jurassic World. In the unlikely event that you haven't seen the trailer, please take a minute to do so now. Short as it is, I think there's quite a bit to digest.



One of the first things I'm terribly pleased about is, first-timers to the franchise, director/co-writer Collin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly. Their previous film Safety Not Guaranteed which Connolly wrote, and Trevorrow directed and produced, was a tremendous film that I think speaks to why they would be suited to take over this franchise. Without spoiling much, the concept of Safety Not Guaranteed stems from a joke ad that achieved internet fame in the late 90s.* Here's the ad in case you've forgotten it:

It spawned a wide range of memes often pairing the ad with a humorous and unflattering shot of an unidentified individual. In Safety it plays central to the plot, which takes place in a universe where the ad is not a joke but has been placed by a man who believes himself to be capable of time travel. So how does this relate to Jurassic World? Quite a bit in fact.

Let's think about the original Jurassic Park for a minute to to answer this. The leap is that man was able to recreate dinosaur through genetic chicanery. That's a big leap too. Science has long since dismissed the foundation of the novel and film as being impossible by virtue of the fact that DNA simply doesn't survive that long.** It turns out this really didn't matter though. People voraciously read through the books - as did I at the tender dinosaur loving age of 10. The movie took people by storm, and with but a quick scan of lists is often considered one of the greatest films of all time, certainly one of the more notable ones. It didn't matter that it couldn't happen. What mattered is that the story was interesting, had a great cast, and was of course visually dynamic. The CG definitely helped, but once you take note of the fact that out of 127 minutes, 6 have dino-CG and 14 total feature dinosaurs at all, it becomes a different story.

Safety Not Guaranteed takes a huge leap as well, but I contend that much like Jurassic Park, it's not the point, nor really is it the gamble. The gamble is trusting the story and characters to make the leap as seamlessly as possible. The dialogue was fantastic in Safety Not Guaranteed, the characters felt like more than cardboard cutouts, each of whom dealt with their own personal conflicts over the course of the runtime. That it dealt it with a man proposing time travel played second fiddle to the real point of the film.

This of course brings me back to Jurassic World. I can place trust in Trevorrow/Connolly to create a sense of purpose for these characters beneath the veneer of a shiny new dinosaur inhabited park. Much like the first (and best so far) entry in the series, it will rely on more than a gimmick to make it memorable. This is course is evidenced by the supreme lack of plot and nearly pointless characters introduced in the forgettable Jurassic Park III.

So what else makes me excited about this movie? I think the plot so far as we know is more clever than people are giving it credit for. From what has been revealed the movie involves a working theme park set twenty two years after the events of the first film. From what the director has stated the park is fully operational yet interest has slowly declined in recent years. This results in the geneticists being tasked with creating a brand new hybrid dinosaur. By the way, that's the new leap.

It's humorous to me that people would be upset about this at all. I'm reminded of a Kumail Nanjiani joke wherein he rhapsodizes about a stray cat that tries repeatedly to enter his house. At one point the cat comes dressed in a pizza delivery outfit and proclaims it's from "Meowminoes," to which Kumail says, "...So we had it put down." The audience groans but he soaks up their reaction following with, "Really? At what point did you believe that story tale? Meowminoes made sense to you?" That's how I feel about people reacting negatively to the news about a hybrid dinosaur. A fully operational dinosaur park visited by tens of thousands daily, and you groan about a hybrid dinosaur? I propose that the hybrid dinosaur is precisely why this plot is clever.

Again we need the first movie real quick to help with my point. I believe it was as much a commentary on the state of computer generated graphics as it was an adventurous good time. Such a thing hadn't existed before Jurassic Park and as a result of its triumph CG dominated movies have become increasingly common. That's where Jurassic World has had trouble. It had been in development for many years, and some versions of the script that leaked along the way included mechanized dino-soldier hybrids.*** So what could World do when Park had already been there - quite successfully as well? You change the commentary to adapt the attitude. When people were blown away by the CG dinosaurs, it would be equally as accurate to say that people were blown by the CG. In Jurassic World the attractions are commonplace and people are accustomed to it much in the way that modern audiences live in a world where CG is commonplace and the fantastic no longer exists solely in dreams. I feel this is the purpose that the hybrid, allegedly D-Rex, serves.

Audiences are bored so we've got to shake things up by making a brand new dinosaur. 

That's really clever because as a statement it exists both within and without the universe of the movie.

That having been said, how cool was that trailer!?

-J


* For more on that check out the Know Your Meme article, which is actually quite detailed.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/safety-not-guaranteed

** Darn science. It seems it's only about 521 years for DNA to hit its half-life

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/jurassic-park-dna-half-life/

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/10/1754212/half-life-of-dna-is-521-years-jurassic-park-impossible-after-all
*** ILM has since denied that these were 'official' part of JP4's (as it was called then) production. But given that hybridization is a part of this plot, I'd be willing to be it wasn't far off. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/10/jurassic-4-mutated-dinosaur-art

Viewfinder: Moonrise Kingdom

For this post I thought I would try something a bit different.

Viewfinder is a new segment I'm starting on my blog wherein I take a scene from a movie that I particularly enjoy and break it down into the interstitial pieces to try and answer why I like it so much.

The attention to detail is through the roof in this film

On the menu today is Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom". The sequence in question can be found here.

Moonrise Kingdom is the kind of movie that is improved by knowing the director's prior catalog. It's already a pretty solid film but in this case, Wes Anderson seems to have culminated the combined efforts, stylings, and experimentations with his previous films to create a pastiche of his own devices. Heightened though his worlds already may be, even the stop motion film, "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" provides a few influences on how he handled Moonrise Kingdom. One such demonstration of this can be observed in the first seconds of the clip I've provided.

Cutaways to set pieces are a classic staple of Anderson's work; for this film, maps are animated with colored beads and strings along with the appropriate foley of either sonar or morse code transmissions. This provides a rather pleasing visual effect for travel/communication which is perfectly in keeping with the storybook aesthetic that the film thrives in.

Next we are greeted by a low light shot illuminating our narrator Bob Balaban with the subtle glow of dusk as he releases a weather balloon into the sky above. He approaches the camera, flicking a light on in the process, then proceeds to expound on the weather conditions that we as an audience already know will develop into a storm (in three days time as a matter of fact). Immediately this calls back to Alec Baldwin's turn as a narrator in "The Royal Tenenbaums". The key difference here though is how much bolder Wes Anderson seems to have become with his use of this device. In "The Royal Tenenbaums" the narrator is neither a character that we meet or know much about, other than that he seems to have a thorough knowledge of the family. Bob Balaban however, lives simultaneously outside and within the film. We even learn that he was one of Sam's teachers at a certain point. As he explains the circumstances of his location and weather conditions the camera subtly swings with him as he changes position on the rocks. It is a rather commanding gesture that seems to metaphorically illustrate that he is unquestionably in command of the movie, as could be argued by how he turns the lights on and off for this particular scene. The lighting also seems to be a reference to stage performances, wherein a character, during an expository scene, will be spotlighted only to fade out, or even back into the scene from whence they came, as needed.

And indeed, our narrator does just that. As he finishes up his forecast, he returns to the light, clicks it off and silently walks off screen. The switching of the light tells us that we have now been returned to the story, the exposition is over, and just beyond our view, the canoes of the young Khaki Scouts making their way to Fort Lebanon row ashore.

It is a masterful scene within a masterful movie. 

-J

Film: Upstream Color

A small spoiler free "poster" I created to go along with the writeup, featuring the movie's key characters

I think I'll open up this post by providing a link where you can purchase this film, and merchandise related to it:

http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor

Please do by the way. At the very least I will buy the Blu Ray DVD to support Shane Carruth's brilliant film-making endeavors, but I could definitely go for that all inclusive package that comes with the soundtrack (also excellent) on vinyl, some posters, and a copy of the classic work "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau. Naturally that last one will make the most sense after you've seen the film.

Well, where do I start? A couple of years ago I watched "Primer," which would be Shane Carruth's first film. Its thoughtfulness was only outdone by its mind-bending plot device - seriously go watch that movie too - and perhaps its biggest downfall was that it had too technical of a story for most people to enjoy, possibly causing more confusion than entertainment. The plot can be worked out and has been done by various places on the web. It was overall a piece that I enjoyed, but mostly it paved an interest in Carruth's future work. Just a few days ago I saw "Upstream Color" and I can say without a doubt that this film has jumped into position as one of my all time favorites, and has led me to believe that Shane will be carving a new path for film-makers yet to come. Despite my desire to analyze everything the first time, I allowed myself the opportunity to simply drink in the entirety of the movie, letting the puzzle reveal itself, and only on the second and subsequent viewings would I begin to pick away at its mysteries, of which there are many. To be completely honest though, the film didn't give me much of a chance to analyze everything the first go around.

"Upstream Color" is exactly the kind of movie where the less one says, the better the reward is in the end. All of this makes it particularly difficult to write an opinion piece, but I think too highly of it to not make some small waves right here on this blog. To that end, I suppose what makes this movie so intrinsically valuable to me is how much it takes advantage of its advantages. I'm no doubt positive every single person reading this right now has heard someone say some permutation of this: The book was way better than the movie! Well that's fine, but not altogether fair. You see, books are an entirely different medium, and I'd be willing to bet that more often than not, a film-maker does not change the book because he/she has a secret sneaky agenda to make you upset whilst making him/herself boatloads of money in bags with "$" printed on it, like a 19th century bandit. Different mediums have different strengths and different ways of telling stories. I love movies and more specifically I love how movies can tell a story. Imagine a twisting narrative that jumps back and forth in time, let's say between 3 different time periods: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. It sounds easy enough to write about in a book, just write it. But imagine how that plays out in a film. We could cut between scenes without delay, flashing images that provide key details and quickly return from whence we came. If you wrote three sentences in a book that took place at three different times, it'd be entirely plausible, but would probably become a tiresome read extremely quickly due to the confusion factor. This is likely why you'll find that books are divided respectively into: sections, chapters and parts. It's much easier to switch a point of view after having completely given a different one, and conversely, much as it would be befuddling to change tense mid sentence, so to would it be to switch focus or POV within one as well.

This all comes up because "Upstream Color" is precisely that kind of film. The one in which the viewer is rewarded for viewing. It takes advantage of what makes films an enjoyable medium, and it supports that charge with a gripping plot, terrific direction, and a finely crafted soundtrack all of which only make you want to hit to play once more as soon as the credits roll. I know I don't have to say it with all the pimping I've already done for it, but I absolutely love this film. For what it's worth, I highly recommend it.

-J