Jurassic World (2015) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / June 20, 2015

After a decade of preproduction, the fourth installment in the Jurassic Park franchise was finally released. The question on everyone’s mind was whether it would succeed in recapturing what Jurassic Park brought to the table. It's an admirable attempt, but not everything’s as it should be.

            As the title suggests, Jurassic Park has been transformed into Jurassic World, a theme park fit for everyone, by the InGen company. Think Disneyland, but with dinosaurs. You’ve got two brothers Zach and Gray who’re sent there to have fun under the supervision of their aunt Claire, the park’s manager. Right away you can tell she’s all about her job, because she’s the kind of character who looks at her watch and says “three minutes late”… Meanwhile the park’s owner, Masrani, tells Claire to bring in a specialist to inspect the enclosure for the new Indominus Rex (the ‘iRex’ if you will), the latest genetically modified dinosaur. This specialist is velociraptor trainer Owen Grady who, when he's not busy training his raptors, likes to spend his time dishing out one-liners like it's going out of style. Then you’ve also got Hoskins, InGen’s chief of security, who tries to persuade Owen to let his raptors be used for military purposes. When Owen inspects the enclosure, they find evidence the iRex probably climbed over the walls and escaped. Soon, and not altogether unexpectedly, things escalate, resulting in a film of extraordinary tension and excitement…

            …not really though. It's not, as Jeff Goldblum would say, "a big pile of shit", but to be honest, I thought things on the action side of things were a bit lackluster and not because it was badly choreographed or anything like that. Quite frankly, the insistence on CGI and 3D ruined a lot of the tension. It’s kind of like upscaling, it doesn’t increase immersion or realism, it just enhances the flaws of the image and in this case the visual effects. Watching Jurassic World, I highly doubt any animatronics were used, even though many close-ups afforded them the opportunity. Instead, you’re constantly watching these dinosaurs that look just a bit too blurry. Even the introduction of the park itself is lackluster. You’ve got the impressive aerial shots and so on, but it just doesn’t feel real.

            On the other hand, Jurassic World does fit quite well into the storyline as a whole. It does manage to capture the spirit of it somewhat. There are all kinds of references to Jurassic Park and the storyline provides its own spin on the familiar tropes, which is more than I can say for Jurassic Park III. I like the idea of the theme park, the fact that visitors have gotten bored with ‘regular’ dinosaurs (hence InGen creates the Indominus Rex to meet consumer demand), the psychological angle of having Owen be the alpha to the raptors, etc.

            There are plenty of ideas here, some better executed than others. For instance, while Owen being able to somewhat control the raptors is an interesting new idea, it also makes the raptors less threatening. Compare that to Jurassic Park where they were the most terrifying thing to occupy the screen, despite being way smaller than the T-Rex. No doubt the infamous kitchen scene wouldn’t have become such a classic, if there was a character who could get the raptors to stand down. Some of the characterization also doesn’t quite work: when you discover that Claire and Owen used to date, you just know they’ll end up together by the film’s end. Also, Hoskins is quite underwhelming as a villain. He’s so obsessed with using raptors for military purposed, I’m just waiting for him to say, “Think of the military applications!”

            All this complaining aside, there’ve been way worse sequels than Jurassic World, especially when you consider this is the fourth entry. It’s generally fun to watch and builds on the ideas of the original in its own way. No doubt, more sequels are inbound. Meanwhile, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope we’ll see more animatronics in the future and that the action will feel more grounded.

Taxi Teheran (2015) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / June 20, 2015

One thing’s for certain: no one’s out there just watching Taxi Teheran. Anyone who’s watched it, or is planning to see it, will do so because of director Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced in 2010 to a six-year jail sentence by the Iranian government and was not allowed to make any more films. Since then, he’s continued making films (one of which was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake!), including Taxi Teheran, his latest.

Director/actor Panahi drives a cab and picks up a woman and a man who soon start arguing the merits of capital punishment. They soon leave and one man, an illegal dvd seller, remains who recognizes Panahi and mocks him for trying to make him believe those two weren’t actors. At this point, with Panahi basically mocking his own film, it’s obvious the film’s not the documentary I was expecting, but that doesn’t stop the film from being riveting from beginning to end. The first few passengers are random people, but soon Panahi’s trips become more personal; he picks up his niece and visits a friend he hasn’t seen in years.

Going into Taxi Teheran, I’d heard it was a documentary where Panahi disguises himself as a taxi driver, comes into contact with everyday folks and basically shows daily life in Teheran. Turns out that’s about half of what I got. The end result is more of a blend between documentary and fiction. Pretty much everything’s scripted. From what I can gather, Panahi attempted to film people in his cab, but they kept telling him to stop filming (naturally). So, in the end, Panahi was forced to add some fictional elements. Nevertheless, the real-life situation of the director and the topics discussed by the passengers lend it that decidedly documentary ‘feel’. Panahi doesn’t say much, but we can feel the frustrations that must be boiling underneath the surface, particularly when his niece discusses how to make a film in Iran without risking jail time. She and her classmates have been assigned a task, you see: to make a film, but they have to follow specific steps that render the film ‘watchable.’ The whole story is obviously Panahi mocking the limitations forced on Iranian filmmakers.

I doubt whether Taxi Teheran, as it has turned out, was the film Panahi wanted to make from the start, but the end result is still captivating. Let’s hope Panahi’s next project won’t have to be smuggled out of Iran in a cake…

Stray observation:

(Spoilers) I quite liked how the ending referenced the beginning. In the opening discussion on criminal behavior and capital punishment, we’re told that the crime committed was an act of theft, (I think) a car was stolen. The woman argues we must examine the context. Simply dishing out punishment and hoping the problem goes away means we’ll never arrive at the root of the problem. She tries to look at the situation from the criminal’s point of view: what if he desperately needed the money to provide for his family?

Again, at the halfway point, Panahi meets his friend who was also recently robbed, only this time he thinks he knows who did it. He says he’s capable of thinking rationally about the matter—that he knows the man is now better off financially—but that doesn’t stop the anger inside him from surging every time he sees him.

Fast forward to the end. Panahi’s niece discovers a wallet in the backseat and Panahi thinks he knows to which one of his clients it belongs to. They travel all the way to their destination, get out of the car to return the purse. They disappear off-screen and after a lot of nothing, Panahi’s cab is broken into, his camera stolen; the film ends. It’s a shocking moment, one that of course angers us, but—like the woman in the beginning and Panahi’s friend—we have to consider the context.

Spy (2015) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / June 15, 2015

Anyone familiar with Melissa McCarthy will by default be familiar with Bridesmaids, the film that made her famous. For good reason too, she’s easily the best part of that movie. So, now that she’s the new comedienne of today, it was only a matter of time before she would capitalize on that success. Enter Spy, a film that’s the next in a very long line of spy movie parodies, that’s occasionally funny but marred by its plot.

McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, 007’s assistant so to speak. In CIA headquarters, she sits at her desk, utilizing her intel to advise the agents out in the field. Needless to say, she’s terrific at her job of advising Jude Law—eh, agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), but she feels her life lacks excitement. Conveniently, director/writer Paul Feig has just the thing in mind: when an agent’s killed in the field, she takes the job of getting close to the target and gathering information. Though she has zero experience, her, shall we say, ‘unnoticeable’ appearance makes her perfect to effortlessly into her surroundings. Agent Rick Ford (Jason Statham) finds the idea completely ridiculous (because it is) and resigns, but has no intention of letting Susan screw up the assignment and goes undercover to help out, though, as it turns out, he is the one who could actually use help.

You’ll notice I said little to nothing about the baddies, because that would require me to get into specifics regarding the plot. It’s not that I care about spoilers, it’s just that, well, who cares about plot in a spy movie parody? There’s bad guys, conspiracies, backstabbing, money laundering, you get the picture. No one’s seeing Spy for its complex plot, but for the jokes and the parodies. Director/writer Feig, unfortunately, spends an awful lot of time on said plot and all its intricacies. Entire scenes are spent explaining how all the baddies tie together, the scheming, etc., hence the two hour runtime. It breaks the momentum and the whole thing grinds to a halt. What’s worse is that, in the end, all this explaining doesn’t build up to anything funny, so you’re left with that awkward feeling the film’s trying too hard to take itself seriously, to render its central story plausible, while it should be precisely the opposite: a comedy, especially a parody, should always be in on the joke.

Fortunately, the comedy is pretty good, if a bit PG-13-ish. Some of the jokes fall flat, while others, usually those involving McCarthy and Statham are pretty funny. Speaking of Statham, I don’t know if it’s a good career move to already be parodying himself as an action star, but he does a splendid job. His character’s convinced of his skillfulness, yet spends the entire film needing rescue. He’s always boasting about all the insane stunts he’s pulled and terrible things he’s experienced (apparently, his lover was tossed out of a plane and was then hit by another plane), and at the end of the day, he’s still convinced he solved the case pretty much singlehandedly. Good stuff.

In the end, Spy is pretty standard comedy fair. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel nor are its parodies of the spy genre really original, but it does enough things right to warrant a recommendation. As modern comedies go, there’s way worse things to watch than McCarthy and Statham arguing.