Jurassic World

For F*** Magazine

JURASSIC WORLD

Director : Colin Trevorrow

Cast : Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Omar Sy, B.D. Wong, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson

Genre : Adventure/Thriller

Run Time : 125 mins

Opens : 11 June 2015

Rating : PG13 (Some Violence)

“The park is open.” With those four little words, the 14-year-long wait for a new Jurassic Park film has finally come to an end. 22 years after the events of the first film, Isla Nublar is now home to a fully functioning dinosaur theme park called “Jurassic World”, welcoming thousands of visitors each day. Billionaire Simon Masrani (Khan) has been entrusted with overseeing the park after the passing of founder John Hammond. As visitors hunger for more excitement, the park’s geneticists, led by Dr. Henry Wu (Wong), have spliced together a new hybrid dinosaur, the vicious Indominus rex. In the meantime, the park’s overworked Operations Manager Claire Dearing (Howard) is expecting her nephews Zach (Robinson) and Gray (Simpkins) who are spending the weekend at the Jurassic World resort. When the I. rex escapes and threatens the safety of the visitors, it is up to Velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Pratt) and the Jurassic World security team to contain the savage behemoth.

            A fourth Jurassic Park film spent over a decade clawing its way out of development hell following 2001’s Jurassic Park 3. Director Colin Trevorrow, known for the indie comedy-drama Safety Not Guaranteed, was given the responsibility of breathing new life into the franchise, not unlike how InGen’s scientists bring dinosaurs back from extinction. The expectations were massive and Trevorrow’s lack of experience with big blockbusters seemed to be against him, but he has come through, not unlike the Russo brothers with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The screenplay by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly and Trevorrow, contains a healthy amount of self-awareness. There are jibes at corporate sponsorship and an explanation as to the focus group origins of the name of the Indominus rex. Visitors to Jurassic World have grown difficult to impress, demanding bigger, more exciting genetically-engineered attractions, not unlike moviegoers and their ever-increasing appetite for effects-laden tentpole extravaganzas. The main difference is it’s unlikely for Avengers 8 to break out of the screen and eat the audience alive.

            A fully-functioning dinosaur theme park seems like the natural place for a new story to unfold and, for a series ostensibly about a theme park, is long overdue. A tourist attraction at full capacity means more potential for things to go horribly, entertainingly awry. There is a lot of effort put into designing the park and the filmmakers have achieved a sense of verisimilitude with the chain restaurants, open-air arenas, monorail systems and bored employees seen in real-life theme parks. While pushing the franchise forward, there is no shortage of very respectful nods to the past and aficionados of the first Jurassic Park movie will find many rewarding Easter Eggs. A sequence set in the derelict visitor’s centre from the first film borders on the indulgent but this reviewer was too busy squealing with fan glee to really be bothered.

            A crucial element of what made the first film so enjoyable was the suspense. The classic T. rex paddock escape and the “Raptors in the kitchen” scene were masterfully staged and dripping with tension. There are several great scenes in this movie that go for the scares and that do have that adrenaline-pumping thrill ride quality to them. One does get a kick out of seeing the Indominus rex make quick work of heavily-armed, highly trained security contractors and a scene in which a swarm of Pterosaurs escapes their aviary to pluck hapless visitors from the park’s grounds is a wonderful “all hell breaks loose” scene of full-on panic.

The Indominus rex is an appropriately formidable creature, but sometimes lacks the tactility of the T. rex in the original. There’s also that classic movie monster pitfall, where the big bad beast is so impervious to anything that it can get a little tedious trying to defeat it. Many were worried that the element of trained Velociraptors would detract from the ferocity of these iconic dinosaurs, but rest assured that they’re still unpredictable and still scary. After all, people train Rottweilers, lions and bears, with sometimes-deadly consequences. The film does slightly disappoint with some of the visual effects work – for the most part, the dinosaurs are adequately convincing, but the scene in which a sight-seeing “gyrosphere” travels amongst herds of herbivorous dinosaurs feels particularly artificial. Animatronic effects are still employed, but this one does lean far heavier on CGI than the earlier movies.

    

        The characters in this film are archetypes and are all relatively simple, but then again, so were the characters in the first movie and in this case, it’s done pretty well. Chris Pratt further cements his A-list action star status as the rugged ex-Navy man Owen Grady, ably carrying the film as a traditional hero. In the scenes in which Owen is interacting with the four Velociraptors under his charge, Pratt displays a knack for acting against nothing, perhaps a skill he honed working with Rocket and Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. Bryce Dallas Howard plays more of a caricature, the tightly wound career woman just seconds from snapping under pressure, but it’s great that there’s a woman in charge of running things at the park this time around and we are profoundly impressed by how well she can run in heels.

            Vincent D’onofrio’s hard-nosed Vic Hoskins, the head of security operations for InGen, is also one-dimensional, dead set on using Velociraptors in military applications. This may be an in-joke referring to an early draft of the film, which had gun-toting human-dinosaur hybrid mercenaries. Yes, we’re glad that didn’t happen too. Irrfan Khan chews some of the lush jungle scenery as eccentric Richard Branson-wannabe Simon Masrani. Ty Simpkins is the stock “kid in peril” and Nick Robinson is his aloof older brother – a film with as high an “embracing one’s inner child” quotient as this one has got to have kid characters in it, and they do far less shrieking than Lex and Tim did in the original. Jake Johnson’s comic relief techie Lowery gets some excellent lines and is, thankfully, not annoying. It’s also really nice to see B.D. Wong again – his Dr. Henry Wu is the only returning character from the first film.

            Jurassic World hits all the notes expected of a Jurassic Park film without merely feeling like it’s going through the motions. It’s clear that there’s earnestness and passion behind this and that Trevorrow is a fan who wants to do right by other fans. There’s definitely a tip of the hat to Steven Spielberg and the contemporary sci-fi masterpiece that was 1993’s Jurassic Park - at the same time, there isn’t a slavishness to what has come before. If there’s anything today that could come close to inspiring the wonderment and terror that Jurassic Park did in the kids who first watched it in 1993, Jurassic World would be it.

Summary: Well worth the 14 year wait. A new world beckons; come on in!

RATING: 4 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

The Judge

For F*** Magazine

THE JUDGE

Director : David Dobkin

Cast : Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Billy Bob Thornton, Dax Shepard, Sarah Lancaster, Leighton Meester

Genre : Crime/Drama

Opens : 16 October 2014

Rating : NC-16 (Coarse Language)

Run time: 141 mins

Remember when after the worst of his personal troubles and before his comeback as a marquee name, Robert Downey Jr. would star in dramas like The Singing Detective, A Guide to Recognising Your Saints and Charlie Bartlett (with the occasional The Shaggy Dog because he had to pay the bills)? The Judge, Downey Jr.’s first full-on drama in a while, harks back to those days. He plays Hank Palmer, a hotshot lawyer who reluctantly returns to his hometown of Carlinville, Indiana when his mother dies. He sees his brothers Glen (D’onofrio) and Dale (Strong) again but there’s one reunion he’s truly dreading: that with his estranged father, the titular Judge, Joseph Palmer (Duvall). Hank can’t wait to escape back to Chicago when he learns his father is accused of murder. Hank has to defend his father against prosecutor Dwight Dickham (Thornton) while father and son are at each other’s throats. Hank also takes the opportunity to mend other bridges and rekindle a romance with his high school sweetheart Samantha (Farmiga).

            If you’ve seen the trailers for the film, you might find it tonally hard to place. Indeed, this is a movie that has plenty of heavy family drama but begins with a moment of slapstick toilet humour. A character also experiences acute bowel function failure and it’s supposed to be a sad moment but it might be seen as unintentionally funny. It seems director David Dobkin was aiming for “bittersweet”, but misjudges this on several occasions. The screenplay by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque piles on the clichés: tempestuous father-son relationship, the prodigal son returning against his will, the adorable little daughter whom our main character hasn’t been the best dad to, a mentally handicapped younger brother and a teen romance from which both parties have never really moved on, all set in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. It sometimes appears that the writers are aware of the overly-familiar, often sentimental nature of the script, attempting to temper this with wiseacre cynicism. This results in an uneven film that almost lurches from shouting match conflicts to a sappy home video montage set to Bon Iver’s “Holocene”.

There’s one cliché we left out in the above paragraph: that of the protagonist being a glib, sharp-tongued “man of Teflon” lawyer. Robert Downey Jr. attacks the role in his typical charismatic, entertaining fashion. He once described his take on Tony Stark as “a likeable asshole” and that’s a character type he excels at playing. Schenk and Dubuque have written lots of snarky, snappy dialogue for the Hank Palmer character, and lines like “I’ll extract the truth from your ass like tree sap” just sound great when they fly off Downey Jr.’s tongue. It’s nothing particularly risky for him but he’s far from sleepwalking through this one either. The big draw is seeing the two Roberts play against each other and Duvall once again proves why he’s considered a living legend. Judge Joseph Palmer is a proud, stern man who has suffered a personal loss and conceals his vulnerabilities, someone who has spent years in the courtroom but suddenly finds himself on the other side, standing trial. Duvall is able to cut through the overly-calculated moments of tenderness to deliver an affecting, thoughtful performance.

            While the film is squarely Downey Jr.’s and Duvall’s to carry, the supporting cast is generally decent too and Vincent D’onofrio’s role in this movie means that Iron Man and the soon-to-be-Kingpin are brothers. Farmiga, blonde, sporting a tattoo and pretty much unrecognisable, is convincing as the diner proprietor who finds herself falling for her high school sweetheart while still being very much wise to his ways. Dax Shepard plays the fumbling, earnest small-town lawyer/antique shop owner a little too broad and Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of the mentally-challenged Dale is cringe-inducing, though this is like due more to the way the character is written as the awkward comic relief than his actual performance.

            In addition to the performances, the cinematography by Janusz Kamiński, Steven Spielberg’s regular Director of Photography, is praiseworthy. With the way the film is lit and shot, Kamiński conveys the combination of small-town home and hearth with the feeling of feeling trapped in a place with too many bad memories associated with it. When the film and its cast was announced, there were murmurs of its awards potential, but this one is very unlikely to stand against the other films of the upcoming awards season. Director Dobkin, known for comedies like Wedding Crashers and Shanghai Knights, is at least a little out of his depth dealing with the family dysfunction and the courtroom drama in The Judge. However, thanks to the strong lead turns from Downey Jr. and Duvall, this is worth a look.

Summary: It’s unsubtle, cliché-ridden and slightly too long, but The Judge boasts the memorable onscreen father-son pairing of Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall.

RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

Charlie Countryman

For F** Magazine

CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN

Director: Fredrik Bond
Cast:  Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood, Mads Mikkelsen, Rupert Grint, James Buckley, Ion Caramitu, Til Schweiger, Vincent D’Onofrio, Melissa Leo
Genre: Action, Thriller
Run Time: 108 mins
Opens: 6 March 2014
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scenes)

Ah, Shia “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” LaBeouf. The former Even Stevens star is best known to most movie-goers as the insufferable protagonist of Michael Bay’s Transformers trilogy and has made a name for himself as the embodiment of pretentious Hollywood unlikeability. Between the plagiarism of cartoonist Daniel Clowes (plus the apology via skywriting), lashing out at Jim Carrey for taking a playful jab at him at the Golden Globes and the too-enthusiastic manner in which he discusses going full-frontal, he’s not exactly “the nicest guy in Hollywood”. The arthouse-tinged romantic action comedy-drama Charlie Countryman appears to be part of his endeavour to carve out a career as a “serious actor”.



Chicagoan Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) is in the midst of a quarter-life crisis and takes the advice of his dying mother Kate (Leo) to travel to Bucharest to get away from it all. On the flight there, he chats with the guy in the seat next to him, Romanian Victor Ibanescu (Caramitu) and upon arriving at the airport, meets Victor’s daughter Gabi (Wood). He is immediately taken with the mesmerizing cellist and sets about romancing her, only to discover Gabi’s dangerous ex Nigel (Mikkelsen) standing in the way. Charlie befriends (and shares drugs with) his roommates at the hostel, Luc (Buckley) and Karl (Grint), who eventually get in trouble with Darko (Schweiger), a thug in cahoots with Nigel. Charlie finds himself in an exotic foreign land, out of his depth and caught between love and death.

Charlie Countryman is the feature film debut of Fredrik Bond, director of television commercials and Moby music videos (Moby provides several songs for the film’s soundtrack). The script is written by Matt Drake, who also penned the detestable Project X. It may seem like an odd comparison to draw, but it reminded this reviewer of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty – albeit a flailing, violent, drug-addled The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. Both films feature protagonists travelling to faraway lands to find themselves, embarking on the “adventure of a lifetime”, meeting colourful characters on their travels and frequently daydreaming/hallucinating. Both films, while visually captivating in their different ways, are also aimless and self-indulgent, Charlie Countryman actually coming off as the worse of the two.



Charlie Countryman is at its core a more conventional film than it fancies itself to be, attempting to put a spin on the “an everyman aboard” genre by flinging disparate ingredients into the pot. Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov gives the entire film a hazy, dreamlike feel, but the end result is inscrutable rather than seductive and fascinating. Charlie Countryman himself is also a difficult protagonist to empathise with, a bland victim of circumstance dragged through the Romanian capital by the coincidence-heavy plot. LaBeouf seems to be playing himself, but you can’t say he phoned it in seeing as LaBeouf actually took LSD to film the drug sequence, a move that’s either dedicated method acting or yet another cry for attention from an unlikeable actor. It’s also more than a little dumb considering it’s not even the right drug (the film features ecstasy).

There’s an interesting supporting cast here, with Mikkelsen getting some amusing lines as a psychotic criminal of some kind and Buckley and Grint playing the archetypical “those two guys”. Wood, affecting an iffy Romanian accent, is certainly a more interesting female lead than LaBeouf is a male lead. Til Schweiger is, just as he is in every other Hollywood film he does, “the henchman”.



If you’re not a Shia LaBeouf fan (and let’s face it, who still is?), Charlie Countryman won’t make a convert out of you. But the film should be judged separately from its lead actor’s public blunders and even then, there’s very little to recommend. Sure, it’s frequently pretty to look at and the soundtrack with contributions from the likes of Christophe Beck, DeadMono, M83 and the afore-mentioned Moby is hypnotic. But ultimately, Charlie Countryman annoys rather than entrances, its unpalatable potpourri of risky romance, buddy comedy and magical realist travelogue hard to get into.

Summary: The film’s earlier title was The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman and while it’s stylish to a degree, this is very far from necessary viewing – whether you’re a friend, a Roman or a countryman.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong