Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

From the frying pan into the proverbial fire.

(2018) Adventure (Universal) Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, James Cromwell, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon, Robert Emms, Peter Jason, John Schwab, Sam Redford, Charlie Rawes, Patrick Crowley, Alex Dower, Honey Holmes, Neil Bishop, Philippa Thomas. Directed by J.A. Bayona

 

In the fifth movie of the franchise overall and the second in the Jurassic World trilogy, I think it’s safe to say that most film audiences have gotten over the wonder and awe of seeing realistic-looking dinosaurs in the movies. It is therefore incumbent upon the filmmakers a good story to surround the cinematic lizards with.

Isla Nublar, where the doomed theme park once stood, is in danger but not from dinos; no, it’s the impending volcanic apocalypse that is putting every dinosaur on the island at risk. Congress is debating whether or not to save the resurrected critters; Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) in the worst utilization of Jeff Goldblum in a film ever, argues against it. He wins.

Former publicist and current activist Claire Dearing (Howard) wants to save the dinosaurs she once sold as entertainment and also ran in terror from. She is approached by Benjamin Lockwood (Cromwell), the former partner of the late John Hammond, to rescue the creatures on the down/low. To do it, she’ll need the services of ex-boyfriend Owen Grady (Pratt), the velociraptor whisperer who is busy building himself a shack on the beach. And of course, despite his reluctance, he agrees to go. But that’s only the beginning. There’s a conspiracy of Lockwood’s assistant (Spall) to auction off the creatures to billionaire industrialists which might just be the worst idea ever, as later events will confirm.

This feels less like a movie and more of a pastiche of bits and pieces from previous films in the franchise. There are some political barbs (one of the baddies calls one of the heroes “A nasty woman”) and some food for thought – do we have the right to destroy a species, even one we created? Do we have the right to exploit animals? Does our treatment of the natural world determine our fitness to survive? All very important questions and really worth tackling in a much less lighthearted manner.

This might be the most disappointing entry in the Jurassic franchise, even exceeding the two sequels of Jurassic Park. Sure, the visuals are as you’d expect top of the line, and there are some thrilling sequences but nearly half of the movie takes place inside a house which really take the bigger dinosaurs literally out of the picture and the big reveal near the end of the movie shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. Hopefully the next installment of the franchise will wrap up this trilogy with a bang instead of a whimper.

REASONS TO SEE: The tone is a little darker than previous JP/JW films.
REASONS TO AVOID: Too many clichés sink this ship.
FAMILY VALUES: There is plenty of action and violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The T-Rex in both of the Jurassic World movies is the same one that appeared in the Jurassic Park films, according to screenwriter Colin Trevorrow.
BEYOND THE THEATER: Amazon, Fandango Now, Fios, Frontier, Google Play, iTunes, Microsoft, Movies Anywhere, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 7/28/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 48% positive reviews: Metacritic: 51/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Godzilla
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Method of Murder

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Diamantino

Attack of the fluffy puppies.

(2018) Comedy Fantasy (Kino Lorber) Carloto Cotta, Cleo Tavares, Anabela Moreira, Magrida Moreira, Carla Maciel, Chico Chapas, Hugo Santos Silva, Joana Barrios, Felipe Vargas, Maria Leite, Manuela Moura Guedes, Djucu Dabo, Leandro Vieira, Vitor Alves daSilva, Abilio Bejinha, Vitor de Almeida, Elisabete Pendeira. Directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt

 

Most movies are fairly straightforward. Some, however, are a little bit on the weird side. Still others are just so out in left field that the best thing to do instead of thinking about it too much is to just go with it. Diamantino is one such film. How to describe it? IndieWire critic David Ehrlich described it as a “technicolor glitter bomb of a movie” and that’s as close to a perfect description as we mortals are likely to get.

Diamantino (Cotta) is the world’s best soccer player, leading his Portuguese team into the 2018 World Cup finals. He is a good-hearted, terminally naive but dumb as a rock man. His career is guided by his loving father (Chapas) but also in the picture are his amazingly venal twin sisters (A. Moreira and M. Moreira) who see their lunk of a brother as a never-ending meal ticket and from whom they embezzle cash at a terrifying rate. It has gotten to the point where the Portuguese authorities in the persons of Lucia (Leite) and Aisha (Tavares), a pair of federal agents who also happen to be lesbian lovers.

Diamantino owes his success to being able to eliminate distractions of the crowd and even the other players on the pitch by visualizing the stadium as a field of cotton candy in which giant Pekingese puppies the size of trucks cavort.  When he is fouled in the final seconds of the game and has a chance to tie it up after being awarded a penalty kick, the Portuguese announcers assume that they have the tie in the bag. Inexplicably, the visualization fails and Diamantino misses the kick by a country mile, going from national hero to international disgrace in the blink of an eye. The situation is so unthinkable that his dad has a fatal heart attack.

Stunned by the double blows, Diamantino decides to do something inspiring and adopt a refugee child. The agents recognize the opportunity and insert Aisha as “Rahim,” a young boy from Madagascar. Nobody in the household seems to notice that Rahim is an adult female. The sisters, now freed from the constraints of their father, decide to further exploit their brother by delivering him to Portuguese nationalists who want Portugal out of the EU and use Diamantino as the poster boy for that movement. In addition, a mad scientist (Maciel) working for the Portuguese government is allowed to conduct experiments in an attempt to clone Diamantino and extract the source of his genius which has something to do with combining clownfish DNA with his, consequently causing female breasts to grow above his magnificent pectorals – and it gets weird from there.

Fans of French absurdist Michel Gondry will likely be doing cartwheels in the theater at the sight of this feature for first-time feature directors Abrantes and Schmidt. There is a whimsical, almost fairy tale-like tone to the film that plays like one of those dreams that make no sense at all but make perfect sense while you’re asleep. I couldn’t help but suspect that there is an allegory going on here and there are certainly a lot of salient political points, addressing the refugee crisis, rampant European nationalism, genetic manipulation and the exploitation of sports stars.

Despite the political points this isn’t a political film and the filmmakers tend to address their subjects superficially. This is, after all, a comedy and one suspects that even the filmmakers don’t take the movie too seriously. It is a mishmash of genres, including espionage thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, satire, spoof and sports film. In other words, something for everybody – well, nearly everybody.

The effects are low-budget and look it but the cinematography is strong and the score is really nice, augmenting the mood well. Some are definitely going to find it too radically weird so those who find Monty Python too high-brow might want to give this a miss. For the rest, this is a remarkably entertaining, endearing and occasionally sweet morality play that ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to heart-tugging pathos. Any movie with giant puppies can’t be all bad.

For Florida readers, the film is currently playing only at the MDC Tower Theater on the campus of Miami Dade College so if you want to catch it in a theater, you’ll have to go there. Keep an eye out for it at your local arthouse; otherwise expect it to be available to stream later this year.

REASONS TO SEE: Extremely imaginative from the plot to the effects. A really nice score.
REASONS TO AVOID: May be too whimsical for some.
FAMILY VALUES: There are some sexual references and nudity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The lead character was loosely based on Christiano Ronaldo and the story inspired by a pair of essays by David Foster Wallace.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/2/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews: Metacritic: 77/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Science of Sleep
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: Free Trip to Egypt

William (2019)

So simple even a caveman could do it?

(2019) Drama (Dada) Will Brittain, Maria Dizzia, Waleed Zuaiter, Susan Park, Beth Grant, Callum Seagram Airlie, Krystle Dos Santos, Kevin Dzah, Stefania Indelicato, Jaren Moore, Ellie Harvie, David Nykl, Nisreen Slim, Christian Convery, Morgan Taylor Campbell, Sydney Bell, Finn Haney, Michael Meneer, Kurt Ostlund, Iris Paluly, Lisa MacFadden. Directed by Tim Disney

 

Neanderthals occupy an interesting place in pop culture. On the one hand, they are our ancestors; we evolved from them and then eventually wiped them out (or out-survived them). On the other hand, they are portrayed as both stupid (“So easy even a caveman could do it”) and brutish, normally portrayed as being possessed of enormous strength and aggressiveness. In truth however, we really don’t know very much about them.

Paleontologist Julian Reed (Zuaiter) would very much like to change that. He dreams of coming face to face with a Neanderthal, particularly after a colleague (Grant) of his at Wallace University where he teaches discovered a nearly-perfectly preserved body in a Pacific Northwest bog not far from the University. Bio-engineer Barbara Sullivan (Dizzia), attending one of Julian’s impassioned lectures on the subject, thinks she can make it happen by cloning a Neanderthal using DNA from the remains of the Neanderthal. The two find common ground and eventually get married.

As for cloning the Neanderthal, the University brass reacts with horror. It’s not just a no but a Hell, no! Being the maverick scientific power couple that they are, they decide to do it anyway, using one of Barbara’s eggs as an embryo. By the time the university finds out, the deed is already done and a baby – named William, after Irish naturalist William King who was the first to identify Neanderthals as a separate species – and the university has no choice but to support the two scientists after the fact.

Barbara and Julian develop a deep rift in their relationship on how William’s upbringing should be handled. Julian wants to keep the boy at the University where he can be closely monitored, whereas Barbara, once the gung-ho maverick, has turned all mom on him and demands the boy be raised in an environment where he has a shot at a normal life which in retrospect doesn’t seem terribly realistic because there’s no way other children are going to let up on a completely different species. William mostly tolerates the abuse although from time to time when cornered he does show an ability to more than adequately defend himself.

William also has trouble with literary interpretation, particularly when it comes to humor and metaphors. Think of Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy who didn’t understand anything in other than a literal sense. William is that, only more soft-spoken and less blue. William is in all ways polite and brilliant but his shortcoming in this one department threatens to derail his plans for college – or perhaps more his dad’s plans. Also, William is getting a little tired of other people making decisions about what’s best for him.

While this sounds like soft sci-fi along the lines of Creator or Encino Man, this is more of a coming-of-age drama with some light science fiction overtones. This is not so much about the creation of William but of the practical ramifications of creating him. Given that some scientists believe that we’ll have the ability to clone dinosaurs by the end of the next decade, the immortal line “They were so busy trying to figure out if they could they never bothered asking themselves if they should” from Jurassic Park immediately comes to mind. The premise is an interesting one and it is handled in an unexpected way which is reason enough to recommend it right there.

Brittain does a great job of making William sympathetic and alien at the same time. He’s just like us, only he’s not. There is a universal truth hiding in that statement; that truth is that we’re all under that category. I don’t know if that was a message Disney meant to send but it was one I read loud and clear all the same.

Cinematographers Graham and Nelson Talbot utilize the Pacific Northwest setting nicely and some of the shot compositions should be used as teaching tools in film school. The negative here (and it’s a big one) is that the ending is completely tone-deaf with the rest of the film. Disney went out of his way to approach the subject in a unique way and then just about wipes out the good will of the audience by tacking on a cliché ending. The ending is an easy one that has the advantage of tying things up neatly more or less but it is almost like it came out of another movie – and not a better one.

Despite the disappointment of the film’s ending this is still that rarity – an intelligent movie with an intriguing premise that never talks down to its viewers (until the last ten minutes) and generally takes the road that isn’t easy or safe. I only wish that Disney had the faith in his own project to give us an ending that didn’t feel so out of tune with the rest of the film.

REASONS TO SEE: The premise is interesting. I liked the shot composition going on here.
REASONS TO AVOID: The ending is a letdown.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some brief profanity, a bit of violence and some drug use.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Tim Disney is Walt’s grand-nephew.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/15/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 50% positive reviews: Metacritic: 57/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: One Child Nation

Patient 001

What’s more beautiful than a new mom and her baby?

(2018) Science Fiction (Random Media) Jason Dietz, Gabe Doran, Rosie Fellner, Noah Fleiss, Michel Gill, Michael Hayden, Ezra Knight, Ian O’Malley, Steven Ogg, Alexandra Rhodie, Jenna Stern. Directed by Katie Fleischer

 

I have heard it said that there is nothing more insistent than a woman’s urge to become a mother. It claws and rends from the inside out and never lets go like a puppy with a chew toy. For some women that urge is more irresistible than in others.

Josie Kingman (Fellner) is deep in the grips of the urge. However, she has a problem; she wants to have a child only with her husband Leo (Hayden) and her husband lies in a coma, the victim of a terrible accident. She resorts to having sex with her unconscious husband, much to the bemusement of the hospital staff who watch her gyrate on top of him.

Nothing works and Josie is getting more desperate by the day. In her despair she is approached by Dr. Alec Jameson (Gill) who offers to help but not in the conventional way. Taking some DNA from the sleeping Leo, he essentially creates a clone, inseminating Josie with the cells which will eventually become Leo 2.0. She gives birth and wonder of wonders, Leo wakes up nearly immediately. At first Josie’s joy is without compare but then clouds begin to appear in the bright blue sky of her life. Whenever the baby and Leo get together, he has blinding headaches, terrifying visions and his personality becomes rage-filled. Eventually, Josie is faced with a terrible decision and she makes it but like many life-altering decisions, her choice will come back to haunt her.

We have seen movies about the consequences of cloning before and those consequences are almost always terrible. I don’t know what moviemakers have against clones, but they are almost always evil and have psychic powers. The clone here is no exception and like many movie clones, he is in full possession of the sins of the father – and by extension, his obsessions. Let us just say that the movie is a bit of a nod towards Oedipus and let it go at that.

It’s a low budget film and while there are some fairly artistic images for the most part the film is fairly standard for a movie of its genre in terms of story and production design. In other words, the look and the tale itself are nothing to write home about. Sadly, the acting is not up to par in a lot of cases; most of the performances seem forced and stiff. The exception is Fellner who not only is exquisitely beautiful and super sexy, she also commands a bit more natural charisma than the others. She has a thankless job that at times has her doing things they probably never told her about back in high school drama club but she at least goes at it like a trooper and acquits herself well.

That isn’t to say that this is a bad movie per se but it isn’t a very good one. There are a few good elements here, especially Fellner but not enough for me to recommend this movie unreservedly. If you’re looking for a hidden gem, this really isn’t it. However those who have an obsession with cloning there are worse films on the subject out there.

REASONS TO SEE: Fellner has some potential in the screen presence department.
REASONS TO AVOID: The story isn’t super compelling. The acting is on the stiff side for the most part.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some profanity and violence as well as sexuality.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Phillip Seymour Hoffman was set to executive produce the film until his untimely death.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, Fandango Now, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 2/13/19: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet: Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Replicas
FINAL RATING: 4.5/10
NEXT: Hunter

Womb (Clone)

Oedipus, anyone?

(2010) Sci-Fi Drama (Olive) Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Istvan Lenart, Hannah Murray, Ruby O. Fee, Tristan Christopher, Jesse Hoffman, Natalia Tena, Ella Smith, Wunmi Mosaku, Alexander Goeller, Gina Stiebitz, Adrian Wahlen, Amanda Lawrence, Jennifer Lim, Tina Engel, Noah Hedges. Directed by Benedek Filegauf

Letting go is the hardest thing possible. When we lose someone, particularly someone who is more dear to us than life itself, accepting that they’re gone is a monumental task. Moving on seems next to impossible. What if the technology existed to bring them back – not as they were but as a completely new person?

Rebecca (Green) met Tommy (Smith) when as a nine-year-old girl visiting her grandfather for the summer she fell deeply in love with him – as he did with her. However, summers end and Rebecca is whisked away to join her mother in Japan. Twelve years pass.

However, Rebecca has never been able to put Tommy out of her mind and as it turns out, neither has he for her. The two reconnect and marry. The future looks limitless; Rebecca works as a computer programmer and Tommy is an environmental activist. Even though the two don’t seem compatible, they are very much in love and all things are possible when you’re young and in love. Unfortunately, so is death.

Rebecca is devastated by Tommy’s untimely demise as our his parents Judith (Manville) and Ralph (Wight). Rebecca is particularly inconsolable, and out of her grief hatches a nutty plan – she wants to use Tommy’s genetic material to create a cloned embryo which she would be impregnated with and carry to term. Judith is aghast at the idea and won’t hear of it. Ralph is more accepting of the idea but urges caution and consideration of the potential pitfalls. He signs the permission forms without Judith’s knowledge and you can guess what happens next.

Little Tommy’s clone-ness however makes him a target for neighborhood bullies and so doting mom Rebecca moves him to an isolated beach shack where she home schools him. As Tommy grows (much more rapidly than the average kid it seems while mom remains just as hot as ever), the bond between them grows deeper – and more than a bit strange. Rebecca has her Tommy back – but has her unwillingness to let her lover go set up her son for ruin?

Hungarian director Filegauf takes a fairly complicated subject with all sorts of twisted implications and to his credit never makes it tawdry or lurid. Certainly there are elements of incest suggested, although it is never made too overt – and yet he doesn’t ignore those implications either. There is definitely a sexual tension between Rebecca and her son.

What I do have issues with is not so much the incest element but the lack of character development.  We never get a sense of why Rebecca is so obsessed with Tommy to the point where she is making choices that can only end in heartbreak. We don’t really see how their relationship develops as adults (before his untimely demise) nor do we get a sense of Tommy the son’s personality other than how he relates to his mom and later, to would-be girlfriend Monica (Murray).

Green is a capable actress, and it really falls upon her to carry the film to a large extent. Unfortunately, she’s not given much of a basket but she does the best she can with what she had. Smith, best known for being the most recent Doctor Who (at least until Peter Capaldi takes over next year) breaks his quirky mold here and plays it pretty straight although he has a few moments that will remind his many BBC fans of his performance on the beloved science fiction show.

I’ve said this about other movies but it bears repeating here – there was a good movie to be made here but the filmmakers didn’t make one. They made an okay movie out of a subject oozing with potential which considering the length and breadth of product out there is probably not a sufficiently good motivation to choose this movie above all the rest.

WHY RENT THIS: Takes a fairly lurid subject and never goes down the exploitation road.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Lacks character development.

FAMILY VALUES: The themes are very, very adult and there are a couple of disturbing images here.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie was retitled Clone for its home video release in the UK.

NOTABLE HOME VIDEO EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: Negligible box office on a $13M production budget.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Possession

FINAL RATING: 5/10

NEXT: The Butler