June 18, 1993
Dear Everyone:
First of all, Happy Father’s Day to all those Dads out there.
Now that that's over, on to the really important things.
Yes. This is the one.
This is worth seeing.
This is worth standing in line
for an hour (especially if you have such charming company as “Jeannie”
and her friend “Roberta” with you, gossiping about all the lawyers in
the county) in order to get good seats. This
is even worth the rather mediocre popcorn that they serve at the Century
Five. As the guy next to
“Roberta” said, this is worth going back and seeing again (first showing
Saturday morning, and he'd already seen it once before).
There are a number of reasons why
Jurassic Park is so much better than, say,
Cliffhanger.
JP
is based on a best-selling novel, one so good that, when I loaned a copy
to “Miranda”, her kids hid it because “Miranda” was so intent on reading
it that she couldn't break away long enough to feed them.
Cliffhanger,
on the other hand, has no plot worth mentioning.
JP
combines classic Something’s-Gone-Haywire-in-the-Amusement-Park with
It's-Not-Nice-to-Fool-With-Mother-Nature.
Cliff is
stock-in-trade guys beating each other up and could just as easily have
taken place in Manhattan as on a mountain top.
JP
has better acting. Of course,
Steven Spielberg
could afford to pick and choose. Sylvester
Stallone took what he could get. JP has the
Richard
Attenborough (the same one who played "Roger", the mastermind of
The Great
Escape 30 years ago). Jeff
Goldblum plays the smart aleck mathematician who warns that
dinosaurs and people don't mix. And
Sam Neill is
wonderful as the paleontologist who having spent his whole life digging
up fossilized bones and speculating about their original owners,
suddenly finds himself nose-to-nose with a
real
triceratops (love
at first sight).
As for the "villains": The
nasties in Cliffhanger are
only there to give Stallone something to bounce off of, or just to
bounce. Whereas in
Jurassic, at least the
dinosaurs have the virtue of just doing what comes naturally, which, if
you're a
Tyrannosaurus,
means eating anything that moves.
"Don't move!" the paleontologist warns. "If
we don't move, he can't see us." But
then, you can see on his face that one small part of his brain is
saying, "You know, that's really only a
theory."
It's bad enough when someone
disagrees with you in the
Journal
of Paleontology; but if your favorite theory disproves itself by
chomping your head off, well that's the sort of thing you just know
you're never going to live down.
Nevertheless, people do get eaten and the critics are right in saying
not to take small children to this movie.
They are liable to get upset with "Barneys cranky cousins".
Wait until the kids are old
enough to rent the tape. As for
the "grown-ups", sit back and enjoy it. The
special effects are seamless. You
don't even ask yourself, "how can they show people and dinosaurs running
through a meadow together like that?" You
just worry about what they're all running
from.
The ending leaves a bit to be desired, but it's still a good movie.
In other movie news…
No, I haven't seen
Indecent Proposal.
I am part of the less-than-1% of
the female population who doesn't give a flying fig about
Robert Redford.
But “Miranda” saw it and said
that it was so bad that she got angry at herself for wasting time and
money on it. As for
Made in America,
the same critic reported that it just wasn't funny.
The opinions expressed are those of the "speakers" and not subject to
libel or defamation of character litigation.
After all, folks, these are just
movies.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS:
Ashland is only a week away!
Here's the schedule for those who are going (the rest of you can ignore
this, or just be jealous).
|
Monday |
6/8/93 |
Drive to Ashland |
|
|
|
Tuesday |
6/29/93 |
2:00 |
Row D |
|
|
|
|
8:30 |
Row D |
|
|
Wednesday |
6/30/93 |
2:00 |
Row D |
|
|
|
|
8:30 |
Row C |
|
|
Thursday |
7/1/93 |
Special Backstage Tour |
9:30 |
|
|
|
|
Jacksonville Inn |
5:30 |
|
|
|
|
8:30 |
Row B |
|
|
Friday |
7/2/93 |
Stagger Home |
|
|
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