Jurassic World Dominon Review: Fans Will Love It! Anyone Else Should Wait For Streaming.
Let’s cut straight to the point on this. Jurassic World Dominion is great for fans of the franchise and may be disjointed and unbelievable to anyone else. If you are looking for fan service, it’s rich with it. Otherwise, this may be a good streaming pick later.
First, with a word like dominion in the title, you would think that dinosaurs are assorting their dominance in the world. Semantics don’t matter as the species just live among us in this film. Credit goes to screenwriters Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow for creating a world that feels lived in and thought out. What if dinosaurs really lived among us? What would a black market for dinosaurs look like? What would the PETA equivalent look like in this world? They’ve thought of it all, accept how to tell a cohesive story.
The film has a Steve Jobs-like CEO, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), as its villain. Dodgson was a minor character from the original film and was a corporate rival of the park’s creators. He’s now is the head of a massive company called Biosyn. It’s the type of tech company that is heavily guarded and you have to have an invite to get on campus. He’s bioengineered locusts that eat the crops of the world, in order to control the world’s food supply.
This is where the gang loosely comes together. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are looking after Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a teenager who Fallen Kingdom revealed to be a clone of a deceased scientist. She holds the key to stopping the disaster and everyone wants a piece of her…kind of literally. We get a globe trotting race to stop impending disaster and the re-introduction of fan favorites Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. How they all link up is where you have to suspend disbelief. It’s that kind of a film where you really need to just, not think. “It’s a film about dinosaurs!” I hear you yelling at me. I get that, but that doesn’t mean that we have to accept characters being in one location in one scene and appearing in a distant location in the immediate following scene with no context as to how they got there unless they were The Flash.
This film introduces the always interesting Mamoudou Athie as Ramsay and DeWanda Wise as Kayla. Kayla is a black pilot who smuggles whatever for the right price. She provides a source of keep it real comedy that is needed for some of the unrealistic moments in the film. Sermon is the heart of the film as she wars with is she real or not. Jeff Goldblum is his charming, old man swagged out self as Ian Malcolm. His humor is much welcomed as well.
There is a major gripe I’ve had with big beasts/monster movies in cinematic history and that is the fact that, since King Kong (1933), we’ve seen how a white character can bring a beast under control with a touch. This is a film where white characters lift their hand and stare down a dinosaur to make it back down. It happens multiple times throughout this film and this imagery is worrisome because seeing yourself on the big screen is important. King Kong, Godzilla, Frankenstein (before it tosses the girl into the lake), any Potter film and more beasts are always under this spell. Shot sizes and cinematography matters. There is a subconscious message that, against impossible odds, white characters can tame a beast. Hollywood needs to stop planting this in its viewers’ minds or at least spread the wealth in these preposterous situations and reflections of power. Let a little girl from Nepal stare down the next dinosaur!
Off of my soap box, it would definitely be of use to revisit Fallen Kingdom, Jurassic Park, and maybe even Jurassic World for this to catch easter eggs. For fans of the franchise, this is likely to be a good time. If you’re not a huge fan, save your money this weekend, or go see Top Gun: Maverick again!
Rating: C-
"The Founder" Review
What do we make of our corporate leaders as people? Names like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Walt Disney are embedded in the popular conscious as much as any kid wizard or snap-together playthings. Though we have access to the legacy of CEOs and leaders, many institutional heads are not as personally familiar as their product. We live in a time where tech titans are the subjects of top-billed films and non-tech icons may seem like an ancient generation.
The Founder is a straightforward biopic of an analogue man, an archetype of mid-century, middle American salesman, Ray Kroc. Kroc is introduced hocking milkshake mixers and scraping by on meager demand for his products when an unusually large order comes in from California. There, Kroc meets Maurice “Mac” McDonald and Richard “Dick” McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman, respectively) brothers and the founders of a new assembly-line style restaurant that does away with car hops and barbeque trays for disposable packaging and made-to-order hamburger meals. Kroc smells real success in the McDonald’s revolutionary kitchen and he wants in. The brothers Mac reluctantly allow Kroc in and he quickly gets to work franchising the operation. The Founder presents Ray Kroc as the foundational understanding for chasing the American dream; every man is just one good idea (his own or another’s) away from striking rich. If Ray Kroc wasn’t the little-f founder of McDonald’s first burger shop, he was the capital-f Founder of the McDonald’s brand.
The Founder follows several blockbuster films about wildly successful company heads that have built their legacies on the work of others. It doesn’t dabble in David Fincher’s upstart backstabbing (The Social Network), nor in Danny Boyle’s confrontational schadenfreude (Steve Jobs). However, the Founder does marvel at its central ego. Robert Siegel’s script hovers over Ray’s marriage to Ethel Kroc (Laura Dern) like a buzzard. Dern’s Ethel offers one of the film’s best performances as the exhausted supporter of Keaton’s workaholic Ray. However, Ray’s relationship with future second-wife Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini) feels undercooked. It matters to his “persistence will pay off” megalomania that he discards his first marriage, but the squirrely middle-aged salesman doesn’t appear charismatic enough to charm the blonde bombshell presented within, considering her marriage to an already successful restauranteur Rollie (Patrick Wilson). Director John Lee Hancock uses Smith as the manifestation of Kroc’s growing success, framed in a red dress and topped with a golden coif (a vision of French-fries incarnate?) singing “Pennies from Heaven.”
Composed in un-ironic reverence, The Founder strings the business of building a fast-food empire together with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, clutched baseballs, stuffed drive-ins and teen greasers. It rolls Kroc’s cornflower blue Plymouth right up against the line of tasteful nostalgia and uses red, white and gold to liven the screen. But the film’s nostalgia is as innocent as Kevin Arnold or Richie Cunningham. Between repeated cuts to American flags and church steeples, Kroc lays out a plan for McDonalds as a cultural staple, “the new American church”, and a gathering place for the hungry families “and we’re open on Sundays.” Don’t expect much cynicism or moral critique to balance; Kroc is simply an inevitability of capitalist enterprise.
The Founder is not built on redemption or destruction, but is instead focused on building an entertaining story in the singular drive of one man who took a good idea to greatness and the many people who were brought up and down along the way. It pleases and informs, but leaves moral certitude at the audience’s feet.
Rating: B
"99 Homes" Review
If you’re like me, there is nothing more thrilling than a glass of red wine and an episode of House Hunters. The show simply follows someone as they pick out their next home and while the formula is predictable, it does not make the show any less addicting. There is something about getting a peek into someone else’s living situation — it satisfies a natural curiosity. “99 Homes”, a film written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, is the exact opposite of a comforting episode of House Hunters. It is an exploration of the much darker sides of home ownership and the realities of the real estate business.
The film’s tone is immediately set as we meet Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) and his son as they fight their forthcoming eviction in a local courtroom. Dennis is unwilling to accept that the house he grew up in- the house his son is now growing up in- can be taken from them. He pleads with the judge, but to know avail. He has 30 days to appeal the court’s foreclosure of the property, but it’s done — they have lost their home. The music for this scene is heart-pounding, a deep bass that signals this is just the beginning of the troubles Dennis and his family are about to face.
Dennis and his family (which includes his son and mother, played by Laura Dern) are evicted from their home the next day, by Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) — a cold-hearted real estate broker whose only bit of sympathy for those he is evicting comes in the form of the two minutes he grants the families to gather any possession that they don’t want thrown out on the curb. Rick is evil personified. He has gotten rich off the backs of those far less fortunate and by working the housing crisis caused by the recession to his advantage. He is savvy in all the wrong ways and Shannon turns the Miami-vice clad monster into a multi-dimensional villain that you’ll hate, but secretly understand.
The movie truly takes off when Rick recognizes in Dennis an entrepreneurial spirit that can be used to his advantage. Rick takes Dennis on as his assistant, teaching him the how to run a real estate business through shady deals and bank foreclosures. Dennis, who walks a fine line between hopeless and hopeful, makes the perfect errand boy for Rick — Dennis needs the money and Rick needs someone who is just desperate enough not to ask questions. As their predator-prey relationship plays out, Dennis becomes someone he and his family thought he would never become. His decision to take a walk on the dark sideeventually comes to head leaving Dennis, Rick and the audience to wonder — was it worth it?
The brilliance of “99 Homes” comes from the context of the film. It’s not an original story, but the context of the housing crisis feels like uncharted territory. There is something so sacred about the home: it is a comforting space (unless of course you’re in a horror movie). “99 Homes” removes all the feel-good amenities of domestic life and exposes several sides of the white picket fence that haven’t really been given this level of dramatic treatment. It’s fresh and thrilling, despite the somber subject matter. Well worth the watch!
Grade: B