Jurassic Park III
When I saw this was going to be on TV this weekend, I couldn’t wait to see it again. Right now it’s my favourite of the Jurassic Park Trilogy (until the next, which might manage to combine all the good things of each film so far into one mind-blowing dinosaur extravaganza). Though, as I said last time, the effects are not as good as the original (weird since there’s almost a decade between the movies), it kind of doesn’t matter. This is a bashful, fun, unashamed B-movie salute. I can’t watch it without a silly grin on my face the whole time. Casting William H. Macy in the comic relief role (I guess Jeff Goldblum wasn’t available) is a stroke of genius. I noted last time the scene with the vending machine – I forgot the punchline of that scene (he tries to mimic the tough guy by kicking another machine in, and the glass just stays put, mocking him). I know the first two movies had their own brand of comedy, but this one leans far more towards the sneaky, slightly warped, Hitchcock type of joke. You’re almost on the dinosaurs’ side: these people are dummies, as sympathetic as lego-men in a rottweiler cage.
Here’s what I wrote last time:
It’s taken me a while to watch this one because I really thought it would suck. It’s still not better than The Lost World because though The Lost World had problems, it still had some truly excellent Spielberg touches (raptors in the grass, wow, what a moment). But taken as a separate movie, this is definitely one of the more entertaining movies I’ve seen recently. William H. Macy and Téa Leoni are hilarious, kinda like Jerry Springer guests or something, as they continue their rocky separation while looking for their son on dinosaur island. Macy plays that character so well – something simple like innocently looking for a quarter for a vending machine in a deserted science lab while any other character simply kicks the glass in; he’s just completely lost in this situation, reminds me of Bill Paxton in True Lies, all show but once there’s real danger, he’s gonna piss himself. And the appearance of the T-rex to the sound of a ringing phone? Comic genius. Oddly, the dinosaurs don’t look as good here as in either of the other movies, but that’s fine as the director chooses to show them mostly in scarier glimpse-shots. Except for the pteradactyls, which we haven’t seen before.