Tag Archives: movies

On Jurassic Park

Nick and I went and saw Jurassic Park 3D tonight, and I'm happy to say that it's still an awesome movie! I don't think 3D really added anything to it, but neither did it take anything away, so wins all around. Watching it did make me ponder the influence that movie had on my life, which I think ended up being more significant than I ever realized.

One thing was made clear as I watched the film tonight: there are synapses in my brain that are entirely devoted to the mental storage of that movie. I seriously watched that thing so many times as a child that I'm surprised the VHS tape didn't wear out (though admittedly after a time I started just fast forwarding to the T-rex scene and watching it from there on out). Every scene, every line, every inflection and sound effect is burned into my memory with perfect clarity. And yet, I still get all excited at the right places, in spite of the fact I know precisely what's going to happen (as Nick said, maybe if I hope really hard this time he'll get off the fence in time!)

I'm not sure the moment as a child that I became aware that the movie was coming and that I was insanely excited about it, but before that happened a friend of mine recommended the book, which I loved, because dinosaurs, obviously. As a brief aside, reading the book nowadays is still a pleasure, but a bit amusing. It's one of those sci fi books that completely missed the mark on a future prediction, in this case tracking technology (they kept track of the dinosaurs by using video cameras and automatic silhouette detection. Meanwhile, RFID chips…).

So I read the book and of course the velociraptors were my favorite and I got a big Jurassic Park poster for my door and drew pictures of raptors and played pretend-dinosaurs with my friend (I was always a raptor, and Taylor was a dilophosaurus, and we wrote a song about dilophosaurs which I can't recall in entirety but I think it contained the lyric "We are dilophosaurs, spit, spit, spit…") and we were always hiding in the roods and then jumping over the creek as we fled from the T-rex.

And then game the video game, the SNES/Genesis one, and OBVIOUSLY I only played as the raptor because who would want to play as boring old Grant anyway? I got to the boss (who was Grant) several times as the raptor, but could never beat him. He had a gun! What was I supposed to do! Mostly, though, I just played through the first level as the raptor because it was safe enough for me to "roleplay" as a dinosaur in a fashion.

And THEN, when I was doing synchronized swimming, Taylor and I decided to do our routine to Jurassic Park music. We spent all that time cutting the music just so for our duet. We picked headpieces with curved, spikey bits that reminded us of raptor claws. I'd like to say that I remember the routine by heart, but I am sad to say that I only remember the first two moves, which were back arm strokes to the opening chords.

I think one of my favorite things tonight was seeing all the little kids in the audience, some of them obviously seeing the movie for the first time, and seeing how they reacted. I wonder if any of them will go home and write enthusiastic folk songs about their favorite dino species…I'd like to think so.

EDIT: I had a sudden moment of clarity where I remembered the entire dilophosaurus song:

We are dilophosaurs, yay, yay, yay,

We let out a lethal spray.

We will spit on you and you'll go blind

And then we'll eat you, rind by rind.

The Princess and the Frog

We saw the Princess and the Frog tonight, and I liked it a lot, it was super sweet! I am glad, because I wanted so badly for this movie to be good. Well done, Lasseter! I hope people will get excited about 2D again.

My favorite thing, as pointed out to me by Will before I even saw it, was that the comic relief characters are endearing and not annoying. Like, the little lightning bug that you saw in the previews and thought “Oh, God!” and were all worried about? You totally love him.

AND NOW THERE WILL BE SPOILERS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Spoilers abound!

Cloverfield

The Bandology consensus on Cloverfield:

Andy: Cloverfield is the second movie ever to give me motion sickness.

Edmundo: Cloverfield gave me a hangover

Me: Cloverfield almost gave me a freakin seizure

The conclusion being, don’t take those warnings at the ticket counter lightly

Incredible

Finally saw The Incredibles last night. It was, well, incredible! I will agree with Jaster that Syndrome looks surprisingly similar to Checkerboard Nightmare, perhaps with a little Freakazoid thrown in.

Anyway, I’m going to blow glass today for the first time since the spring! I’m super excited, although I’ll probably just make some cups to get back into the swing of things.

Pre-holiday weekend cleaning

I bought the Triplettes of Belville yesterday on a whim, I think everyone is entitled to an impulse buy now and again.

This weekend we (my family) are going over to Virginia to help my aunt move into her new home. Her husband is in the army, so they and my two cousins have played the move-everywhere-across-the-world game for quite some time now, starting out in Germany, then New York, then Houston, then back to Germany again. They are finally finished and coming back to the States for good now, much to everyone’s excitement (the entirety of my mom’s side of the family lives here in Louisville, so it’s been somewhat of a strain on them to have a family member so far away all the time. Granted, Virginia isn’t exactly down the street, but it’s closest so far!).

My mom went up there with my aunt earlier this week to help paint, so today I am clean clean cleaning so that when we come back my mom won’t freak out at how dirty I let the house get, hehe! It’s also for myself, though. As much as I hate to admit it, the dirtier and more cluttered my room gets, the less inspired I am to do work. My work on my puppet and new painting have dwindled this week because of how much stuff is strewn across my room. I guess it’s not a terrible thing, at least it will inspire me to clean a bit more often.

Whenever my room is freshly cleaned I am inspired not only to work on current projects, but to start like 10 new ones (I suppose it’s some entropy-driven urge to dirty up the room again). Maybe next week I’ll start building another mask to sell at the con, or maybe some little sculpey dragons.

I really hope I can finish this new painting I started for Conglomeration, because I think it will be a nice one. We’ll see, I guess.

Obligatory LotR rambling

Matinee and Manatee are way too close of words, especially since I often mispell the latter as “manitee”. In reading LJs I have been confused one too many times as to why someone would want to go see a manatee show, I mean, they aren’t that exciting.

Anyway, I have a question for you LotR people out there. So, Gollum used to be something that was somewhat related to a hobbit, right? However, his race seemed to be almost instantly overtaken by the ring’s power (hence the initially struggle and murder upon finding the ring), whereas Frodo and Bilbo and all thems hobbits seem to have a decent resistance to it. Explain!

(Brendan’s explanation was that Gollum’s race were fishermen, and thus took on the traits of the fish, and thus were naturally cold-hearted. While it was a decent impromptu explanation, I’m sure *someone* can make up something a big more reasonable)

In other news, I got my room cleaned and organized, and am 90% unpacked. Tomorrow I have plans to do some arting, maybe even drag out my oil paints.