My Own Little World

What is the Jurassic Park franchise, and what should it be? Those two questions are sitting at the front of my mind the morning after watching the fifth installment in this series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom . Sleeping on this movie was not a good idea; instead of being ambivalent as I was last night, I am now deeply concerned that this franchise is not going to continue being one of my more anticipated summer movie events as it has been for both this film and Jurassic World . The predominant problem with watching Fallen Kingdom is structure and pacing. It appears like two separate movies were put together end to end and played as the final product. The first half revolves around getting the dinosaurs off the island of Isla Nublar, saving the animals from its active volcano, while the second half turns into a gothic horror-esque monster movie that is tonally inconsistent by itself. These distinct aesthetics and tones make the finished film nothing more than a bridge b...

There is something about Wes Anderson’s filmmaking that ensnares me. I cannot say if it is his meticulous method, his whimsical and dry humor, or his ability to tell parable-like stories about human nature; whatever the case, his unique technique makes me love every single one of his films – even the lesser ones are still highly enjoyable.  Isle of Dogs is no different in that respect; the film's style has the same overtly charming effect on me as all of Anderson's other works. I reveled in the experience of seeing one of his films in a theater for the first time. My question going into the film was what Isle of Dogs would do to make itself different from the other films in Anderson's catalog and whether those differences would benefit or hinder the   final product. The biggest difference is the setting; Anderson has not set any of his films in the Far East yet, the closest being The Darjeeling Limited in India. Placing the story in Japan with many Japanese char...

By this point, there has been an established formula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s a reason they are so successful at the box office: people see them as a reliable option for being entertained at the movies. That’s not a bad thing by any means – I thoroughly enjoy every single one of these movies and plan to for the foreseeable future – but it does mean that each successive film in the franchise needs to stand out at least a little bit from the rest to keep interest high. This year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 partially failed at that with its convoluted plot and somewhat rehashed humor; on the contrary, Spider-Man: Homecoming successfully rebooted a character that has had problems in past in film, giving me a film that I really enjoyed. Thor: Ragnarok does something I didn’t expect in trying to change up the formula from the previous two films focusing on the character: it cranks the humor up to 11. OK, there’s more to it than that, like the way the film ...