Oh! Renny Harlin! He’s a Finnish director who made a surprising career in Hollywood (FSVO), and I found him interesting at the time. He married Geena Davis (who’s great) and made a number of slightly off-kilter action movies before disappearing… Well, I don’t know that he disappeared, but I haven’t seen that name in decades.

I guess he never did disappear. I think the last movie of his I’ve seen is the 1996 Long Kiss Goodnight, which I think famously bombed…

I like Harlin. He did these oddball shots that nobody else would do, because they’re too artificial.

Best. Hairdo. Ever.

Is Harlin expressing all their personalities solely through their hairdos? I think he is!

What a kind-looking nurse.

Anyway, this isn’t as good as I’d hoped. The “Scare Scenes” are really inventive and fun, but then when they have to do the connecting scenes (to get irrelevancies like plot and stuff out of the way), tension just dissipates.

Yeah!

It’s a pretty fun horror movie — but it’s not actually scary at all. It’s also uneven in tone… so what’s the story behind this movie?

In an interview with Midnight’s Edge, director Tom McLoughlin said that after completing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, New Line offered him the job on The Dream Master. His one caveat was that he wanted creative control. The studio could not adhere to the demand, specifically because they had already begun filming without any director. McLoughlin said,

“When I finished Friday, I was offered Nightmare 4 and went to New Line, met with them, and I said, ‘I love Freddy, I would love to do one of these, but I really want to do what I just did, where I had creative control’,” he explained. “And they go, ‘Well, we’re already shooting.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, we’re already shooting, we’re shooting like two different units for the visual effects’ and something else, puppets or something. And I said, ‘Without a director?’ ‘Yeah, we kind of know how we’re going to make these things.’ And I went, ‘That’s not the way I work.’ So I turned it down, which of course made (Nightmare 4 director) Renny Harlin’s career.”

Heh heh.

I’m now watching these excellent extras on this box set — they’re not the typical “one sentence from one guy and one sentence from another guy about how wonderful everything was” puff pieces. They’re very forthright and talking about how much they hated the other guy’s ideas, and so on. Like:

High praise indeed!

But is this a good movie? Nah.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Renny Harlin. 1988. ⚂

This started off with a voiceover over a bunch of paintings…

… but then the people in the foreground started moving! That’s a lot of greenscreen.

This is from 2001 — I didn’t really know that Rohmer was still directing then, but looking at his imdb, I’ve seen one later movie: Triple Agent.

This is so weird — a horse and carriage on greenscreen over a painting. Was this done for TV?

It’s la revolution.

This is pretty confusing — for me, because I’m an uncultured cochon. So this is like happening at the start of the French revolution, but they’re dropping all these references that I don’t quite get. But that (I’m guessing) any French three year old would understand.

Still, it’s pretty interesting… Not quite gripping, but plenty interesting.

I almost understand that… two months of Duolingo works!

Perhaps not all revolutionaries are as honourable!

I like this movie — but I’m not sure it needed to be this long? That is, there’s really not any scenes that are superfluous or seem gratuitous, but I found my interest flagging a bit… Like, is there sufficient interest in this story for a movie of more than two hours?

It’s good, but it’s not great.

L’Anglaise et le Duc. Éric Rohmer. 2001. ⚃

OK, so this movie (the sixth) is finally going to do what I assumed the second one would do to escalate things: Have the dinosaurs be in the Real World instead of on some remote island. Perhaps they resisted the idea because it would be a too large a perturbation of what’s known to be the “real world” — if you change the scenery too much from what’s outside the window, it gets harder to care, too.

So now you have dino rustlers. Yee haw.

Anyway, the reasons I started watching these Jurassic movies is because I have a tendency to just buy random 4K blu ray movies — while the novelty has worn off, some of them still look pretty great. And then I thought — “hey, I haven’t watched the first five movies”, and I got those, too… but after starting watching them, I quickly regretted the entire thing. But if I’ve bought them, I’ve got to watch them, right? That’s the disadvantage to buying physical media… there’s more of a… pressure to actually watch them.

But that’s also a good thing, often.

I’m just saying I’m really really fed up with this series at this point, and I’m like grudge watching this one to get it over with.

Oh, and there were two versions of the movie on the disc, apparently — one that’s 2h40m long and one that’s 2h29m long. I’m watching the shorter one, obviously.

SO SHORT

What’s the budget on this one?

It looks … cheaper? They’ve even skimped on hairdressers.

Well, it’s $5M cheaper than the previous movie:

And made $300M less. Still, it made beaucoup d’argent, so I guess it won’t be the last one.

So this movie is less about dinosaurs ravaging New York than about peacefully living with them? Huh… that’s a choice…

Aww.

Mother and child. How cute.

I SAID HOW CUTE

It’s her! I love Laura Dern.

I’m actually kinda enjoying this movie… perhaps it’s my lowered expectations?

There’s something old-fashioned about this movie… it’s a bit 80s in the way it builds slowly. There’s also something really 2012 about the colour grading — everything tends towards cold greys.

But then… they go to another island! I mean not really — but it’s a cut-off remote area, so it’s basically the same.

The entire crew is back!

Is that Steve Jobs?

What’s with the hairdresser on this movie?

I haven’t looked at reviews, but I understand that it’s a movie that’s not well-liked. And I can understand why — it doesn’t feel like a Jurassic movie at all. Instead it’s more like a heist/secret agent kind of movie? At least so far. And… I like that better? Because the Jurassic template was boring as fuck.

(I mean, it worked in the first movie, but that’s it.)

OK, this is pretty stupid.

Whoa

I take back what I said at the beginning — about this movie looking cheap. I think the problem is the excessive colour grading that makes everything look slightly unreal, even the scenes that are totally on location.

But that was a totes fun action scene.

This movie is aggressively and unapologetically stupid, which I like.

Heh heh. Does Laura Dern have a contract that stipulates that her forehead never be shown?

This is really entertaining. Now I regret that I didn’t watch the longer version instead — I bet it has even more nonsense.

Oh, they’ve finally started to incorporate some new research — this one is slightly feathery, and moves more like a big chicken than an alligator that stands on two feet.

Oooh! This one has big feathers!

FAMBLY

Nice.

Perfect little gag.

Is this the end of the road for Steve Jobs!?

It’s like they had a speech before each scene that went “Remember, this is a dinosaur horror movie for children… with that in mind, how can we make take this scene… TO THE MAX”. And they just deliver, scene after scene: It’s funny/scary in a way that’s totally exciting.

So I’m wondering why this movie got such harsh reviews. I mean, I get it — it’s more like a Fast & Furious movie than it’s like a Jurassic movie. But what?

Oh, that’s harsh. People on imdb really didn’t like it.

And not because if brigading — that’s a normal distribution when people don’t really like a movie.

Critics really loathed it, but the rottentomatoes audience kinda liked it?

Well, I guess — this movie almost takes the dinos for granted, while in the first five movies, they were played for “gooosh! dinos!” But for how many movies can you do that?

What!? Urgency? In Jurassic World?!

So weird. Critics are weird.

Anyway, this is the best Jurassic movie since the first movie. I’m almost tempted to try to watch the long version. But not now.

Jurassic World: Dominion. Colin Trevorrow. 2022. ⚄