Fang and Claw

My long-suffering partner has much simpler demands of movies than I do. For example: when she sits down to watch a movie about dinosaurs, she expects to see those dinos eating people. In this regard, she was mildly disappointed in the original Jurassic Park, in which very few people were actually eaten by dinosaurs and only one was spectacularly eaten on-screen. Mind you, she approved whole-heartedly of the film's disposition of the lawyer character, but in the long run, it was a brief moment. It's fair to say that she was thrilled with the newest "Jurassic" film, Jurassic World (2015, directed by Colin Trevorrow), though. This is a film that throws plenty of chum to the dinosaurs. I suppose I can't fault it for giving the audience what they paid to see.

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Ultron Unbound

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) finds the Marvel Cinematic Universe entering its decadent period. I'd almost call it the series' Bronze Age, to borrow the nomenclature of comics. This should be a period when the storytelling in these films ramps up because the need for origin stories has been satisfied by the previous movies, a period when it should be doing its Galactus trilogy, its Kree/Skrull war, its Dark Phoenix saga. Certainly, that's part of why Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the best of the Marvel movies. That movie also had crackerjack storytelling and a defined source text. This film, on the other hand? It's stuffed to the gills with new characters, but not many new ideas. More, it's obviously the middle child in a trilogy, one that's weighted down with far too much franchise-building. Does it provide superheroics? Sure. But at this point, it should be providing more. Maybe I'm asking too much. I mean, it's not awful by any means. I suspect that after 38 movies based on Marvel Comics (with a 39th and 40th due in the next couple of months), I'm suffering from superhero fatigue.

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White Elephant Blogathon: Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea

When I opened the email containing this year's White Elephant, I was convinced that I had seen my film before. It turns out that I was confusing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea with The Neptune Factor. I saw The Neptune Factor at a kid's matinee when I was seven or eight. That film had dodgy special effects that pit its all-star cast against giant goldfish. In comparison, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea looks pretty good. In truth, it's faint praise.

Two of the most arresting scenes in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961, directed by Irwin Allen) come in the first act. In the first, during the tour of the Seaview, the film's super submarine, we come across a trumpeter playing for his mess buddies and for the Admiral's secretary. In the film's only unconventional shot, the camera focuses on Barbara Eden's gyrating bottom. The second finds the submarine being pummeled by boulders of ice sinking from the polar icecap. Ice. Sinking. Or how about that shark pool that doesn't spill over its banks when the ship dives at steep angles. Given that the motivating disaster for this movie finds the earth's Van Allen belts catching fire and roasting the world, it's fair to say that this is not a film for anyone with even a passing acquaintance with science. Indeed, it's a film that probably plays best to nine year-olds. If anyone older than that makes the mistake of thinking about what's on screen, then, well, the whole thing falls apart early. And that's before it even gets to its big special effects scenes.

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