Obamasaurus

President-elect Barack Obama!

The music played over the loudspeakers at Grant Park after Obama's acceptance speech reminded me of (but it definitely was not) the score to Jurassic Park, which seemed somehow fitting.

Untitled Melodrama 01

So, for fun, here are some excerpts from the screenplay I wrote for no reason at all. It currently clocks in at 36 pages.

Originally, I had titled it while a work in progress as "Untitled Melodrama 01" but this completed first draft, dated June 26, 2008* is titled "Backyards."

It includes some uncomfortable homoeroticism:


My love of squash:


And an obligatory Jurassic Park reference:


*But why is this dated after your previous post where you said you had finished it, you ask. Because, that's why.

Needs More Goldblum: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Goldblum's Ian Malcolm, "scientist" (he's apparently referred to as more than once), returns for this sequel, this time as a headliner. The first time we seem, a jump cut presents him standing, still the man in black, in front of a tropical setting. Overlapping his image is a mother's scream from the prior scene of a dinosaur attack. Goldblum stoically yawns as the tropical setting is just a billboard in a subway station. And it's revealed that those clothes aren't all black, but rather dark brown tones. And even more colour will be introduced to his wardrobe later.

Goldblum is more than action man here, having ditched the glasses and sporting a perma-five o'clock shadow. When he gets to Dinosaur Island, he even sports action jeans. Clearly, he is a changed man. Luckily, he still sports some of his trademark wry wit, although not as much when he was the part-time comic relief character of the first film:

So you went from capitalist to naturalist in just 4 years. That's something.

Malcolm in this film is sort of defined by relationships with two characters. First off, he has a sassy black daughter. If we remember correctly from the first film, there was a throwaway line about Malcolm collecting wives. And here his sassy black daughter says,

You like to have kids but you don't want to be with them, do you?

The second character is a girlfriend paleontologist played by Julianne Moore. This makes The Lost World: Jurassic Park succeed just by making me imagine Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore having sex. It justs feels so right (I'll be having sweet dreams tonight).

Don't want to slight the Malcolm character too much as the film does make out to be a bit of a badass. First off, he survives a velociraptor attack (along with Julianne Moore and sassy black daughter*); velociraptors being the baddest motherfuckers ever. Secondly, after a tyrannosaurus rex has chased and trapped a bunch of humans into a waterfall cave, eaten one guy, and seemingly backed off, someone yells, "It's coming back." But instead of the T-rex, it's Jeff Goldblum. Who's king of the dinosaurs now, bitch? Yeah, Goldblum, that's who.

*Now that I think about, and without rewatching the third Jurassic Park film, the only velociraptor deaths that occur are caused by the tyrannosaurus in the first film and the gymnastics-wielding sassy black daughter in the second film.

Top Five V: The Films of Steven Spielberg

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
2. Jaws (1975)
3. Empire of the Sun (1987)
4. Jurassic Park (1993)
5. Munich (2005)

Unseen: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Amistad (1997), Always (1989), The Color Purple (1985), 1941 (1979), The Sugarland Express (1974)

N/A: Shorts, TV Films (Unseen: Duel (1971)), Anthology Films

Honourable Mentions:

• Minority Report (2002)
• "D-Day Invasion," Saving Private Ryan (1998)*
• Schindler's List (1993)*

*If this was an Essential Spielberg list and not my personal top five, these "important" films about WWII would have a spot.

Update 25/05/08: I have since seen 1941 (1979). Having seen it, I can say that the entire film is shot with a sickly, gauzy softness that tries to purpose itself as cinematic shorthand for nostalgia.

Needs More Goldblum: Jurassic Park

Here Goldblum is a rock star mathematician-- sorry, chaotician-- and he owns the part. Doffed all in black, pants and button down, and topped with a leather jacket is the rock star. And for the intellectual (and shades of nascent hipster) are a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Brought to the island as one of three subject matter experts that the InGen board of executives wants to sign off on the viability of its adventure theme park dinosaur island, Goldblum's Ian Malcolm drops the knowledge on chaos theory and unpredictability:

Life, uh, finds a way.

Ian Malcolm is too a brash young punk. When not making quips about massive piles of triceratops shit and hitting on Laura Dern's paleobotanist character, he's losing his leather jacket as he sits in an automated Ford Explorer in the rain, showing off his short sleeves and his thoughts on water ripples. Then when Sam Neill's paleontologist protagonist decides to use a flair to get the tyrannosaurus rex's attention away from the kids, Malcolm has got to do it too, to lesser, more foolish and more impulsive effect.


After the dinosaur has thrown Malcolm into a thatched hut, collapsing it in the process, he spends the remainder of the film injured. But he's still rock star enough to have tourniquetted his own leg when his injured body is first found. He also spends the remainder of the film with his shirt ripped open, his chiseled body spilling out his shirt like a pulp hero, his rugged handsomeness that of an Edgar Rice Burroughs character. Yet this clashes with his injured status, which leaves him in a prone state, his damsel in distress sitting aside like the ravished, scantily clad exotic girl of a pulp cover or like Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hut.

If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.