Because

These are the two covers for Stars of the Lid’s “And Their Refinement of the Decline.” This album is one of my favorites of all time. I’ve been getting more and more into ambient music these last couple years as I can listen to it while doing work, but this album is, by far, the one I have listened to the most.

I love the overwhelming bleakness of tracks like “The Mouthchew” or “Even (Out)+.“ Stars is a band that deals in sad music. Even the band’s most popular track, “Meaningful Moment in a Meaning(less) Process” has a gut wrenching ending that, when it fades into silence, leaves me with a feeling that’s equal parts despair and grief.

Full Disclosure: these are my first impressions with this movie and I finished writing this at 3 a.m. since I couldn’t get to sleep so please excuse any grammatical errors as me being tired instead of using grammatical errors to discredit my thoughts on this movie.

 If you like monster movies, Chris Pratt, dinosaur fights, product placement, and poorly executed divorce subplots, then you’ll absolutely adore Jurassic World. I thought Jurassic World had moments that were awesome and captured the awe of the first movie (final fight, giant fish dinosaur thing, etc) and those were enough to elevate the movie to an entertaining level. 5/10 go see it if you haven’t seen Mad Max already. There’s my review, it’s not a great movie, but it is entertaining at its best and isn’t that painful at its worst. 

     Now onto the bad parts of the movie. Characters are cliched, oversimplified, and weren’t emotionally resonant with me at all. The only time I felt any emotion attached to the characters in this movie was between Chris Pratt and his Raptors. Sure the characters had “arcs”, but they were such simple arcs that they don’t provide any depth to the characters. I also thought the product placement was downright insulting to the viewer after the movie went so far to poke fun at product placement (from joking about a “pepsisaurus” to the brother asking “wanna see something cool?” and then cutting to a mercedes-benz). 

     At this point I’m just going to make a list with what I didn’t like about this movie:

dialogue was awful, between the forced family interactions to the trying-to-hard-to-be-ironic-coworker I felt like there was only a couple of well written conversations in this movie (most involving Chris Pratt)

“homages” to the original Jurassic Park, they just kept reminding me that this movie isn’t stand alone, but is part of a series that have movies that did almost everything in this movie better

CGI, way too little practical effects used which is sad considering how revolutionary the effects in the original movie were

Characters so bad I have to mention them twice 

Lack of originality, seriously you’d think someone would learn that the park would go wrong

Everything involving Vincent D'Onofrio’s character and his role in the movie

The movies internal logic, examples include the person piloting the helicopter, the brothers fixing the 20 year old cars, everything involving the creation of the genetically-modified dinosaur (the Andosomething rex, I can’t remember what it was called)

the divorce subplot

and many more

What was with the “military wants dinosaurs” thing in this movie? I get that the army wants efficient ways of killing things, but there is a very good reason as to why animals of war aren’t used very much. Also, by this movies logic, any top of the food chain predator that works in a pack would make excellent militaristic tools superior to actual military equipment