#robertjuniorjr

           Let’s get this out of the way first, since it’s probably what most people were afraid of. Jurassic World is not a bad movie. The action is solid, the performances are enjoyable, and the dinosaurs eat a lot of people. That being said, Jurassic World is not a great film. It’s enjoyable enough to look past its flaws, but its flaws are still there, and they unfortunately hold the film back from greatness.

           The most glaring issue I had with the film was the amount of unnecessary subplots. The kids in the film feel like nothing more than placeholder characters that they forgot to develop. The brothers get one throwaway line of development throughout the film regarding their parents’ divorce, but that aspect of their story is literally never brought up again. Their story is completely irrelevant to the film’s overarching plot, and by the end of the film it feels like the brothers are exactly where they were at the beginning of the film. Their experiences don’t change them at all, so the only reason for including them in the film was to have kids run from dinosaurs.  They don’t even know how to work a unix system.

           There’s also the subplot regarding the weaponization of velociraptors. For real. Honestly, the idea of InGen becoming militarized over the course of 20 years or so isn’t a bad idea. It’s the specific idea of weaponizing freakin’ velociraptors that really makes me scratch my head. I know that the military regularly uses service dogs, but from my limited understanding of how dogs in the military work I always assumed that the dogs were used to sniff out bombs and traps. Not that I wouldn’t love to see a velociraptor general, it’s just that the idea seems a little farfetched.

           Okay, now that the painful part is over, let’s talk about what worked in the film. Dinosaurs. The dinosaurs in this film, especially the Indominus Rex, are intimidating as hell. I mean, Jesus, the Indominus Rex is basically the Predator amped up in size and without any lasers (though it’s not like she needs them). If that thing finds you, there is no escape…unless you’re Chris Pratt. The other dinosaurs were just as entertaining even though they were left out of the spotlight. The velociraptors now respond to commands from Chris Pratt, but have no fear, they’re still killing machines.

           One of my favorite aspects of the movie was actually the relationship between Pratt and the raptors. It’s not like the movie was Marley and Me with dinosaurs, but it was refreshing to see a relationship form between a human and a dinosaur other than the relationship one’s mouth has with food.

Speaking of Pratt, he was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film. His character, Owen, was recruited out of the Navy to train dinosaurs, because I guess the Navy has a dinosaur training route now. For the entire running time of the film Pratt’s character felt like Indiana Jones had accidentally crossed over into the universe of Jurassic World. Seriously, just give Pratt a hat and a whip already. He’s charismatic and aggressively likable, but he can also carry dramatic weight when necessary. Dallas Bryce Howard was enjoyable as well, playing the stuck-up CEO of the park who gets her hands dirty in order to save her nephews. The nephews themselves are serviceable dinosaur fodder, and that’s about all I have to say about their performances. Nobody’s performance made me gag, so that’s a plus. Unfortunately, Jeff Goldblum is nowhere to be found.

Other than the action and performances, there’s not really much to talk about when it comes to Jurassic World. The film isn’t reaching for any higher ideas other than the notion that dinosaurs are good at killing people. You get glimpses of what could be an interesting analysis of the ethics behind genetic modification, but those ideas are quickly pushed aside to make room for product placement and scenes of vicious natural selection. There’s also this odd sense of self-awareness throughout the film that doesn’t really add anything to it. Jurassic World knows it’s just a big budget monster movie designed to thrill audiences and sell toys, and it wants people to know that it knows it. I just don’t know why.

Overall, I enjoyed Jurassic World. Yes, it’s flawed, but the film succeeds where it counts and I don’t regret buying my movie ticket. It’s nowhere near as good as Jurassic Park, but really, what movie is?

You know a film is well-directed when it can get under your skin without having to resort to a smorgasbord of jump scares, violence and gore. Such is the case with “Nightcrawler,” the new film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a sociopathic news correspondent who spends his nights seeking out the most violent and disturbing video footage around Los Angeles. “Nightcrawler” is a rare beast, one that asks audiences to laugh at the film while also posing some interesting and important questions regarding what the news is versus what it should be. It’s satire done right, and thankfully, the film is also hugely entertaining.

“Nightcrawler” opens with Gyllenhaal’s character, Louis Bloom, working as a petty thief stealing scrap metal to sell to a scrapyard owner. After happening upon a car accident and witnessing a couple of men with video cameras document the accident, he learns that local news stations are willing to pay for graphic footage of accidents and crimes. He promptly buys a police scanner and a camcorder before deciding to pursue a career as a stringer, someone who records graphic accidents and crimes in order to sell the footage to the highest bidding news station.

Bloom struggles a bit at first, but after a few failed attempts at getting good footage, he realizes that he has to take risks that other stringers won’t in order to make a name for himself. He gets better at finding shocking scenes, but it doesn’t take long for his ambition to set him down a terrifying path.

Bloom’s ambition is actually one of the main focuses of the film. Much of his dialogue sounds like it was lifted verbatim either out of a self-help book or a marketing textbook. He views every decision he makes as a business decision, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each option. Although it doesn’t seem like it at first, Bloom is rational to a fault. He cannot connect to a single person, and throughout the entirety of the film, he is not shown to have one friend. He views people as either rewards or obstacles, and he isn’t above disposing of an obstacle entirely in order to get what he wants. He is the perfect sociopath, and as a result, one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever seen in a film.

Watching Bloom work is riveting. He is utterly disconnected from the rest of the world, and because of this, he makes for an astounding businessman. His tactics would be lauded in a corporate culture, and his knack for manipulation would make him an intimidating negotiator.

Obviously, a morally conscience audience would never root for Bloom, but that’s all part of the satirical genius of “Nightcrawler.” Bloom’s story is, by all accounts, an uplifting success story of a young, ambitious man who starts out with nothing and lifts himself up by the bootstraps in order to become one of the most renowned figures in his industry. Society has become increasingly focused on individual success within the business world, placing a higher value on the ability to make money instead of the ability to help other people. Based solely on corporate values, Louis Bloom should be regarded as a hero.

“John Wick” is a pretty simple movie to sell. Keanu Reeves plays a retired hitman who is drawn back into the fray after some Russian mobsters steal from him. On paper, it sounds like a simple setup and, for the most part, it is a relatively straightforward revenge story. However, the most impressive pieces of “John Wick” have virtually nothing to do with the pedestrian plot. In fact, what really stood out to me after leaving the theater, aside from the astoundingly high headshot count, was the storytelling potential of the universe that the film had created.

The film begins with Reeves’s character grieving the loss of his wife. The day after she dies, a puppy is delivered to his doorstep with a final goodbye letter from his ailing wife. He cherishes everything he has left of her, including the dog. So when a couple of young Russian thugs break into his house and take the only reminders of his wife he had left, he decides to get back into the underworld game and track down those who wronged him.

This simple setup is handled with a surprising amount of grace and restraint, turning what could have been a quick, generic setup for an action film into something emotionally resonant. Reeves shows off an emotional intensity that he’s never really shown before, and by the time the action starts, viewers are already invested in seeing Wick exact revenge upon the young Russians. Reeves sells the character of Wick like no one else could, and it is invigorating to see him back in action hero mode. Watching Reeves perform a majority of his own stunts is exhilarating, and it only further proves his dedication as an actor.

Now, no action film would be worth mentioning if the actual action of the film was subpar. Thankfully, the action scenes in “John Wick” are some of the best choreographed action sequences of the year. The actors move with such a kinetic grace that the action scenes can sometimes feel like a choreographed dance with firearms and bullets. The handheld camera technique – which has become far too prevalent in action films these days – is thankfully nonexistent in this film.

Instead, the filmmakers opt to allow the audience to actually see the action happening on-screen, rather than letting the audience just assume a scene is intense because the cameraman can’t figure out what to focus on.

When the action slows down, the film shifts into world-building mode. Rules exist within the underground world, and the film does a great job letting the exposition be delivered organically, in favor of awkwardly shoehorning dialogue about the rules and boundaries of this world.

The film doesn’t play down to audiences. It assumes the audience is smart enough to figure out how the world works after showing it on screen, instead of hand-feeding the rules to the audience through unnecessary exposition. This keeps the film’s pacing on beat. The universe it creates is quite interesting as well, and I already want to know more about the world that all these characters operate in.

For a long time, video games wanted to be movies. Games wanted to tell epic tales over the length of 10 to 20 hours, and they wanted to look as realistic as possible while doing it. When games like “Uncharted” began hitting shelves, gamers were rightfully impressed with the presentation and storytelling, with some people describing it as a playable Indiana Jones movie.

However, now that photorealistic graphics are becoming more commonplace in the gaming world and linear storytelling is getting a bit stale, people are beginning to realize that video games have so much more potential than their film counterparts to create living, immersive worlds. This is due in large part to the one facet that differentiates video games from nearly every other form of media: interactivity.

Interactivity in games is something that many cinematic video games have begun to shy away from, and this trend is hugely disappointing to a lot of people.

Now, when I say that a game is interactive, I don’t simply mean that the in-game avatar reacts to button pushes on a controller. A truly interactive game will shape itself around the decisions made by the player, and the game world will alter to reflect those decisions. True interactivity in a video game means that no two game worlds will be exactly alike.

This is something that has sadly been shed by games like “Uncharted,” where every player will see exactly the same scenes at the same points in the game, just like a playable movie.

The thing is, if I wanted to watch a movie, why would I be playing a video game?

That’s not to say that I hate the “Uncharted” series. They’re hugely successful and mostly enjoyable as playable films, but because everything that happens in the game is already set in stone, they can grow stale fast. It’s like watching the same movie four times in a row. There’s nothing surprising in these games, aside from their graphical fidelity, and the actual gameplay mechanics are passable at best.

Another gaping flaw in the design of cinematic games like this is the narrative dissonance on display. For example, in certain non-playable scenes in the game, emphasis is placed on moments where characters are forced to kill someone, and the consequences play out in full. However, when the time comes for the player to take control, enemies are slaughtered by the dozens, yet this doesn’t seem to affect the characters at all.

A well designed game shouldn’t have narrative dissonance. If I were to watch a film where the main character is remorseful for having to kill somebody, regardless of who they were, I would be a little taken aback if they were to suddenly go on a murdering spree in order to get from point A to point B. Characters’ actions should be consistent with their moral values, and in many cinematic games, the actions of the character do not line up with their moral standards.

Sometimes, this dissonance can actually be used to great storytelling effect, like with the “Bioshock” series, but those games aren’t cinematic, nor are they trying to be. Instead, the designers have embraced benefits of an interactive medium, and in doing so they crafted one of the most highly respected series in the industry.

The “Bioshock” games don’t want you to just sit back on the couch and watch the action play out. They require you to be invested in the game, forcing you to build up your character with genetic modifications that have some pretty interesting ramifications, and because the game is presented entirely in first person, the player sees the story unfold the same way that the main character does.

Games should be intimate, and a great game will create a relationship between the player and the world instead of simply putting the world on display. The video game industry used to look at the film industry with jealousy, and many developers often put out cinematic games in an effort to validate themselves as artists. To me, though, that’s missing the entire point of an interactive medium.

Theaters are always looking for an excuse to throw a surcharge on top of the price of a regular movie ticket. When James Cameron's “Avatar” hit theaters, theater chains scrambled to install 3D projectors into their auditoriums. The gimmick of 3D allowed theaters to tack on a few extra dollars to the price of a ticket, and for a good few years, Hollywood churned out cheap 3D movies one after another. Thankfully, the 3D fad is finally beginning to die down, but theater chains have already begun push for the next movie going gimmick.

Enter the off-brand IMAX experience.

Certain theater chains, like Cinemark and Regal, have begun installing their own large-format theaters in an attempt to draw bigger crowds. Now, Columbia has one at the Regal Stadium 14 theater, and it is dubbed the RPX (Regal Premium Experience) auditorium.

So, is the "Premium Experience" simply the next iteration of the 3D gimmick? Well, yes and no.

Over the weekend, I was able to catch a screening of “Dracula Untold” in the RPX theater. Right off the bat (pun very much intended), I can tell you the screen is big. In fact, the new screen is a cool floor-to-ceiling screen that honestly looks pretty impressive. It's just a shame that most films being shown in RPX probably aren't going to be filmed in IMAX's standard 70mm film format, so the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen make it seem unnecessary to have such a large screen. After about an hour of the film, I had forgotten that the screen actually reached from the floor to the ceiling. The screen sounds awesome on paper, but without the proper media format, the RPX theater looks like a regular theater screen, albeit marginally wider.

However, the audio quality of the RPX theater is something to behold. The RPX theater is certainly louder than your average theater auditorium, but the loudness isn't what won me over. The clarity of the sound effects was top notch, and it really helped with my immersion into the film. The battle scenes of “Dracula Untold” were elevated by the brutal audio design of the swords clanging and bodies being tossed around the battlefield, and it was gratifying to get to hear that audio design in full. I would love to see a horror film in the RPX theater, though I would love it even more if a studio ever decided to film a horror picture in 70mm.

So what else is there to differentiate the RPX theater from the rest of the movie screens in Columbia? Not much, actually. The seats are leather and have extra cushioning, and you can put the armrests up if you so desire. The entrance has some neat blue lighting and an RPX logo, but none of these things are really that crucial to the moviegoing experience. It’s nice to see Regal trying to make the moviegoing experience more comfortable, but paying a surcharge to sit in a marginally cushier seat isn’t something that I would normally do.

This weekend, I was lucky enough to catch a free screening of the new Michael Fassbender film, “Frank.” Judging by the trailers, I thought “Frank” was going to be an enjoyable, if trite, film that wore its quirkiness on its sleeve.

At first glance, the film seemed like it was aiming to showcase the creative process of a strange and unstable band. I thought it was going to ask the audience to laugh at the lack of reasonable behavior on display by the band members, but to my surprise, the film actually ended up showing a much deeper and tragic side of the band.

The film opens with Don (Domhall Gleeson) trying desperately to compose a song while walking around his quaint hometown. He futilely posts to social media sites, unnecessarily documenting every moment of his life for a group of 16 or so followers to read.

Things change for Don when he witnesses the band, SORONPRFBS, trying to stop their keyboardist from drowning himself in a river. Don is then invited by the enigmatic Frank (Fassbender) to join the band and replace their keyboardist, much to the chagrin of the band’s theremin player Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

After playing one miserable live show, Don becomes so desperate to have his music liked by people that he makes the utterly irrational decision to move in with the band and live with them in the middle of the woods. This moment in the film provides a strange dichotomy in which the film begins to grow darker while also growing seemingly more whimsical.

The cracks in the characters’ psyches begin to show, making for some amusing imagery but also revealing a much darker subtext to the film. Don begins to document, and in certain cases exploit, the quirks and eccentricities of the band members, slowly unraveling the camaraderie that used to exist between the band members.

However, the film doesn’t explicitly show how damaging it is to the mentally ill or impaired for people to romanticize their problems. There are multiple times in the film that Don wishes that he had a traumatic childhood or a mental impairment so that he could compose better music. Too often will I come across a film centered around a disabled or traumatized character that romanticizes the impairment to a point where it becomes desirable to the audience.

In reality, as this film hints at, making a showcase out of someone like Frank is inviting the internet to scrutinize their entire livelihood. The fallout of Don’s grabs at fame is truly felt during the third act of the film, and the film takes on a decidedly and fittingly more somber tone. The characters’ quirks are still present, but the audience isn’t invited to laugh at them any longer.

Once the curtain is pulled back on these characters, it becomes clear that these people don’t exist simply to be a one-dimensional cutout for people to laugh at. These characters are more than just vessels to deliver a universal truth to the main “normal” character, and the fact that the film is aware of these expectations makes it all the more satisfying to see Don become disillusioned with Frank. As Don slowly realizes that Frank is not someone he should necessarily look up to, the film becomes a fantastic character study of someone who unhealthily idolizes a person simply because they have a talent that he doesn’t.

By the end of the film, it is clear to both Don and the audience that looking at only one aspect of someone’s life is simply another form of objectification. Idolizing someone’s weirdness or envying someone’s mental trauma is juvenile, and “Frank” does a great job at luring the audience in with humor before revealing how a person, a true character, is more than just the quirks that make them different.

There are no good new releases currently in theaters.

If you want to have a good time at the theater this upcoming weekend, just see “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and if you’ve seen it already, I would recommend watching it again rather than going to see any new releases in September. Every year, the movie industry suffers a drought of good content from September until November, and 2014 is no exception.

Thankfully, the offerings of video-on-demand have grown exponentially over the past few years, making this time of the year a bit more pleasant to get through for film buffs.

While scouring a few digital libraries, I came across the 2011 indie horror film “The Innkeepers.” Seeing as Halloween is about six weeks away, I decided to get into the spirit of the holiday early, and I gave “The Innkeepers” a watch. Thankfully, I don’t regret my decision.

To start off, I was pleasantly surprised by the film, but not in a way that I had expected from a horror film. I went in hoping to be terrified of turning off the lights while watching the film, but, to be frank, the film really isn’t that scary. Sure, it has its moments of terror, but they are relatively few and far between. What I was truly surprised by was how much I ended up caring about the characters.

The story is pretty straightforward. Two hotel clerks, Claire and Luke, are working the front desk during the final weekend of the hotel’s operation. They’re on a quest to prove that the hotel is actually haunted, as is suggested by some local urban legends.

The film does a great job of characterizing these two as a couple of semi-lazy outcasts finally trying to do something to garner the attention of their peers. It starts off with a healthy dose of banter between the two, firmly establishing the characters’ personalities while giving just enough exposition to explain why they do what they do. In fact, a large majority of the film is dedicated to developing these characters and building them up before tearing them down in the finale.

It’s an effective technique, and one that is unfortunately quite rare to find in horror films. The film plays the psychological game for a while, refusing to say whether or not the urban legends are actually true. It is disturbing to watch the psyches of these two likable people slowly unravel.

It’s the film’s strongly established sense of normalcy that makes it so effective as a horror film, more so than most horror films that just devolve into a barrage of jump-scares and an endless amount of gore. Watching a world that seems immediately familiar with characters that can be easily empathized with slowly twist into a ghost story from hell is unsettling, to say the least.

Many horror films use humor to relieve tension, but “The Innkeepers” does a great job of blending the two together. Sometimes I found myself laughing with the characters out of fear; other times the scares are underlined with a sense of self-awareness. Eventually, it becomes clear that humor can’t always save you from what’s lurking in the darkness.

I’ve always been a big fan of horror films that can be disturbing without relying on violence or gore. I believe that disturbing imagery can certainly supplement a horror film, but only when the filming techniques are already solid. Gore and violence should not be a substitution for creating actual tension and dread with the camera.