#if i see another person say jurassic park's dinosaurs have always been monsters?

[jojirarambles]

Gonna analyze the JP rex’s behavior because fuck it

Okay for my first post on Tumblr I decided I’m gonna go on an analysis of Rexy’s behavior during the first Jurassic Park’s breakout scene because why the hell not. Don’t worry I’m a biologist in training, I know what I’m talking about (not really).

Okay, first a dumb nitpick. The iconic scene with the water tremors is... Really not what would happen. The T.rex is big, but not so big to make the ground literally shake. Elephants are well known to sneak up on people with ease and they’re just a bit smaller than a T.rex.

With that out of the way, the actual breakout scene: She rips out the wires, steps out and gives us the money shot with a cool pose and a mighty roar... Except not quite. She first takes a look around, THEN she lets out that iconic roar we all love. If you ask me, I think she’s probably announcing her presence. She’s knowingly leaving her territory and entering an area she doesn’t know, so she checks if that spot is already taken by telling any other potential Tyrannosaurs she’s coming through.

Oh, but then the mayhem starts! Nope, she just... Leaves. There’s no immediate response, so she’s got green light to just explore this new environment. Really, she didn’t actually want anything to do with humans, at most she nudged the car out of curiosity. Everyone would have made it safe and sound...

Until Lex turns the god damn light on. I guess she was trying to catch Alan and Ian’s attention? Which good job girl, you also caught the attention of a 7 ton predator. Way to gp.

So good old Rexy decides to investigate, and curiously she just seems to be generally aware that the light is coming from somewhere around the area since she’s not really looking at the car.

That is until Tim closes the door.

Well kids, you got her full attention now. So she starts inspecting the car. Like, really inspecting it, sniffing it around to try and get a good sense of what this weird, shiny thing is.

And that’s when she sees there’s something inside. I don’t think she fully understands there’s food in there yet, she’s probably still seeing the car as a whole, but there’s definitely something weird about it, so she roars and tries to get a reaction.

Then she sees the kids moving inside, and she nudges the car. That’s when the kids start screaming and moving all erratically, with Tim trying to wrestle the light out of his sister’s hands and screaming at her to turn it off.

Of course Rexy is seeing and hearing all of it, and that’s when she realizes there’s definitely food in there, plus all that sudden movement and screaming must be sending her predatory instincts into overdrive.

And have you ever seen any video or photo of a big cat in a zoo trying to get a treat out of one of those enrichment balls?

Yeah.

Luckily for the kids there’s a thick enough panel of glass between them and those banana sized teeth, so she can’t get them that way. But that’s fine of course, because there’s always plan B. What’s plan B you ask?

Well flip the car over of course. The top of the thing is armored, so maybe its underside will be softer? That’s how a lot of animals work, there’s a reason predators start eating their prey’s guts a lot of the time, so the logic is sound.

She then bites the tire too, I’m guessing out of curiosity or trying to test different spots. Of course the tire gets completely pierced by the teeth, freeing a lot of air... And making noise, which catches Rexy’s attention... And makes her bite it again.

She gets completely side tracked by the tire and starts trying to tear it off, and I honestly think here she’s just playing and has completely forgotten about the snack.

Not that the kids are in any less peril anyways, with an animal the size of an elephant crushing the car they’re currently trapped in with its sheer size alone. Thankfully Alan’s quick thinking and knowledge of animal behavior are here to save the day!

He grabs a flare and lights it on. This catches Rexy’s attention, because new weird sparkly thing. Then, he throws the flare back into the paddock, and Rexy follows it because she really wants to check out what the hell that new weird thing is. That’s it folks, the day is saved!

Right. For some reason, Ian decides to grab another flare and light it up too. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention because hey, another weird sparkly thing! Then Ian starts running with the flare, and throws the flare while running. The thing is, the point of the flare is giving Rexy a new target to check out, but if you start running and screaming then you become a target. A target that acts an awful lot like prey at that.

So Ian runs straight to the toilet for some reason, and Rexy lunges at him, running her head straight into the small hut because let’s be real, that thing wouldn’t be able to withstand a full charge of something that big lol.

Anyways, the whole thing comes crashing down, leaving poor Gennaro exposed. Now something that’s interesting here is that she doesn’t instantly eat him, she actually checks him out at first! She’s actually curious about him, tilting her head like a quizzical dog.

And eats him. So long for the whole “won’t see you if you don’t move” thing I guess.

Fortunately Gennaro being eaten alive gives Grant enough time to get Lex out of the car (which he would have had even if Ian hadn’t tried to be a hero anyways but I digress), but before he can get Tim, Lex screams. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention, who must be having the time of her life with all this stimulation and she comes back to the car.

We get this scene where she’s supposedly not seeing Grant and Lex because they’re not moving, but IIRC the Lost World novel retconned that to her just not being hungry anymore and honestly I’m gonna roll with that because even if she didn’t see them there’s no way she didn’t smell them. I think she just lost interest in humans after eating a goat and a lawyer, especially when she has a much bigger toy right there!

I honestly think she’s not even trying to get Tim out and eat him anymore, the way I see it she’s just playing around with the car, pushing it around and generally just dicking around with it for the hell of it.

Then she pushes it off a magically appearing cliff like your cat knocking over that one glass at the edge of your kitchen table, either because she wants to get rid of the used toy or simply because she thinks it’s funny. Or because Spielberg didn’t tell her there was suddenly a cliff where she had just walked off. Then she gives one final roar to the camera, which is probably just for cinematic effect tbh.

So... Yeah, that’s all. As you can see, one of the best things of the scene is that the T.rex is... Just an animal. It’s not a movie monster going on a rampage, everything it does is completely normal animal behavior. This is big part of what makes the scene just so good and tense. It just feels real, you can actually believe the protagonists are being put in danger by a wild animal. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what dinosaurs are. Just animals.

Unlike mister “wants to watch the world burn” over here.

[redrosesartcabin]

Self indulgent series: Part 2.1

Life: Part 1

(Kenji x female reader, authors perspective) (the reader is a singer) (also: Some angst in here. I dunno why, but I just love writing some angst with fluff endings xD)

“So, let me get this straight”, the interviewer said, bewildered by the story the singer and songwriter Red Rose had brought up, “you met your now husband, Kenji Kon no less, on Jurassic World as one of the kids who got stranded for five months?”

“That’s correct”, she said. She had answered that very question a million times, but she couldn’t fault them for it: It was an unbelievable story (though she started to wonder how not everyone was aware by now that she was one of the teens back than).

“It was in December of 2015. I was thirteen years old and exited to be one of the first teens to visit Camp Cretaceous. I have to admit, I wasn’t and still am not, maybe even less than before, the biggest fan of dinosaurs. I’m not particularly interested in facts about them, but I definitely was interested in seeing some Dino action! So when I won first place at the talent show of my school-“

“Unsurprisingly”, the interviewer interluded at which the audience gave a collective chuckle.

“-I was still very excited about going to Jurassic World. My parents never wanted to go and in retrospect I can understand why. But you know: I was a naïve thirteen-year-old and didn’t think much about the consequences of the past. What happened at Jurassic Park you know? I was convinced Jurassic World was different and all worked out. Boy was I wrong! We all know it now! But at least I can say that I got, besides trauma, lifelong friends and my amazing husband out of it”

“That definitely can’t be disputed”, the interviewer agreed. Red Rose found him quite pleasant. Although he was a chatterbox, he was still very respectful and didn’t poke too much into the Jurassic World story: Although she was, for the most part, over the trauma, it was still a work in progress and it’s not a time she always remembers fondly. On most days she remembers the good moments she had with her newfound friends there, but sometimes she could feel the adrenaline rush through her as she thought of dinosaurs trying to eat her and her fellow campers. She saw flashes of sharp teeth and could feel hot, stinking breath and hear growls drawing shivers down her spine.  Red Rose liked to focus on the human part of the experience, so she preferred being able to tell the tale of Jurassic World the way she wanted without being asked too much…

 “So, Kon helped you reach fame if I remember correctly?”, he asked.

“Definitely! Though, I mean: I was able to do most of what I’m doing. Teaching myself how to use certain programs. I taught myself how to sing and I’ve always written my own stuff…But I certainly wasn’t good at marketing myself or making myself grow.

Kenji and I became boyfriend and girlfriend when I was sixteen and he was eighteen. That same year we went on vacations for three weeks in the Caribbean’s. And “, she let out a laugh. The camera closed up on her and caught a smile and a glance that looked so touched by love anyone could feel how much she adored her spouse, “I remember how we went on the private part of the beach Kenjis father had purchased. I sat down on a hammock and a guitar and just started improvising and singing. Little did I know my boyfriend -gosh that sounds weird to say now- was filming me. He put it up on Instagram, and he already had quite a following back then, so it gained quite some attention. Though not necessarily because it was a nice scenery or any of that: But because people genuinely liked how I sing and the melody I had come up with. And well… it got wild from there. People soon requested I make my own Instagram page for making music.

A year later I was asked if I would like to produce some music and well… then my career started”

“That’s honestly such a cool and sweet story. Though how about an even sweeter reunion? Please welcome: Kenji Kon”

Red Rose got up from her seat with a wild jump, not as the eccentric, elegant yet kind of crazy minded artist, but as y/n Kon. As the wife who hadn’t seen her husband in person for a month because of the production of yet another movie starring him as the protagonist.

The crowd clapped in awe of him, as fans. She wanted to clap because her heart was clapping too. Her heart was dancing a tango inside of chest as though she was seeing her middle school crush in the hallway. His dark eyes, ridden with depth met her y/e.c. ones and all they could read in each other’s eyes was happiness and love.

This happened within miliseconds, but it passed by in slow motion for her, so she perceived herself running towards him with calm. For the rest of the world however she was perceived as looking like a golden retriever who had missed his owner whilst they were at work and were ready to play.

It was adorable. It was downright touching how the couple met each other halfway and gave each other a long, passionate yet gentle kiss (so that it wouldn’t be too inappropriate for life TV).

“Not to be giddy, but you really are a couple to die for”, the interviewer said. The audience half chuckled half yelled in agreement. She felt her cheeks blush in a deep dark shade of red and heard her husband chuckle in embarrassment. She looked down to her and whispered “Hello love”

 Kenji had, unsurprisingly, had found joy in being actor. Being dramatic and showing his face on camera all the time? Perfect!

And he honest to god was a great actor. Though it did get annoying from time to time that he was casted as either the pretty faced villain or the charming, perfect love interest. Sometimes he was even both.

Y/n didn’t like to admit it, but she was quite jealous at the beginning when she saw him kiss other men and women on screen. It took a big fight for her to admit that.

She wasn’t proud of that fight at all. She had been, without wanting to, been very critical of her then fiancé (it was about six months before they got married). She would call him several times a day when he was on set of a particularly spicy rom com and observe his socials every couple of minutes. Y/n remembers her friends teasing her about it in the beginning and then eventually scold her. “Don’t you trust him?”, they had asked and she had answered, “I do….”, and they knew she was telling the truth, yet there was more behind it.

Kenji soon caught up and noticed her strange clinginess.

“What is up with you, Y/N? You know I have work to do! You can’t call me that often on set!”, he had yelled when the topic came up. He had been visiting for the weekend before he would go back on set.

“Why not? Can a girl not talk to her fiancé?”, she had asked with a sharp undertone

“Of course, you can darling. But twenty times a day is simply too much!”, he argued, yet he tried keeping his tone softer.

“I don’t call that often”, she pouted

“Oh YES you do!”, he put his phone out and showed her the times she had called just the other day. She counted about thirty, “I was nice with that number!”

“And? So what? You can just put your phone on silent”

“Yes, of course I can. This isn’t about solving the notification issue it’s about solving your trust issues towards me. Why don’t you trust me?”, as he asked the question his anger had subsided and genuine hurt showed in his eyes in his voice, “you monitor me like I’m an inmate”

“I…”, she was only able to say, her throat suddenly seemed dry, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I…”, she couldn’t find the right words to explain it. It hurt too much to admit. She thought she had been over that thought pattern a long time ago, but it had returned to her.

“What? What have I done to deserve this?”, he asked, “Why are you even with me, if who I am disturbs you so much?”

And that… that sentence had hurt her more than that ugly thing inside of her she hadn’t wanted to face.

“You fool!”, she screamed in fury as the sentence he had uttered stung, her eyes filling with endless tears, “How could you ever think you disturb me? You are the most beautiful, wonderful human being I know, inside and out. And on top of that you are incredibly kindhearted. And that’s why I’m like this… I don’t want to lose you. And it’s not that I don’t trust you: I highly doubt you’d ever cheat on anyone. You are too kind for that. But I fear… I feared when you are together with all these good-looking actors you might not find me enough anymore. I know it’s stupid, but you see: The past haunted me again. When I was called fat. When I was called not-good-enough. When I read social media comments saying you’re out of my league and I don’t deserve you. Ugly words that ate me up inside when I was a child and young teen. I thought I was past that but I…I…”, now the tears were too many and her words died with hiccups. She felt his form surround her in a hug that felt so warm and yet sharp as knifes. She loved his touch but felt guilty for not opening up about this sooner. She had never wanted to be like this, but alas she had been too much of a coward to burden him or herself with this.

“Love”, he whispered after comforting her for a couple of minutes, “Look at me”

She lifted her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, her lips were dark pink, and tears had run streaks across her cheeks. It broke Kenji to have hurt her so deeply, yet he also knew that it wasn’t his fault. It was however his responsibility, to clear this up once and for all.

“Love listen”, he started, “I completely understand your jealousy. But we’ve been together for almost ten years and in all that time, I’ve never encountered a woman more incredible, deeply fascinating and intrinsically beautiful as you. No acted kiss could bring me away from you, no sexy actor could keep my mind from ever wishing for more than to be by your side. I’ve been by your side for almost six years: What should change now?

The monster from your past is, as already stated: Past. Their words were untrue. These people were in pain themselves when they caused you pain. You were a target to unleash the inner turmoil of others. It’s no excuse but it is the explanation. Those who feel they must hurt others are those who seek the most attention and power because they’d be devoid of having a self. I should know: I used to be similar to that. And I had my phase of jealousy as well, you know?”

“Really?”, y/n managed to ask

“Oh yes! I was in rage every time I heard you talk about any of your guy friends back in high school. Difference is I could hide it better because we were apart a lot of the time. I feared you would find someone who had more of a personality than me. I was no longer sure looks would cut it”

“Gosh love”, she answered, her voice love drunken, “you burst of personality. You aren’t just a pretty boy or well… pretty man. You have so much spirit and energy to give to the world. You are the definition of happiness and sunshine. And on top of that you are an incredibly talented man with so much to show. You wield the human mind and emotions so well you can convert yourself to be something other than yourself convincingly-”

“See?”, he asked, “and just like you love me like that and see all that good I sometimes don’t recognize, I see it in you… I always love you”

“I love you too. I’m sorry”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m so happy we had this talk. It was much needed”

“Yeah”, she hummed as her lips almost touched his and within seconds the couple found themselves passionately kissing

Ever since then they hadn’t had any of these kinds of self-worth problems. They’d say I love you on a daily basis and gave each other compliments whenever they could.

One thing the fans found especially cute was that, without fail, Red Rose would comment on each of Kenji’s selfies and comment “hey gorgeous, you single?” and he’d answer every single time, “Sure Sugar. Meet me at seven on your favorite street-corner”

One time they took a picture of each other on a nice-looking street corner. Kenji had called the picture “finally found the street corner. Been waiting to meet this lady for a while, apparently her name is ‘your wife’, which is peculiar but otherwise she seems nice”.

The picture even went viral and became one of the all-time favorite celebrity pictures of 2026.

  After the talk-show they flew back in his helicopter.

They were in New York city and y/n looked at the city landscape with a fascinated gaze as she observed the flickering lights of the big apple.

Kenji looked at her with eyes shining almost as bright. He loved her love for everything new she sees. He had noticed that the first time she had seen the watering hole. He wasn’t really interested in her that way yet. He was fifteen and she thirteen, that makes quite a difference at this age. But still he couldn’t but smile as she looked at the dinosaurs with big eyes. And he loved that she hadn’t lost that spark, even as she got older, even as they came together and grew and changed together.

Y/n noticed his gaze and shifted hers to look at him.

‘What a beautiful man. I’ve missed him so’ she thought to herself.

“I missed you”, he said as though he had read her mind just now. Maybe he had. They had been together for so long they were often able to read each other’s subtle shifts in expression. Quite a beautiful thing.

“I missed you too”, she simply answered, “did you plan this talk show surprise?”

“Yes and no”, he admitted, “I was meeting up with Donavan O’Connor, the director of the ‘Elaine, the one?’ series. When calling Donavan, he told me had been to talking to Ray (the interviewer) and he was casually pointing out the funny coincidence you were meeting up for and mention the funny coincidence, that you’d have an interview with him that same day I come to the city and well… needless to say I called Ray and arranged things... I just had to. Couldn’t miss the opportunity to surprise my beautiful wife”

She smiled at that. A shy and flattered smile that reminded Kenji of when they were teens.

 They landed on the roof of a nice-looking hotel. They had decided to stay the night here in New York before travelling back to Ireland… yes: Yes Ireland.

Most celebrities lived in L.A., but Kenji and y/n had preferred living a bit apart in an old mansion near the coast of south Ireland, close to the northern border. Although Kenji was a people person, he didn’t like the dishonesty and lying in the industry and wanted to get away from that with his wife who thought the same.

Besides: It was a beautiful country.

As they entered the room, they felt peace and happiness as well as a certain kind of tension arise.

Needless to say, there was another kind of reuinion going on that night...

(Sorry about that short ending, I had to heavily edit that ‘cause it originally was a... well... non Pg scene xD)

[yourfanvivitran]

It should come as no surprise that John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon were students in the same film class, that they created Dark Star together, and that they both had a great affinity for 1951’s The Thing From Another World. If you put Ridley Scott’s Alien, which O’Bannon wrote, next to Carpenter’s The Thing, the parallels cannot be contended. A group of people, bound together almost exclusively by their careers, are isolated and trapped in their own environment with a murderous monster. One by one, they are picked off by this alien beast and are forced to pull out all the stops just to survive. The tension in both movies is suffocating. The suspense stays well after the credits roll.

So, why did Alien excel and why did The Thing fail?

Alien was heralded as a science fiction-horror masterpiece, raking in over $200 million at the box office. The Thing, although now recognized as one of Carpenter’s best films to rival even the likes of Halloween, barely exceeded its $15 million budget by $4 million. What’s more is that critics panned The Thing almost unanimously after its 1982 release. And to what point?

When you compare the 2 movies, it objectively doesn’t make much sense. When you sit down and watch The Thing, without even thinking of its much more popular predecessor, it still doesn’t quite add up. There is not much I can say about The Thing that hasn’t already been said before. It’s well-known, now - the writing, the acting, the practical effects, the cinematography? Masterfully done. No arguments. So what went wrong?

The most popularly accepted explanation was that it just wasn’t the right year for it. In 1982, The Thing had to contend with the Summer of Spielberg, being critiqued alongside horror giant Poltergeist and science fiction treasure E.T. How could a stark and grim story of distrust and gore stand alongside such beloved classics?

But in tandem with these films and also calling back to the success of Alien, Carpenter cites reception from various focus groups: they hated the ending.

It should be assumed at this point that if you have not yet seen The Thing, you are sorely missing out. All the same, however, be wary of spoilers.

The end of The Thing is bitter, to put it lightly. Childs (Keith David) trudges through Antarctic snow, lit by the burning wreckage of Outpost 31, towards R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russel) who sits alone, already half buried. They observe their inevitable deaths, and drink to the supposed demise of their shapeshifting predator.

A lot is left out to die in the snow.

According to Carpenter, this ending was seen by test audiences as too dismal. And rightfully so, when you take into consideration the other popular releases of 1982. Carol Anne is ultimately saved, along with the rest of her family, at the end of Poltergeist. Elliot embraces E.T. before he finally returns home. And going further back, even Ripley is able to escape the xenomorph by the skin of her teeth and secure herself the title as one of the greatest “Final Girls” ever put to the silver screen.

And what of MacReady and Childs?

Well, that’s up to your imagination, Carpenter told a test audience member who asked who the final host was at the end of the movie.

“Oh, god. I hate that,” they responded.

As a writer, this loose ends style of concluding a story is almost expected from a lot of modern works. It’s written this way in order to haunt the reader, to linger and adhere itself to the real world in the most sardonic of ways. Think Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” This almost anticlimactic close of the curtain arrived in the literary world long before it found its place in film, but it’s a big point of contention in mainstream criticism.

Dark or incomplete conclusions have been met with the most scathing of responses. Beware the black cutaway of Sopranos fame. Or the near-universal outcry against the third Mass Effect game that grew so much, the developers created a morsel of DLC content that maybe kind of confirmed a more optimistic fate for our dear Shepard.

But even for the horror genre, The Thing seemed unprecedented. The only fate darker to fall upon a mainstream protagonist was Ben’s untimely death in Night of the Living Dead. The tragedy of both movies is palpable - all this trouble to survive against inhuman killers, all this trouble to outlive something gruesome and maybe even make the world a better place, and what was left to show for it?

In short, Carpenter’s science fiction terror was too much of a bummer.

I personally did not take much of a liking to horror until much later in life. My parents didn’t filter the media I consumed as much as they probably should have, and I was scarred early on by movies as cheesy and entertaining as The Lost Boys and Blade. It wasn’t until late adolescence and into college that I set out to catch up.

My roommate at the time of this resolution had been a fan of horror her whole life, her favorites being Halloween, Candyman, and The Thing. Having already known a good deal about the former two, I decided to strap in for The Thing for the first time ever.

These days, I always have several soap boxes on retainer, just waiting for the next unwitting recipient of my usually-beer-induced rants. Brian Jones was killed, Jaws single handedly endangered sharks, banning books is a stupid practice, representation in media is important, etc. Predictably, one of these soap boxes is the general lack of appreciation of The Thing, both at the time of its release and today (it does not even make the top 100 on Rotten Tomatoes’s highest rated horror movies).

And yet, at the same time, if The Thing had achieved the credit it deserved upon release, I may not like it as much as I do today.

I make a point to not read too much about movies I am feverishly anticipating, and revel in the feeling of going into a well-known movie knowing as little as possible. Most of the time, it makes for the best viewing experience, but I’m sure I don’t even have to point this out.

This was my experience seeing The Thing for the first time. I was on winter break, staying at my parents’ house for the holidays. Everyone else had gone to bed, and I stayed up late in the living room, curled up under layers of blankets, content in perfect darkness save for the television.

I had no idea what to expect, as I had not been spoiled by any TV show making any blatant references and had not done any prior reading into the film itself. And I was absolutely delighted from beginning to end.

What stays with me the most is the special effects. It’s true what they say - that practical effects hold up better than CGI alone. And the production team didn’t cut any corners in this department. Stan Winston and his team, who were later responsible for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, helped construct one of the best animatronics in the movie. Rob Bottin, who brought this constantly-morphing creature to life from conception to every last slimy detail, went on to be hailed as a genius in his special effects career. And there is definitely something to be said for the work of cinematographer Dean Cundey whose masterful control of lighting and framing is best seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The extent of my knowledge of the titular creature was that it was an alien. That it was an alien who could consume multiple life forms and take on their shapes was both exciting and terrifying. There’s creative genius in this premise that thrills the science fiction lover in me, and also fascinates the bookworm in me. I had been a fan of Agatha Christie novels as a teenager, and to see a new and outrageous take on the And Then There Were None structure was incredibly novel to me.

The appeal wasn’t just that there was something out there, lying in wait to torturously pick off it’s victims one-by-one. It was that it could have been anyone.

At its core, horror as we know it has deep roots in whodunnit style murder mystery. With the rise of the giallo and the sensation of the slasher, horror movies of this nature are far from uncommon and can be seen as late as 1996 with the Scream franchise. Carpenter himself spurned a new kind of fear with his breakout success with Halloween by refusing to give a bodily face to its main antagonist. Here, with The Thing, he takes the eponymous killer character to the next level by giving it the genetically inherent function of deceiving its prey. Not knowing the true face of your murderer has proven to be inherently bone-chilling.

Even now, hundreds of horror movies under my belt later and still constantly learning, I keep coming back to The Thing. I really cannot think of another movie in my wide array of favorites that I love more than The Thing, and I truly believe it has everything to do with me not knowing anything about it upon my first viewing. Every other movie I can name on my (similar to the subject) constantly changing top 10 list of most beloved horror flicks was, at some point, spoiled for me in some capacity.

Think of how often the twins in The Shining are referenced in cartoons, of all the head spinning jokes made in reference to The Exorcist. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs has become so infamous, that I knew his dialogue (and Buffalo Bill’s) long before I ever saw the movie in full.

I don’t blame these references for ruining these movies. As a super fan, I understand that compulsion to pay tribute. It’s no one’s fault and to their credit that these films take lives of their own. But the repercussions don’t age well in terms of initial viewing experiences.

All that being said, I truly cherish how much I was not exposed to this movie. The unpredictability of the creature and the quiet, looming despair that comes with it create a horror unlike any other.

Although it was a box office flop, The Thing is now a welcome and praised name in both science fiction and horror. Even Quentin Tarantino made it known that The Hateful Eight was primarily inspired on several fronts by Carpenter’s underrated work. However, it has not pervaded pop culture like so many other horror classics have left their indelible mark on film vernacular. And to that end, I hope it remains in that slight shadow of anonymity for all future enthusiasts.

[galacticbugman]

My Jurassic Park/ Jurassic World Top Ten List of  Prehistoric Creatures

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So as some of you may know that I am a crazy Jurassic Park fan. I love the movies and I love the books. I thought it would be a pretty cool idea to post what my favorite dinosaurs are. I have a lot of favorite Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park fandom but what are they? Let us dive into it. So get ready we are taking a short tour through the wilds of Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna for these favorites. Buckle up the the Jeep Wrangler is moving. These are not my photos but are stock and belong to their rightful owners. Spoilers ahead so watch out! If you have not seen the film turn back now you have been warned. 

Number 10: The Stegosaurus 

To begin my list of my favorite Jurassic Park/ Jurassic World Dinosaurs is this beast which was showcased in the search for Sarah scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. This is on my list for it was the first time we saw a plant eater attack a human in the series on screen. This attack was provoked by Sarah Harding as she was photographing the baby Stego in the nest. Her camera goes wonky and scares the baby and it alerts the family. Two big ones come from out of nowhere and start to attack Sarah by trying to swipe her with their large Thagomizers. She is almost killed but the massive tail spikes miss and she is left to live for another day. This was always one of the favorite parts for me in the Lost World for it was the first and only time we see a plant eater attack a human in the original trilogy. You don’t really see any other animal that is a vegetarian try to attack anyone. So this one kind of stands out there as one of the more interesting attacks in the Jurassic Park franchise movie wise. It is also one of the best designed and one of the coolest opening dinosaurs in the franchise. Lets let the heard move on and got down the road shall we. 

Number 9:  Ptranodon 

The Ptranodon is one of the most under used Dinosaurs in the movies until you get to the third and fourth Jurassic movie. However in the first book there is a giant bird cage scene that we eventually got to see in the Jurassic Park /// film. This is a favorite of mine. The bird cage scene is one of the best scenes in the third JP film which many of us think was pretty clunky in some parts. I think it was much better than Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in some aspects. This scene was one of those redeeming qualities in my opinion. In the book Alan Grant, Tim and Lex enter the bird cage and get attacked. In the film it is Alan, Eric, Mr. Kirby, Amanda Kirby, and Billy who wind up getting attacked. It is a terrifying sight but the design of these are pretty cool and just the sheer terror of this scene gives me chills. The photo of this is part of that scene where Billy is being swept down stream and this guy looks at the survivors like “your next!” this part always sends shivers up my spine for some reason. It is just one of those scary moments that shouldn’t really be that scary. I did like them in the Jurassic World scene but their design is not as good as these guys. So I am adding this one as a JP Win instead of a Jurassic World win because even though I liked that movie these looked the most real in my book. This is a much darker and more intense scene for me than the birds escaping the bird cage in Jurassic World. You may have another opinion but this is mine right here. Lets move on. 

Number 8: Procompsagnathus AKA Compys! 

 These little buggers spell trouble! They are one of the scariest little terrors on Isla Sorna. Introduced to the franchise in the Jurassic Park Novel by Michael Crichton. These guys were set up to be used for waist management. These are the first to escape to the main land and attack a few people including a little girl playing on the beach of Costa Rica. That scene was first seen in The Lost World: Jurassic Park but it was in the opening of the Jurassic Park Novel. These guys will jump on you and not let go. Deter Stark learned this the hard way. After getting lost to pee in the woods he falls down a hill after getting turned around after one pops up and scares him. He is soon swarmed not once but twice and getting torn up. They bite him from all angles and dig into his flesh with their claws. Hammond in the novel was given the same treatment. After falling down a hill after grousing about the failure of the park and hiring all the wrong people and thinking about firing all the original park operatives and wanting to make a new park he falls down and hill and meets a similar demise. These guys are one of my favorites because at first they look kind of cute like a few other Jurassic Park dinos. They look like they mean you no harm but if you tick them off then that is when they get you. karma on Jurassic Park does work. You can’t be stupid in Jurassic Park and if you are a smart-alek or just a plain jerk then best beware Karma on Jurassic Park comes in many forms and in some cases it comes in shades of green. 

Number 7: Blue 

  I am a sucker for Raptors and Blue is only my third favorite in the series. Her relationship with Owen is something that was never explored in any concept in the original films or the first two novels. This is a very interesting concept and makes for an interesting story. Some people maybe against what they are doing in the new films but I kind of like the new ones for they broaden the horizon of the story of Isla Nublar’s animals. Blue is a cool Velociraptor and almost has a human like quality of emotions. She trusts Owen and no one else. She is pretty cool and when it comes to defending Owen and his crew. She is one cut above the rest and not just a blood thirsty monster like the other raptors of Isla Nubar and Isla Sorna. She is alright in my book but kind of falls short. I have nothing against her if that is what you are saying she is smart and one heck of a clever girl in the long run. 

Number 6; The Indominous Rex

Okay so now we are in hybrid territory and this guy is the only Hybrid that I really thought was interesting. The Indoraptor was kind of a retread in my book. It was just the Indominous in a different wrapper. This original Hybrid is the one that I really thought was pretty cool. It just comes to show how unhinged animals built in a lab can be. This sucker was completely hostile and would kill anything for fun. It was kind of sad that she really had no clue what to do she was just trying to survive and learn where she belonged in the food chain. She was quite the fighter and was a brutal monster. Her abilities reminded me of a few of the concepts from the original Michael Crichton novel. The Velociraptor that Ellie Sattler finds that could change color and the Carnotaurs that could blend to their surroundings could be the big inspiration pieces to creating this guy. That is just my theory anyway. I am a huge fan of the books so when ever I talk about a dinosaur I always try to mention the novel’s connection with said animal and why it may be like that. I am not one to criticize a Jurassic Park film for all of the parts to the novels are there on screen throughout all of the movies just told a little differently and this monster is just one of those things that I found very neat. 

Number 5: Stiggy 

Used for a more comical effort this guy was actually pretty cool. He was one of my favorite dinosaurs from the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom film. This guy caused chaos and confusion in the very little screen time film. Again with a vegetarian that attacks people. This attack was not really intentional just more accidental in my book. This guy just runs amok and throws chairs and people every which way just for the heck of it. To be very honest this film was very wild with some of the comical stuff like the Indoraptor smiling just before ripping off Ken Wheatly’s arm and then killing him. This one I would count as comedic but it is more Jurassic Park style I guess. This one was a fun one though and has really grown in popularity in the fandom. I have to admit he has a certain personality to him. He comes off kind of cute and a little clumsy at times. ]

Number 4: The Brachiosaurus 

Going back to the original movie and the very sad part of the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom which included this animal is the Brach from 1993. This guy is the one intro Dinosaur that has really stuck with me and like most of us gave us the best exposure to what we were baring witness too during the first Jurassic Park movie. This is almost as Iconic as Rexy herself. This guy is number four for it had to be on the list somewhere. You just can’t forget the one dinosaur that all gave us the big reactions given by Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, Ellie Sattler, and Donald Gennaro. It gave us and reaction of our own that this movie was going to rock. This one has always stuck with me and when it died in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom after director J.A. Bayona said it was this one a little part of me just died inside. It was very sad even though it was not a real creature it was still a big part of the Jurassic Park series but as they say some eras must come to and end and the Jurassic Park era is no more. Welcome to Jurassic World I guess. As sad as it makes me to say that some legends still live on like Rexy from Jurassic Park (1993). So some things just don’t die to easy. Rexy is the most resilient of any of the dinosaurs. 

Number 3: Rexy (Tyrannosaurus Rex) 

Speaking of her majesty! I give you the Queen of the Jurassic Park/ Jurassic World Saga. She has always had a pretty lasting impression on all of us as fans of the Jurassic franchise. This female Rex has stood the test of time in her world gaining a lot of battle wounds over the time of five films soon to be six in 2021 with Jurassic World 3. I have to say she is only third on my list for she maybe iconic but sometimes even the poster children can’t win them all. Still she is pretty high on the list. I love the book and movie versions of this particular dinosaur. In the novel there is a second Rex which is younger than she and is a little more clumsy with a puppies gate. She on the other hand is tough and the young rex knew to stay away from her. In the movie who could forget the “Main Road” scene that first introduced us to her. In the book she is actually seen the first time they arrive to the T-rex Paddock as she eats the goat. The main road is almost the same with a character running out of a car after peeing their pants and totally freaking out with a few differences. Rexy has saved the hides of many a Jurassic Park visitor but I don’t think it was totally on purpose. She is one that always is always going to get the big reaction and I have been very sad that she has kind of been over shadowed by Blue in the recent films and has only been used in only a handful of scenes in the newer chapters of the franchise. Still she outdoes blue anytime. Sorry but she was here first my friends. 

Number 2: The Tiger Striped Velociraptors and the Original Raptors of Jurassic Park and The Lost world: Jurassic Park. 

I count these as one for they are all in the same category. Both of these Raptor clans gave us some of the biggest jump scares in the first two movies. I was not a very huge fan of the ones with the quill in Jurassic Park ///. The original raptors showed us what real terror was like. In the original novels they are just as terrifying and will stop at nothing to rip you to bits. In some cases that is exactly what they are good at. They are almost like the Compy packs but much bigger with bigger teeth and bigger claws. You have to be super smart to out think and fox these guys. The Tigers are my favorite for we see just how their social orders go in just that small scene where they are at the gas station near the worker complex where Nick Van Owen was trying to get a chopper called to pick up the remaining survivors. All the raptors are the top predators of the Jurassic Park series. They have a complex social structure and are hard to bring down. They never give up and they seem to always be on the hunt. They are one of my top favorites for they are just that Clever Girls. I bet you are wondering what is my first over all favorite??? It is not the raptors and not Rexy. Lets take a look at number one.

Number 1: Dilophosaurus AKA Spitter 

This is my favorite dinosaur in the whole Jurassic Park series. I am very upset that this one has only been featured as an actual dinosaur in the first one. It has been eluded to in the last couple of films but that is not good enough. I want to see this one again. This guy is one of my favorites for its very personality. It is kind of cute one minute but then once angered it turns into a frilled nightmare lizard that shoots blinding poison at its target. This one is one of those scenes that give us that “Holy... Did you see that?!” Impression. The difference in this scene from the movie and the book is that in the book Nedry dies outside the Jeep in the movie its pretty much blocked out in the Jeep. The book gets really descriptive which sends shivers down my spine every time I read that. Still my all time favorite dinosaurs for its really interesting surprise attack mode. It is certainly a beautiful but deadly edition to Jurassic Park. 

There you have it my top ten Jurassic Park dinosaurs. Of course I do have a few honorable mentions such as the Mosasaur, Carnotaur, and of course the Certasaur that we only got a few seconds of which I think was a complete let down for that creature and I am not the only one who thinks that. Now I have a mission for you; tell me what your favorite JP dinosaurs are and why. Thank you very much I think we survived another travel through Jurassic Park. Until then I am Zachary AKA Galactic_Bug_Man and I will see you on the trail. 

[armorbirdpress]

Armor Bird Reviews: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - A One-And-A-Half-Year Retrospective

If you have been following my writings and ramblings and original works and DeviantArt favorites for long enough, you'll know that I am unashamedly a dinosaur fan - I never outgrew the phase because despite what people have told me both online and off, palaeontology, like other sciences, is not specifically a child's thing - obviously dinosaurs are cool, but there is a lot of technical stuff that you'd need college degrees to understand in the field, too. While I certainly am a stickler for accuracy when it comes to dinosaur portrayals, however, I am also not ashamed to admit that I have a love for fictional portrayals of them as monsters, too. Jurassic Park, which was - for its time - pretty much a reconciliation between the "prehistoric monster" imagery of dinosaurs in popular culture and the latest discoveries about the actual fossil animals during its production, is my favorite movie of all time, partly for this reason and partly because there's a lot of depth and sophistication to it as well - a sophistication that modern movies seem to be utilizing less and less. Even the Jurassic Park franchise itself was not immune to this trend, and although it still remains my top favorite franchise of fictional media, the changing conceit of what audiences want in an entertaining film has dragged it along for as much of a long and bumpy ride as just about everything else Hollywood has to offer. Still, even in spite of it all, there are a lot of things to like about the sequels we got since that groundbreaking original - I'm admittedly one of those people who actually enjoyed Jurassic Park III, though in fairness I was too young upon first watching it to really pick it apart and analyze its numerous flaws, and I also heaped a lot of praise on Jurassic World upon my first review of it... in hindsight, perhaps a little generously. Although I won't pretend that everything since The Lost World (including TLW itself) is flawless and that the complainers are wrong, even the infamously controversial JP3 had some enjoyable moments in its own right, despite being seen by many as the worst installment of the franchise by quite a margin.

Which leads us to the most recent film of the franchise, 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

I had intended to review this movie for a good, long while - back when I was a more prolific writer I used to write film reviews shortly after seeing the movies in the theater, though schedule concerns have obviously made that too difficult. But there's a silver lining here, in that by not reviewing a film I've seen until much later (...well, much, much, much later as the case may be), I have the time to really sit down and think about what made the movie tick or not, and oftentimes have come down from my rush of excitement by the time I actually get off my tail and write the review itself. There are exceptions, of course, with certain films actually leaving me disappointed as soon as I left the building, but these cases are mercifully rare. I'm happy to say that despite being horrendously imperfect, Fallen Kingdom wasn't one of those cases. I was genuinely entertained by it more than 50% of the time - which is, for better or for worse, the highest compliment I can give the film because, as we shall see, in some ways it really is quite terrible.

As always with my movie reviews: SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!

I watched Fallen Kingdom twice since its release - first in the theater at my home town, and then on rental DVD - and both times, my impression was the same: this movie, in retrospect, plays out much like a big-budget, cinematic fanfiction of the Jurassic Park films or even of Jurassic World (the latter of which I actually consider darkly hilarious for reasons that are highly specific to me exclusively, which you'd only understand if you know what I've written in the past - I'll get to that shortly). This is perfectly understandable, seeing as the director, screenwriter, and production crew have changed considerably from the team that helmed the original trilogy during the ten-year gap between JP3 and JW. Even if the work is canon, it's essentially someone else taking a look at the original franchise material, picking out what they liked about it, and building an original story off of it, oftentimes borrowing characters from the original work and inserting them in (most notably Rexy, and yes, I consider her as much of a character as the humans she menaced in the original movie). Across the board, in all kinds of franchises, this approach tends to fall flat if you don't know about the original work, though I do have to say that there was one very notable exception in the case of Jurassic World, that climactic fight scene with the Indominus rex, which is my favorite part of the movie even if it isn't entirely perfect. Now, I realize that I'm being a bit of a hypocrite by saying that these films are imperfect, because almost a decade ago, a friend and I co-wrote a megacrossover fanfic where Jurassic Park was the most prominent franchise by quite a margin (and didn't even start out that way to boot - my own selfish preferences caused elements of the franchise to slowly bleed in until a recycled plot of the second and third movies took over the whole thing). What makes it truly embarrassing to me is that the fic didn't even need the series' involvement in the first place, and my choice to shove it in anyway was one of the numerous factors that led to it going completely off the rails and turning into a tremendous tangled mess of clumsy writing and mishandled characterization, not just with JP itself but with almost all of the dozen other continua that got dragged in as well. Obviously, the fact that Fallen Kingdom is restricted by its very nature as a sequel to the one franchise only thankfully precludes the sheer absurdity of what my co-writer and I had inadvertently wrought back then, but upon rewatching the film I couldn't help but notice that in a few ways, it does ironically come off as being quite similar to my own old shame, albeit coincidentally, though it still earns points for choosing to be a Jurassic Park/World film and sticking with that conceit, rather than an entirely different film with JP elements shoehorned into it. I've harped on my stupidity as an immature fanfic writer back in the day for long enough, I think, but I felt this was worth mentioning regardless, because like the fic I touched upon above, this is a work I only started having issues with long after the fact, but these days I can't unsee these issues now that I've considered them.

One of the biggest things that stood out to me regarding Fallen Kingdom was that no matter how you slice it, it was trying to be two films at once, and had less time for both than most would have desired. The first half of the movie concerns Isla Sorna being destroyed by a volcano, and everyone trying to get the dinosaurs off of it before they are rendered extinct once again, with another island being noted as their new sanctuary (though of course, one of the antagonists quickly screws that plan over, but more on that later). You could easily make an entire film out of that - exploring the island one last time, dodging potential threats from both the volcano and the dinosaurs themselves, and coming to terms with the fact that not every creature can be saved, and that the end is coming for everyone eventually. The scene with the Brachiosaurus being overtaken by the eruption, with its plaintive wails and iconic rearing silhouette, is proof that such a moral could make a solid closing for this kind of movie, and heck, you could even have the subplot with the executives hoping to exploit the dinosaurs bleed into the movie until, at the very end, you get a scene where their true intentions with the animals are revealed as a sequel hook, rather than being resolved over the course of like half an hour or so in a rushed manner that gives people too little time to consider the implications. And this brings me to my next point.

Remember what I said about that dumb fanfiction I co-wrote having the elements I personally wanted more than my co-writer did slowly fester in true plot tumor fashion until they took over the entire story like literal cancer? As it turns out, what I witnessed in Fallen Kingdom wasn't quite as ridiculous, but kinda sorta similar in its own way. Obviously, Fallen Kingdom isn't so audacious (or ignorant of copyright laws and plain old common sense for that matter) as to let an entirely different franchise stage a gradual hostile takeover of itself, but the somewhat cliched plot of capitalist exploitation being the absolute worst roommate imaginable with a whole franchise's worth of temporally misplaced creatures that can and will kill you if you look at them funny - already done in both the original movie and TLW, and to some extent in JW as well, but still relatable in our current social climate even after so much repetition - still manages to... well, stage a gradual hostile takeover of the movie, and enforces itself in full force during the remaining third or so of the runtime. The antagonists, a pair of cartoonishly evil and somewhat flat executives, sabotage the plan so that the dinosaurs are diverted to the Lockwood Mansion instead of the sanctuary island, and then things escalate when the prototype Indoraptor is bought in and, inevitably, raises hell for everyone involved. As with my previous pitch, the idea of bidding wars over the dinosaurs and the moral debate over the ownership and exploitation of living creatures - something which does happen in the real world - could have made for something interesting, again, if the script wasn't so rushed. Continuing where the hypothetical sequel hook left off, we could open with a discussion between the villains about the implications of what they are doing, followed by the heroes having to deal with the ramifications of such actions along with the involvement of Dr. Wu, the Indoraptor, and of course Blue as a potential prize-winner. Of course this runs the risk of becoming the original Jurassic Park except on the mainland, and thus not really trying anything new, but it could at least give audiences the time to digest the film and appreciate the moments where it makes a genuine impact, even before the dinosaurs end up getting released into the mainland like what happened in the movie itself, complete with the insane amount of ramifications thereof. The Stygimoloch plowing its way through the bidders on its way to freedom was almost as cathartic for me to watch as the climactic fight in JW, and I wish it could've gotten more screentime, or even plucked up the guts to fend off the Indoraptor in a situation that doesn't seem forced, e.g. the hybrid and the Stiggy getting trapped in the same complex, or even Owen luring it over as backup (which is stupider but, given how he got it to bust him and Claire out in the movie itself, isn't entirely unreasonable). As for the Indoraptor itself, I feel like they could have done a bit better with its design, as even underneath the paint job and altered proportions it's still more or less "Indominus 2: Genetic Boogaloo", as I have called it at least once. Still, it has its own appeal as a monster design and, if it weren't for the presence of similar-looking creatures in previous installments of the series, it would certainly have made an impact as a monster. It's almost wolf-like in movement and mannerisms, even werewolf-like, which is intentional given the vintage horror movie homages the production team was going for. The way it menaces Maisie - who has her own set of plot-related craziness to her, but that's a can of worms I'd rather not open - makes you worry for her life, and even fear for Blue when she engages it in battle. I know I'm one of those who actually prefers antagonistic Velociraptors (the inaccurate variety from the films, not the smaller and fully feathered real-world version which I would absolutely take home with me if I could find a way to retrieve it from Cretaceous Mongolia and have it housetrained and okay I'll stop now), but Blue as always is awesome, and after seeing her actually manage to hold her own in her fight against the Indoraptor if only for a short while, there's no denying that anymore - even if that scene with her outrunning the explosion in the boiler room is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this movie. There is of course no way a spectacle-driven, plaid-speed-paced romp like Fallen Kingdom could surpass the bar set by The Big One and the legendary kitchen scene, but on its own merits, the Indoraptor is a wonderfully serviceable and formidable threat that I just wish could've gotten more screentime and room to develop as a character, rather than just remaining as an unhinged killing machine that exists just to terrorize everyone before exiting the film (the same is true for all the dinosaurs here besides Blue, really, which is sad because, again, I much prefer when films develop monsters as characters rather than mere plot devices). With a little more design work to make him stand out more among the other critters in the franchise and more time to explore his nature, he could easily have become almost as iconic as The Big One as movie monsters go, or at least as much as the I. rex, though the latter bar is admittedly a good deal lower in the wake of how the movie industry has, ahem, evolved.

With that thought in mind, I will now spell out the biggest problem I had with this movie: the fact that it was trying to do so much in such a short space of time. Humorously and ironically, I know almost enough about the issues with my own writing to recognize the signs of that, with significant events being spaced too close to each other, too many characters at once (though admittedly, Zia and Maisie are a treat to watch, Franklin a bit less so but far from unbearable for my taste), and at least one questionable decision on the part of everyone at some point or another, up to and including the writers. There are a lot of things I liked, but not enough time for me to let them sink in, like I was being bombarded with one spectacle after another. It feels like overkill more than anything, and alas, far too many films in recent years have tried to shove that method into people's faces as though trying to say, "Here's your action, here's your fanservice, here's your whatever the whoopity-freaking-doo you consider entertainment, are you happy now?!" (Well, not quite as vitriolic and sarcastic, but you get the idea.) If the filmmakers and the owners of the franchise rights had been willing to accept four movies in the newer series rather than just three, and let Fallen Kingdom be broken up into two separate, slightly slower-paced movies, the problems with each individual portion would likely not have been as significant, and audiences would not have noticed them so readily. Sadly, though, the rapid-fire, dozen-blockbusters-a-year rush-job environment of the modern movie industry was not kind to this film, which is a crying shame. We need more movies that are more relaxed and subdued half the time, the way the original JP film was, and while audiences may have to take the time to once again get used to movies like that, I think it would be a welcome change of pace from the current influx of chaotic, nonstop slugfests and pyrotechnic displays we've become so familiar with.

In tl;dr form, it is with a heavy heart that I have to say that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is, in fact, the worst film of the entire Jurassic Park franchise, even more so than JP3 - though don't get me wrong, as with JP3, I still very much enjoyed it as its own movie, as clumsily handled as it was at times (though even then, the movie itself isn't entirely at fault for it). There's a difference between a movie being the low point in its franchise and a low point among movies in general, a difference which a lot of reviewers need to understand before taking an undeserved dump over movies that could've been so much better if Hollywood had worked just a bit differently. You have to actually try to make a work of entertainment media I consider genuinely terrible, and it was actually a relief to me that even the lowest points of Fallen Kingdom still ranked somewhat midway between "meh" and "shakes hand eeeeehhhhhh" from my own subjective standpoint. I truly hope that the next and presumably final JP film will turn out for the better, especially given that Alan, Ellie, and Ian are all slated to have major roles in it, but I'm not going to dismiss Fallen Kingdom off the bat just because of the issues I have with its writing. If nothing else, it's a perfectly decent popcorn flick with prehistoric monsters in it - and hey, that was pretty much what everyone was there for, wasn't it?

Grading Scheme:

96 - 100: A+

93 - 96: A

90 - 92.9: A-

87 - 89.9: B+

83 - 86.9: B

80 - 82.9: B-

77 - 79.9: C+

73 - 76.9: C

70 - 72.9: C-

67 - 69.9: D+

60 - 66.9: D

Below 60: E

Grades:

Writing: 6

Characterization: 6

Pacing: 7

Creativity: 8

Consistency: 8

Cinematography: 9

World Building: 7

Music and Sound: 8

Effects: 10

Engagement: 9

Final Grade: 78 (C+)

[mst3kproject]

1105: The Beast of Hollow Mountain

I have a personal fucking grudge against this movie.  When I was… I dunno, maybe six or seven, I went to an event at the city zoo that featured a talk by paleontologist Robert Bakker (I still have the Ornithomimus he drew for me) and a screening of an absolutely, non-ironically fantastic movie about cowboys and dinosaurs in Mexico.  Since I was a child, I never bothered to remember the title of this film and so years later when I fondly remembered it, of course I couldn’t find it to watch it again. Until one day, flipping through banged-up VHS tapes at a flea market I happened across The Beast of Hollow Mountain… cowboys and dinosaurs in Mexico?  This had to be it!

I was wrong.  I was so, so wrong.  This movie has been on my Episodes that Never Were radar since the inception of this blog, and I was delighted that Season Eleven actually used it at the same time as being slightly annoyed that they used it first.  No matter.  It richly deserves everything Jonah and the bots threw at it.

There are these two guys, Jimmy and Felipe, who own a ranch. Jimmy keeps flirting with a woman named Sarita.  She’s supposed to be marrying this other guy called Enrique, who doesn’t like Jimmy and tries to undermine his ranching business so he’ll be forced to return to Texas, but of course Sarita secretly likes the smiling white guy better than the grumpy Latino. There’s also a comic relief drunk, Pancho, who might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a grieving widower raising a very young child, which kind of undercuts the joke.  We watch these people go about their lives for at least seventeen hours in which nothing much happens, and then suddenly holy shit motherfucking dinosaur out of nowhere.

The weird masked people in that one scene are chinelos dancers, which is interesting in that it gives us an exact location for this story: the little Mexican state of Morelos. This area is rather far south of the US-Mexico border and known more for its sugar cane than its cattle ranching, but it does appear to have mountains, so we’re on firmer geographical ground here than in Beginning of the End.  The masks and robes the dancers wear were originally designed to make fun of Europeans, so it’s kind of fitting that the whole display reduces Jonah, Kinga, and Max to terrified weeping.

If you only look at the first three quarters of the movie, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is an unremarkable, laid-back little western about an upstart rancher competing with the local cattle baron in both economics and love.  There are probably a lot of movies that have this as their only plot, and they do just fine for people who like westerns, I guess.  In this particular movie, however, it’s all just killing time. When I reviewed Avalanche a few weeks back I complained that all the effort getting us to invest in the characters is ultimately pointless because none of those stories will be resolved.  Beast of Hollow Mountain is slightly better, in that it does resolve the problems it has set up for the characters, but it does so via tyrannosaurus [r]ex machina.

The movie does make some attempt to hint at the existence of the dinosaur, but it’s pathetically ineffective.  There are superstitions that the mountain is haunted, and cattle are disappearing – but we see that Enrique is encouraging the rumors and possibly stealing the cows as he tries to force Jimmy to leave town.  Occam’s razor tells us that a jealous rival is a much more likely explanation than a dinosaur.  Actual evidence of the monster, such as footprints, cow bones in places cows could not possibly go, or never-believed eyewitness accounts from the local drunks, is completely lacking.

It’s pretty obvious that the reason the dinosaur never appears until the last few minutes of the film is because animation is expensive and that’s all they could afford.  That’s fine, but a lack of budget shouldn’t have gotten in the way of the foreshadowing!  You can make a respectable dinosaur footprint with a shovel and an eye for artistic detail.  Have a couple of prop guys drape a fake cow skeleton over a tree branch, and presto, instant mystery!  And if you need unlikely eyewitness accounts, you’ve already got a town drunk who could be laughed at for it, in the form of Pancho!   You could even do that stupid joke, as seen in god only knows how many other movies, where seeing the dinosaur makes him throw a bottle away and swear to never touch another drop!

It seems so obvious that a movie called The Beast of Hollow Mountain would want to include some clues to the nature of the titular beast before we actually see it, I can’t imagine why they didn’t.  Maybe they figured they were building suspense?  If so, all they actually accomplish is, as Jonah and the bots repeatedly note, making us doubt that there will be any beast in this movie at all.  By the time we get to its appearance, it seems completely wrong that there would suddenly be a dinosaur in what has so far been a story with no fantastical elements.

The other problem with only pulling the dinosaur out at the end of the movie is that, as I mentioned above, it’s a deus ex machina, an easy solution to the characters’ problems that doesn’t feel like part of the same world.  After we’ve watched the rivalry between Jimmy and Enrique for an hour, the satisfying way to end this story would be to have them resolve their differences, perhaps out of mutual love of Sarita and a desire to make her happy. You could even include the dinosaur in this, by having Enrique forgive Jimmy out of gratitude for saving his life. Instead, the dinosaur kills Enrique, leaving Jimmy free to do whatever he likes without having to address his own problems!  It’s as lazy as having him wake up at the end and discover that Enrique was only a bad dream.

When you refuse to foreshadow, you also leave the audience wondering why there is apparently one dinosaur wandering around in Mexico somewhere.  You can’t just pull one dinosaur out of the movie’s ass and not have some kind of explanation!  Eegah! had one caveman in the deserts outside Palm Springs but offered the backstory that he was the last of a clan whose lives had been greatly lengthened by the sulfur springs.  Other movies give us dinosaurs that come out of lost valleys or the centre of the earth or something.  Is that what ‘Hollow Mountain’ is supposed to be?  A portal to a lost land?  If so, I think that deserved at least a few seconds of screen time!

Outside of its lazy storytelling, I guess The Beast of Hollow Mountain really isn’t badly-made. The costumes, including those on the extras, are gorgeous, and between those and the chinelos dancers I suspect the film-makers just went to a town in Morelos and said, “who wants to be in a movie?”  The characters are all pretty one-note but the actors do their best. Mario Navarro as Panchito isn’t nearly as annoying as he was in The Black Scorpion, and Patricia Medina as Sarita does manage to seem like she’s struggling between her commitment to Enrique and her crush on Jimmy.  The worst performance in the movie is probably given by Jimmy himself, played by Guy Madison.  He does ‘smiling mellow cowpoke’ in every single scene, including those that really would have benefitted from some gravitas.

The dinosaur itself is… eh, it’s not that bad.  I feel like I’ve probably waited longer for worse dinosaurs (Lost Continent comes to mind).  I do like stop motion in general and I respect the effort that goes into creating it.  The problem in The Beast of Hollow Mountain isn’t so much the animation itself as what they chose to animate – why the emphasis on the dinosaur’s flailing tongue?  They also failed entirely to make it look as if the dinosaur is occupying the same space as the humans.  Either the puppet or the actors is always horribly out of focus, which might be an attempt to suggest depth.  If so, it doesn’t work.

Then for the closeups, they have dinosaur puppet arms and feet. These are simply terrible.  They don’t match the stop-motion creature in anatomy, movement, or implied size.

It’s pretty obvious what went wrong with this movie.  Somebody came up with a really cool idea for a popcorn flick – cowboys and dinosaurs, you guys!  Everybody else loved it, but as they tried to bring it to fruition, they realized it was also a really expensive idea, and tried to lower the cost by increasing the cowboy-to-dinosaur ratio.  By the time they got to something they could afford, there were only five minutes of dinosaur left.  As I observed in my review of Future War, sometimes movie-makers really need to just step back and say, “no, guys, this is just not gonna work.”

In this case, the ‘somebody’ with the great idea was stop motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, who wrote a script he called The Valley of Mists.  I’ve never read it but I know for a fact that The Beast of Hollow Mountain didn’t come anywhere near doing it justice – because thirteen years later, O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen did the animation for the remake, The Valley of Gwangi. You guessed it, that's the fucking awesome cowboys-and-dinosaurs movie I remembered from my youth!  If you were disappointed by The Beast of Hollow Mountain, I highly recommend giving The Valley of Gwangi a look.  It’s got action, adventure, romance, special effects so groundbreaking that the Jurassic Park franchise has actually paid homage to them more than once, and is the guaranteed cure for all your Beast-of-Hollow-Mountain-related blues!

[maverick-werewolf]

Just some werewolf (and writing) thoughts

I had another moment tonight. I get these moments sometimes. This one actually stems from my writing.

Why can’t people take werewolves seriously anymore?

I’m going to just clip this here because this is going to get very long and inane and now you’ll find out why I’m going to have to just tag some posts as “rambling.” Keep reading if you’re curious as to what’s bothering me. But if you don’t want to drown (seriously you will drown, I didn’t hold back) in unorganized walls of text, wait for this Wednesday’s werewolf fact instead.

Whether werewolves are from the beginning or turn into one, they’re jokes. Whether the person telling the story intended it or not - jokes. Ha ha, dog jokes. Sometimes that’s fine. I enjoy it, I even dabble in it myself. I’m not completely innocent of that, and I’m not completely bashing everything that does it. I think it’s fun and it can be really super cute and entertaining. Especially if it’s reached at a point later in a story or a relationship (I know some of you you know what I’m talking about).

But the problem is that werewolves have been degraded into just something funny, or something average. They’re just one of those monsters you randomly throw at your players in a tabletop session, or they’re a boss fight in a video game. There’s an evil pack of them your heroes have to slay. By default, no one takes them seriously.

Where’s the depth? Where’s the meaning? Where’s the horror, the torment? The challenge?

That’s another thing. They’re almost “normal” by the standards of a lot of settings they’re in. It’s “normal” for a guy to turn into a horrible man-beast that eats people. Yeah, that’s not really that scary, I’ve seen those before and killed like half a dozen. It’s not too uncommon out here in [insert setting/region], the only hard part is figuring out what werecreature the person is turning into while they’re seizing around in throes of desperate agony.

Let’s fight something bigger, badder, scarier. Werewolves are so blasé. And it’s not a setting they’re in, it’s werewolves as a whole - in popular culture. It’s part of the reason why we see all these people trying to “change” them in some way or another, to try to make them “different” or “unique” - and we’re back to bigger, badder, scarier.

Say for example you run a zoo. Someone sells you a tiger. A TIGER? But tigers are NORMAL! We’ve all seen tigers before. These enormous, endlessly majestic animals that can easily kill a man with a single effortless swipe of its massive paw, with teeth longer than your forefinger, whose tawny hide has since time immemorial stricken a primal fear into anyone who sees it - as it should. Yeah, those are boring. They’re not good enough anymore.

Let’s genetically engineer dinosaurs and bring them back instead. Tigers are so blasé.

Only then dinosaurs aren’t good enough anymore. A fucking tyrannosaurus rex? That’s not very scary. We’ve seen those now. Let’s amp it up a little more. Let’s genetically engineer a big freaky albino auto-cloaking horror monster dinosaur straight out of your nightmares because we’ve reached a point now where, to modern audiences, a T-rex is normal, and we need something - what? Bigger, badder, scarier.

And as for werewolves, where’re they? Down there on the bottom of the totem pole somewhere with the “lowly” tiger.

(note: this isn’t a dig at Jurassic World or its plot, I’m just using that general idea as an example :P)

Anyway, I love Jurassic Park with all my heart and soul and that isn’t even a very good comparison as to what exactly is bothering me.

So what do you mean, Mav? What’s got you so upset tonight?

I’m upset because I feel like no one will ever take werewolves seriously again. Not really. Yeah, some things might try, but they won’t get very far. Because in the end, werewolves will always be relegated to what they are now.

Werewolves are essentially one of the most primal and terrifying concepts that have captivated the imaginations and nightmares of mankind in some way or another for the entire existence of humanity, even since the days of cavemen. Throughout our collective history and across every single region of the world, we have werewolves.

But now the average person struggles to care about a story if it focuses on werewolves. What a silly, cheesy fantasy thing. Tell someone your story has werewolves in it and you’ve probably already lost them, because to them, the word “werewolf” carries a lot of connotations and assumptions that are premeditated and inescapable thanks to this greater hive-mind conception of them shaped over the years by overwhelmingly bad media, with far too few diamonds in the rough to change most anyone’s opinion about anything.

Because, to the average person, what are werewolves? They’re B-movie monsters. They’re old news (despite never really being much news at all). They’re some shirtless romance model. They’re a random encounter, or just that one boss fight earlier in the game.

They’re paranormal romance novel material or something similar that serious authors won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, because the second you have a werewolf in your story that isn’t just a one-off, lame, monster-of-the-week creature (hi, “Silver Bullet”), your story acquires a very, very specific audience and becomes one of four things: a young adult paranormal novel ala Harry Potter, a romance novel ala Twilight, a standalone horror quick-read, or a book no one wants to read because you can’t quite fit it into any of those specific boxes, and those are the only boxes in which werewolves are now meant to exist.

Oh yeah, or straight-up comedy.

Bring up werewolves in a conversation - what do you get? Any number of, or all of, these responses: Oh yeah, I saw [insert horrible movie here], it was really funny. Haha, [dog joke]. Hey what about were[whatever]s. Let’s talk about all these other wacky werecreatures and make endless jokes about those instead. How about wereannelids and werehumans? Oh I’m sorry, were you trying to have a serious conversation? Well then how about you answer this completely off the nut question instead? What would happen if a werewolf swallowed silver? Wouldn’t that be funny!?

What about discussing them in relation to some particular setting? Oh yeah, it’s just that ONE setting that treats them that way, right? No. No, it’s not.

My whole life, I’ve just wanted to find some way to encourage people to take werewolves seriously again. I don’t know why or how this became my passion, but that’s what it’s always been.

This blog has actually helped a lot. So thank you all.

But here’s my problem. And now things are about to get personal and move away from broader territory. I’m about to talk about writing fiction.

My primary means of showing the world that werewolves can be awesome, I had always planned before, was to write some novels about them and attempt to tell a story as deep, as moving, as powerful, and as emotional as I think one could tell with a werewolf protagonist. Those novels were going to be called The Prophecy of the Six, set in my world, Wulfgard. And my protagonist? My once favorite character I’ve ever made, Tom Drake. But now I’m struggling to love these things again, to the point of being deeply and emotionally upset with myself.

Because in my mind, he isn’t even “the werewolf” anymore. He’s barely even a scary monster anymore. Which, in my world, he is supposed to be all of those things. He is my ultimate werewolf, and beyond that he is the ultimate monster. Or at least he was/is in theory. For quite a while now, he hasn’t been. There are other werewolves, and for some reason or another or in some way or another, they’re better at being werewolves. They’re, put simply... better werewolves.

And I have to be reminded time and time again that werewolves “aren’t even that scary.” Which I know is a statement bred in the pop culture we have to work with today, and it’s statements like that that should - and sometimes do - spur me on to work even harder. But when I’m down, it’s hard to deal with. And there’s not really much to stop all of these things from coming close to breaking me. Breaking my spirit, in terms of the werewolf thing, and breaking my heart, in terms of my personal issues with Tom right now.

So next time you leave a comment on some story you read online that you really enjoy? Thank the writer simply for writing it. It’ll mean a lot to them. It’ll mean the world to them.

Being a writer can tear you apart. Being a writer is very, very hard.

And on top of that, next time someone talks to you about something that they’re truly and deeply passionate about, no matter what that thing is, do me a big favor...

Don’t shoot them down.

Even if, yes, their passion is trying to prove to the world that something as “silly” as werewolves holds a much deeper and more profound meaning than your average direct-to-DVD horror flick is going to convey.

[jessiemieli]

I was tagged by like eight people to do this 11 questions thing (which made me feel very loved so thank you guys<3) and i put them all in this one post for some reason that i might come to regret later on. you can just skip to your section if you want cause i am sleep-deprived and most of these answers are... just terrible.

rules: answer the questioned given to you by the one who tagged you, write 11 questions of your own, and tag 11 people!

@chlobenet‘s questions

If you could live in any fictional world (book/movie/tv) which would it be and why

Def the mcu cause then I could have superpowers

What was your favourite movie growing up?

Oooohh probably spirit: stallion of the cimarron. I watched that movie like 500 times in a row and my siblings hated me for it

What is your favourite movie now?

I honestly cannot choose one, but few of my top choices are wreck it ralph, breakfast at tiffany’s, and spirit cause i will never stop loving that horse or that soundtrack

Top 5 fanfics? 

ummm this is so hard, but I’d have to say the gloaming by @yourpalmoony, eventide by @emiliachrstine, the dotn series by @fraysquake, ophidian by @chlobenet, and black sheep by @recklessyouthinme

Which of the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World would you most liked to have seen? Why?

Probably the hanging gardens cause it looks like it would have been beautiful and very relaxing

Favourite Greek God/Goddess? 

Maybe artemis

Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans or Chris Pine?

I’m gonna have to go with my fave aussie hemsworth

What is the one song you will always sing along to, no matter what mood you’re in?

I have so many but one of my faves is glitter and gold by barns courtney. I can never resist singing along

What OC Crossovers would you most like to see with your own characters?

I know it’s a copout but I am a crossover slut so I would love to see any and all of them (honestly if you have an idea for one hmu cause i love em)

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Ireland Ireland Ireland Ireland. someone should take me to Ireland.

What is something you have in the past/or still do collect?

Books. My room is mostly just books.

@cherylmblossm‘s questions

When is your birthday? (I’m only asking this because I need more birthdays to add to my list lol)

October 20th

What are your writing goals for this year?

To at least start my original story version of my soul to take

Which of your ocs are your favorite/are you the most proud of?

This is so hard but adeline or caroline

Were you a Disney or Nick kid growing up?

Disney more than nick but I watched both religiously

Favorite Holiday?

christmassss

First fandom you were a part of?

Ehhh vampire diaries???

If you were to sit down and have a meal with any famous person in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?

Audrey Hepburn hands down, no doubt

What is your least favorite household chore?

Doing the dishes. I still dread doing them to this day

Favorite meal of the day?

Lunch cause it’s the only one I actually eat every day

Are you a coffee person or not?

YUSSSSSSS

If you had to eat only one kind of food for the rest of your life, what would you want it to be?

I’m immature so I’d have to say chicken nuggets. The dinosaur shaped ones preferably. (I’m also really really tired so don’t hold me to this)

@bradysuttcn‘s questions

What’s your favorite tv show?

the walking dead... or game of thrones

For which fandom do you enjoy to write the most?

Atm I’d say none

Your favorite otp of all the times?

kim possible and ron stoppable. They still own me even ten years later.

Your favorite animal?

horses

Which fandom do you prefer in term of mentality/attitude?

Walking dead I guess. They don’t have too many problems, at least not that I’ve seen

What’s your passion in life?

Writing I guess

If you could be another person for one day, who would you choose?

Ummm I honestly have no idea

What’s your favorite season?

winter

What do you find most attractive in a person’s personnality?

Empathy probably

Do you enjoy tv reality show?

Not really

Do you believe in astrology?

Depends on what I read lol

@yourpalmoony‘s questions

You’re stranded on a remote island, and have to survive for what could be months. Which three fictional characters would you want there? And why?

diana prince cause she lived on one (and she’s a total badass), rick grimes cause he’s super survival smart and nice to look at, and jack shepard cause he’s a doctor and he nearly survived THE island… and he’s nice to look at. Gotta have those distractions sometimes

What is your go-to happy show?

These days it’s riverdale cause I spend nearly the whole hour laughing. Before that it would be impractical jokers.

What three songs are you obsessed with at the moment?

breezeblocks by alt-j, blood // water by grandson, and I took a pill in Ibiza by mike posner

Pick one of your ocs, now pick a band or artist who’s music and vibes really resonate with that oc

Uhh idk maybe ruelle for caroline cause like five of her songs are on her playlist lol

What is your guilty pleasure fandom?

Riverdale has turned into my top guilty pleasure lately

Say something nice about someone else's writing (I know its not a question but lets spread some love, huh?)

So many to choose from but @emiliachrstine is amazing at weaving her original characters into existing universes and timelines. Not to mention that all of her ocs are very unique and complex. I’ve fallen in love with every character of hers that I’ve gotten to know and I can’t wait to see what (or who??) else she creates!

Which of your edits are you most proud of? Put it in here!

this one cause making those runes look realistic was super hard

Which of your ocs deserve a damn vacation? Name four of them, and pick where they would go and why?

Caroline would go to some remote town in Ireland or Africa or somewhere that doesn’t have wifi to get away from everyone, if she could Adeline would go visit her hometown NOLA cause she misses it like crazy, Mia would just go anywhere there weren’t a shitload of zombies and bring rick and her fam with her, and Juliet would go to france or Italy cause she’s always wanted to see the world and travel

Make an OC now! Face Claim: Michael Cera

Oooh I love these.

Name: Liam O’Neill

Fandom: Jurassic World

Synopsis: Liam thought it would be fun, working at an amusement park housing a bunch of extinct monsters. He thought that after the boatload of stupid mistakes that were made with the first park, there was no way the new park owners would let history repeat itself. Unfortunately for Liam, he was dead wrong and he just happens to be working tech support at the indominus rex exhibit the day it goes on a murder spree and all hell breaks loose. He’s forced to put up with Claire and Owen’s bickering as they try to outrun a 40 foot tall killing machine, but as with all sci-fi thrillers, amongst the chaos and carnage, the nerdy and lovable Liam might just find the woman of his dreams (spoiler alert: he won’t).

Think of your main oc, now make them a POC, who would play them? If you have a main poc then go with secondary! If this doesn’t pertain to you, then write a few sentences on why you love me.

I was so prepared for this question. I’d change Adeline’s fc from Maia Mitchell to the gorgeous Courtney Eaton (if she had more material, this change would actually happen)

@emiliachrstine​‘s questions

Choose an oc from another fandom you would like to crossover with? (it can be yours or someone else’s)

I think caroline and Melissa would get along pretty well tbh. Caroline and Bianca stilinski (@recklessyouthinme) would have a great time too I think

Favorite sentence or passage from a fic you’ve read?

The opening part of the prologue for Take Me Down by @fraysquake literally made my jaw drop (I would copy and paste it here but it’s a little long) Everyone should go read that amazing fic.

Choose one of your ocs, what would be their theme song?

blood // water by grandson for Caroline

If you could have one of your ocs become canon within the established fandom, which oc would that be?

Juliet for stranger things cause she’d add a new characterization to the mix without having to change too much to fit her in

Which oc would you be willing to become for a day?

Adeline cause I’d get to kiss DOB hahahaha (but just for one day cause I don’t think I could take any longer than that)

Guilty pleasure movies? TV shows?

Chicago PD (only cause I’m the only one in my fam who actually likes it) and Riverdale for tv shows and maybe star wars tfa for movies

What is the one thing that helps to get you into the writing mood?

Music. I usually can’t write if I’m not blasting my tunes so loud that I’m causing early hearing loss

The one thing you absolutely can’t live without.

my computer unfortunately. It’s my only escape.

If you could meet any actor, who would it be and why?

this was nearly impossible, but I’d have to go with my love Daisy Ridley. She just seems so sweet and caring

Top 5 fav fics?

I answered this above somewhere but I should add amamnesis by @wild-stdreams

Current TV show/Movie obsession?

It’ll always be an obsession, but the walking dead. Rick Grimes is (one of) the love of my life

@beepbeep-richietozier‘s questions

What is your favorite movie and why?

Uhhh wreck it ralph is one of them cause it makes my heart happy

Which of your ocs would you get along with best in real life?

Probably adeline and juliet or amelia and sawyer cause they have a lot in common

If you could be a character in any fandom what would it be?

So many options, but I’ll have to go with either teen wolf or shadowhunters

What is your favorite musical?

Singing in the rain if that counts??

Which of your ocs would you put in another fandom?

Caroline would go to Sons of Anarchy cause she’d fit right in with the Tellers and their totally legal “motorcycle club”

Who are you favorite ocs from other creators?

nikita grace by @yourpalmoony, stella sharpe by @recklessyouthinme, princess aspen by @chlobenet, melissa hughes by @emiliachrstine, and ariana petrakis by @fraysquake just to name a very minuscule amount

Do you play video games? If so, what is your favorite?

Used to but not really anymore

What helps you write?

music

Is there a story you’ve been holding off from writing? If so, what is it?

I was putting off writing poisoned but then I wrote the first chapter and it kinda tanked so that’s going back on the shelf for a bit. But I’m also putting off Juliet’s story and Kaden’s story

What are some fcs that you would like to use?

courtney eaton for adeline but she just doesn’t have enough material to work with. I used to want to use Alfred Enoch, but then I made my own dreams come true and have put him in my original story mwahahaha (i’m sleep deprived)

What fandom would you like to read stories for but you haven’t yet?

I think I’ve read stories for most fandoms I’m in, but I wish there were more stories for the walking dead tbh cause I’d be all over that

@curious-fools-howl-to-the-moon‘s questions

3 OCs who you haven’t read but are curious about!

This is hard cause when I find an oc I like I usually annoy the shit out of the creator until I know everything there is to know about their oc. BUT there’s always a few that I miss so I’d like to know more about fred ackerman by @susiesamurai, sawyer grimm and her whole fam by @feralcherry and regan mccall by @jones-fp.

A fic you’ve written that you’re most proud of and why?

Only two chapters in, but My Soul to Take cause I love my baby addie to death and from what I’ve been told my characterization of mental illness is believable so whooo (plus I’m working on turning it into an original story)

One of your OCs can become canon, who will it be?

Ahhh I’d die with joy if that could happen with any of my ocs. I’ll go with Caroline this time just cause

What’s something in a fanfiction will automatically make you want to read it?

best friends to lovers trope

Your favorite sentence from your current WIP?

Every time Caroline looked at her hands, all she saw was blood, none of it her own

Have you ever wanted to write for a fandom you’re not a part of? If so, which one?

I don’t think so… or I’m just too tired to remember it

If the OTP from the last fanfic you wrote in couldn’t happen, who would your OC be with?

Caroline doesn’t really have an otp so I’ll go with Adeline’s fic. If Stadeline (adeline x stiles) couldn’t happen then I’d go with raekall (adeline x theo) [which might actually happen… but someone should probably talk me out of it]

Have you ever completed a fanfiction?

Two and they shall not be named cause they were short and terrible, nothing to be proud of

What’s your longest running fanfic?

I think my game of thrones fic Snow Like Ash but I’m too tired to check sorry

3 OCs (yours or someone else’s) that your current favorite OC would be friends with? (and you can mix fandoms/original stories)

Atm Caroline Grey is my favorite oc and I’d think she’d have fun with Melissa Hughes (@emiliachrstine), Bianca Stilinski (@recklessyouthinme), and definitely Aspen Mills (@chlobenet)

What’s the hardest thing to convey with writing? (ie: emotion, expression)

Anything smut related. I avoid it like the plague when I write.

@recklessyouthinme‘s questions

who are your top 5 favorite celebrities?

I’m going with living celebs: daisy ridley, andrew lincoln, sophie turner, chloe bennet, and tom hardy

what songs make you feel at peace?

georgia by vance joy and Comes and Goes by Greg Laswell

if you could see any concert what would it be?

Imagine dragons

what’s something you want to achieve this year?

Finishing my certification so I can get a good job and get some money and get out of this house of horrors

who is your biggest role model?

My mom

what did you want to be when you were growing up? 

A veterinarian I think

do you have a favorite character to write for? if yes who and why?

I like adeline a lot cause I relate to her in some ways and in other ways I have to go out of my comfort zone

what’s your all time favorite movie?

Ahhhh I honestly can’t choose

describe your perfect weather.

Cloudy and drizzling or raining, whichever

what’s the meaning of life?

Idk, if you ever figure it out let me know though. This girl can use some help

where am i?

At home?? lol

I’m not gonna do the 11 questions cause i am pretty sure everyone has been tagged in one and i am too tired to come up with 11 not-terrible questions at the moment. But thx to everyone who did tag me. I feel very loved right now.

[twh-news]

Welcome to Skull Island: on set with Tom Hiddleston and the biggest King Kong ever | The Guardian

The director and cast of Kong: Skull Island, including Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson, discuss filming opposite an 85ft ape – while using as little green screen as possible.

“Apologies for the shirtlessness,” says Tom Hiddleston. “I didn’t want to show off.” The world’s most impeccably spoken Marvel baddie is looking awfully embarrassed. I’ve caught him emerging topless from his trailer, late at night, with female company. The makeup artist has been in with him, carefully pawing at his torso. Hiddleston is shooting a movie in Hawaii and, as it is, his skin doesn’t look sufficiently sun damaged. Muddier stuff is slathered on, and our star is good to go.

This dramatic tan is part of the latest, and perhaps most adventurous, step in Hiddleston’s ascent to the A-list: the lead role in a grand new reboot of the King Kong franchise. It is why we are both standing in mud in the middle of the night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

The question arises, though: do we really need another movie about King Kong? Ever since the romantic giant ape landed in New York in 1933 with a giant crush on Fay Wray, he has cropped up in at least another six films, most recently Peter Jackson’s handsome 2005 remake. In the latest reincarnation, Kong: Skull Island, he is getting the origins treatment – his story beginning again, ready to be continued in future films. Reassuringly, any reservations one might have about such a project seem to be shared by the film’s producers, who chuck around words such as “fresh” and “current” as casually as Kong juggles biplanes.

“I went in and pitched a movie I would want to see and my friends would want to see,” says the director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts. “I honestly thought they were going to laugh me out of the room. Then they responded really well and we started building that story.”

One can understand this initial concern. The 33-year-old has just one full-length credit to his name: the low-key coming-of-age indie The Kings of Summer. The only thing that film has in common with this one is that trees feature. Vogt-Roberts also looks every inch the indie director – gold medallions, heavy hipster beard – not a guy you would automatically trust with a reported $190m (£152m) budget. But maybe it is because of his indie credentials that the vibe on set seems so relaxed. There is an army-like camaraderie between the actors playing soldiers and those playing non-military folk.

So what is the movie that Vogt-Roberts and his pals would want to watch? Well, it’s set in 1972: the Vietnam war is almost over and the Landsat programme is dawning. For the first time, satellite imagery is able to capture the Earth as a whole and shine a light on previously unknown areas. A voyage to discover what really lies on a mysterious island is launched with a ragtag crew, all with conflicting missions.

“In the early 70s,” says Vogt-Roberts, “the world was in chaos, and I love the idea of using that as an access point for the characters, taking people who are in the middle of sexual revolutions and racial riots and losing wars for the first time and political scandals – people who are watching the world crumble around them – and sending them to an island untouched by man. There’s a sense of catharsis to that.”

But don’t be fooled by the film’s vintage feel. The producers are keen to position this as a contemporary adventure. Recruiting Hiddleston, hot off award-winning TV show The Night Manager, is indicative, and he is surrounded by an eclectic and self-consciously contemporary ensemble. There is 2016’s best actress Oscar-winner Brie Larson, franchise addict Samuel L Jackson, character actor John C Reilly, Straight Outta Compton breakouts Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell, plus John Goodman, fresh from his terrifying turn in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

“It’s a pretty big family to be travelling around the world with,” Larson says, mid-midnight snack. We are in an open air tent and she is ploughing through salad, surprisingly energetic and awake. She has just done the umpteenth take of one especially draining scene; there are many more to come. “Usually, I’d be done by now,” she says with a grin. “Most films I’ve done are 20-, 30-day shoots. So I keep thinking this is the end and we’re not even a quarter of the way in.”

To create a place of unique otherworldliness that could conceivably exist on Earth, three locations – Australia, Vietnam and Hawaii – are being amalgamated. There is an emphasis on bricks–and-mortar sets rather than a CGI overload, which is reserved for the big man himself (a Kong record height of roughly 85ft/26 metres) and a host of nasty creatures with whom he shares his ecosystem. “Jordan always insisted that we should be in real places,” Hiddleston says. “There should be as little soundstage or green-screen work as possible. He was location-scouting for nine or 10 months.”

Despite the hour, he is animated and enthusiastic as he talks to me between takes. This scene involves the characters arguing over whether Kong is friend or foe. It is intense, but what is initially thrilling to watch from the wings becomes notably less exciting the 30th time round. While Hiddleston and Larson remain upbeat (she does an improvised workout with a prop gun whenever the camera stops rolling), Jackson is starting to feel the strain. “How many times have we done this?” he asks. No one seems to know.

When it comes to my chat with him, I’m gathered with a handful of other journalists and his weariness seeps through.

“Why do you think this King Kong is different from the other King Kongs that we’ve seen,” asks one journalist. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it,” replies Jackson.

“When we spoke to the director and the other actors, they compared your character to Captain Ahab. Is that something that inspired you too,” asks another. “No,” says Jackson.

Still, at least Jackson made it to Hawaii this time. In 1992, he was due to head here to film his doomed role in Jurassic Park when a hurricane destroyed the set before his scenes were shot. His work on Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur thriller was consequently based in LA. His biggest challenge for both projects, he reports, remains the invisible co-stars.

“The first lesson I got on green screen was from George Lucas years ago: the more you do, the more we have to draw,” he says. Do the practical sets help? “No, because you still have to ask the same questions. How big is it? Where is it? How fast is it moving? Sometimes they don’t have the answer to that.”

At least his Avengers co-star is living and breathing, right? “Tom’s got his fans,” he says with a smile. “A lot of girls. It’s good to work with people you know and trust. I guess he’ll be going back into the Marvel universe and put that green suit on again. Hopefully, I’ll be back with my eye patch and we’ll be together again.”

The love is mutual: Hiddleston waxes on about how Jackson is “a consummate professional … just a very fine actor”. But that, surprisingly, is about it when it comes to romance in the film. Despite Kong’s penchant for women, in this version, he is all business, no pleasure.

“This is not a traditional Beauty and the Beast story,” says Vogt-Roberts. “I personally don’t want to see a damsel-in-distress story and I don’t think the rest of the world really wants to see that any more.”

This was a deal-breaker for Larson, too, who added tenacity to a victim narrative in Room and will next be squaring off with a warehouse full of gun-toting blokes in Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire. “We’re in a really interesting time when we’re interested in seeing something different,” she says. “I’ve seen women who have found their way to continue to be feminine but still exert a sense of force and a sense of strength, and that’s important to me.”

Kong: Skull Island, then, is dodging some familiar tropes. But it is also part of a very modern trend: not just a kickstart to one dusty franchise, but a way of breathing life into a shared universe, a world also inhabited by another giant of the screen: Godzilla. The breadcrumbs have already been dropped online, and there are easter eggs in the film to reward the hardcore monster fans. But, on set, everyone is tight-lipped about the upcoming face-off, scheduled for 2020.

“I don’t know much about it,” Hiddleston says. “We’ve got to finish this one. I obviously know it’s a plan and that’s what Legendary [the company in charge of both properties] wants to do. It’s exciting and something that hasn’t been done in a long time. If it’s done in the right way, then it could be cool.”

Godzilla 2, with its rather leading title, King of the Monsters, is next, with Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things attached. Might a Kong sequel be on the way, too? Vogt-Roberts shrugs off talk with a lightness befitting his roots, rather than his reality: “That’s a little bit above my pay grade.”

[27timescinema]

INTERVIEW - NYFA - CRAIG CATON

By Maria Salomia (pics © Sinead Shahrzad)

Craig Caton is a special visual effects artist known for his work on an impressive number of lovable Hollywood blockbusters. He has designed, built and pupeteered some of the most memorable creatures in recent cinema history: the famous raptor(s) in the riveting kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, Slimer from the 1984 Ghostbusters, the penguins from Batman Returns and countless others. Being a part of the motion picture industry for 36 years, he has worked with highly acclaimed directors like Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron and contributed to over 100 films.

He was present at the 76th Venice Film Festival as a special guest and representative of the New York Film Academy, where he teaches 3D Animation and VFX. The 28 Times Cinema participants had the opportunity to attend and actively participate in a workshop he held on Wednesday 4th, during which he managed to shed some light on the wizardry of motion capture, augmented reality and the wonders of digital special effects in general.

I sat down with him to find out more about his background, his impressive career, his extremely diverse skillset and his passion for monster films.

I would like to start at the very beginning: you have mentioned in a previous interview that your career grew from a childhood passion, triggered by seeing the original Planet of the Apes and trying to reproduce that makeup on yourself. Would you say that your career is, in a way, an extension of that child-like playfulness? Do you still approach your work in that manner?

Absolutely, that was all I wanted to do from the fifth grade on, move to Hollywood and make monsters for movies. That was my dream and I realised it. And it’s really fun. If people pay you to make toys and then play with them, you should do it!

What was your first encounter with puppeteering and animatronics? What got you into it?

Ghostbusters was the first one. I got to work on the Slimer ghost and that gave me a taste of mechanics. It took off from there, I went from being a makeup artist to being a sculptor, then to doing the mechanics and in the end that’s what I liked better. When you were doing the mechanics for a puppet you also became its best puppeteer, because you knew how it worked.

It also had something to do with my background, because I used to be an X-ray technologist. So I have a great knowledge of bone and anatomy and that actually worked pretty well for creating puppets.

It’s very interesting that you could take that knowledge and use it to create characters that don’t actually conform to basic human anatomy at all.

That is what I really liked about doing puppets, that you weren’t constrained to the human form any more. I had done so much makeup and effects that were on people that I just wanted to completely move away from that and do real creatures and monsters instead.

How do you create these creatures and monsters? What sort of references do you use, where do you get your inspiration from?

I use as much real world references as I possibly can, especially when it comes to movement. I love to study how birds fly, how fish swim, how centipedes crawl and try to look at the real nuances of those motions, so that I can incorporate them into my puppets. A lot of it comes from nature.

Was any of the projects you have worked on particularly challenging? In the sense that, for example, you had to find new ways of doing something that didn’t have much precedent in the field at that time?

Jurassic Park was the big innovator because Steven Spielberg said: whatever you can do to make the best dinosaurs ever, do it. Without much time or budget constraints. So we pulled out all the stops and just came up with great ways to make dinosaurs! And I’m pretty happy with some of the solutions we came up with. There is a lot of groundbreaking stuff in that movie that people don’t realise.

You have been in the field for 36 years and during that time special effects have evolved considerably. Jurassic Park is especially relevant in this respect, as you didn’t just witness the transformations, but have actually worked on a film that pioneered and propelled a big shift in paradigm. How did you welcome the change? And how did you eventually transition to computer generated visual effects and digital animation?

In the early 80s I had started playing around with computers, mostly to play games. But then the Amoeba computer came out and it had all these amazing 3D graphics and even as a home user you could create dinosaurs and logos and a lot of cool stuff. So I did a logo for my boss, Stan Winston, which was kind of goofy and sad, but he thought I knew everything there was about computers. Of course I didn’t, and I still don’t. But times were changing and he wanted to be able to create these things. So he gave me a lot of money and I bought a bunch of computers and software and set up a lab. And then James Cameron and Stan and another man named Scott Ross joined together and we created a company called Digital Domain. One of the early movies that came out of Digital Domain was Titanic. We were really pushing the envelope on digital stuff back then.

I also created for Cameron the first permanent motion capture stage in Hollywood, and that was my personal contribution to the field.

What sort of relationship would you say there is between a director and a VFX artist? How would you describe a successful creative collaboration?

We all have to remember that we’re trying to create the director’s vision. And some directors like Ron Howard, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg are very visual. They can describe to you right down to the minutous detail what they want, which is great, because as an effects artist that leaves a lot of the mystery out and you can focus on what you have to do. It’s a great liaison to work with directors like that. James Cameron is a very good example because he started out as an effects artist, so he spoke the language, he knew everything about visual effects and he knew what the expectations were.

Whereas directors that aren’t visual will say something that is very vague and keep rejecting the results because they don’t really know what they want. And it becomes very frustrating, not to mention vey expensive.

Would you say that there’s a tendency toward over-reliance on CGI nowadays?

I do. I see a lot of bad filmmaking where they say “let’s fix it in post”. And that little sentence, that’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars right there! My personal philosophy is to try to do as much as you possibly can in the real world and then use the CG tool for what it’s really meant to be. When you can’t do it in the real world, that’s when you go to CG.

To what extent are practical visual effects still being used?

It’s real hit and miss and it depends on the director. You can get someone like Christopher Nolan who doesn’t like CG, so before having to rely on it he will try to do everything practical first. But every type exists, of course there are a lot of directors who go straight for the digital effects.

Can you name one or more films from the past few years that you especially enjoyed?

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the Marvel movies - superheroes are always fun. And of course I like the Batman movies and some of the really out there SF movies like Ready Player One. I’m a popcorn-movie fan, if it’s fun to watch I don’t need something really intellectual, I just want to enjoy it and I also want it to be something that I don’t see everyday. I’d rather watch soap operas about spaceships blowing up than regular ones that portray what happens in real life.

Is this the reason why you chose to work on monster films and in genres that usually represent a departure from reality?

You are really able to stretch your imagination with these projects, but you do need to ground everything in reality, otherwise you loose your audience. There’s actually a fairly simple rule about it that’s called the “double mambo-jumbo rule”: you can have a movie with a lot of science fiction and tech and you can have a movie with lots of cool magic, but when you try to combine them, that’s when things start to fall apart. I think that’s one of the reasons why the remakes of the Star Wars movies, the prequels, were a bit over the top.

You are a self-taught professional, but now you teach at the New York Film Academy. As someone who has a perspective on both formal and non-formal education, what is your take on film schools?

I think that going specifically to a film school like NYFA has an advantage over going to normal universities. Let’s say you decide to take an animation class at a regular university. The other people in the university are either lawyers, businessmen, doctors and social workers and all these other things that don’t really have anything to do with filmmaking. But when you go to a film school, you go to school with directors, cinematographers, screenwriters and actors and actresses and now all of a sudden it’s more than just a school, it’s a network. It’s a great advantage to going to school with people likeminded.

Is there anything that you learned in the beginning of your career that you still apply to this day? Do you pass it on to your students as well?

I used to say: it’s who you know that gets you in the door, but it’s what you know that keeps you there. A strange phenomena is that some young people today think that knowing somebody and using that person to get a job is not fair and they think that it’s cheating - and it’s not! Use everything you can to your advantage. Because once you get there, if you don’t know how to do your job, you’re not going to last for very long.

This was totally by accident, but one of my students used it recently and it worked: when I first came to LA, there was this company called Make Up Effects Labs. I went to them and they didn’t have any work for me, but said that they might have something in a couple of weeks. In the meanwhile I could work for free in the shop, reorganising all the tools and the shelves and the supplies. I did that, and by the end of the week I was the only person who knew where everything was. And all of a sudden, I was indispensable! And one of my students just got an internship at a stop motion company and he was able to repeat that and succeeded!

It might seem like a trivial thing or it might seem beneath you to sweep a floor, but you should never be afraid to roll up your sleeves. Whatever it takes to get that movie made, you should do it.

Is there also something that you have learned from your students?

To talk slower (laughs). 64% of my students are from other countries, from over 122 countries. And for the most part, English is their second language. And if I start rattling off like a machine gun, I’ll loose them. But even more importantly, all of these countries and all of these students bring their unique stories and experiences with them. Yet everybody has the same great core values, everybody just wants to love each other and get along. Our leaders should look at our students. There’s a lot to be learned from young people today.

What are you working on right now?

I have an internal project that I’m actually using students at the NYFA to do. We joined up with NASA who are planning to send a space rover to the moon to explore these giant holes that they discovered. So what we’re doing is creating animation for them to play and help sell the idea to Congress.

If you could create any character/project from scratch and had the means to do it, what would you like to do?

I’m pretty sure it would involve dragons. In a perfect world, it would be a dragon movie directed by Ridley Scott. One of the only things that’s left on my bucket list is to even just meet him. He was so inspirational, when I saw Alien that was my decision point right there: I wanted to come to Hollywood and do stuff like that.

[bloodelves88]

Trip to Kyoto/Osaka, Japan (Part 3)

Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 4 here. Part 5 here.    

Day 6

Breakfast was in the hotel with bread bought on the previous day again. This time it’s red bean bread, and it’s really good.

Today, we’re heading to Universal Studios Japan! This is the first time I’m stepping into Universal Studios, so it’s pretty exciting to see what it’s like.

I’ll mainly show pictures, since I don’t have much to say.

Staff in Dragonball outfits!

A Terminator ride. I didn’t go for this one so I don’t know what’s in there. Probably a simulation ride.

No idea what’s this, but apparently a lot of people are taking pictures on the grass and beside the walls. Seems to be popular with school girls.

On that note, I want to comment that there seems to be a fairly sizable amount of Japanese high school kids in the theme park itself. They go there in their uniforms. I thought it was kind of strange, because is Universal Studios a place that students just decide to hang out at after school? It’s not even cheap to enter the place. Rich students, I guess.

Anyway, this was the first ride we entered. Only my sister and I went for the rides. My parents just hung out around the whole theme park, looking at the scenery and sitting around. 

It was a simulation ride, meaning that you sit in a car, and it moves along to the 3D movie that is shown to you. It’s quite rough, as the car flies and gets thrown around and falls from a building, and all that sort of thing (of course it doesn’t actually happen, but it tries to give you that sensation). They even blast you with air when it’s supposed to be windy, and hot air when there’s fire, and water when there’s water. It was okay I suppose.

We bought the express passes, so we could skip to the front of the queue for most of the rides in the theme park. The longest wait I had there was probably about 3 minutes or so, so the express pass is really worth it. Without the pass, the waiting time can be anywhere between 30 minutes to 60 minutes. 

This is the Jurassic Park roller coaster. It’s called The Flying Dinosaur. It’s a ride where you’re permanently upside down, and there’s cockscrew sections on the track. I didn’t ride it.

The main attraction in Universal Studios Japan is probably the Harry Potter area of it. Here’s the entrance to it:

After quite a walk through a forest, you come across the main area. Hogsmeade. 

Everything is Harry Potter themed, from the restaurants to the toilets. The toilets had Myrtle speaking in there.

Hogwarts! It started to drizzle, which was a pain.

Anyway, we headed to the queue for the ride, and it was really crowded in there. We first had to go to the locker room to deposit our bags and valuables before going onto the ride. The ride was still a simulation, but there was more real movement than the Spiderman one. You sat on chairs that are something like this (this isn’t the actual chair):

(picture from here)

Then the chair moves along sideways, and off you go! 

You get into a cave with spiders, go play Quidditch, fly around Hogwarts, and fight a dragon. I mentioned that there’s more movement than the Spiderman one, because this one tilts till you’re completely on your back, it tilts quite a bit in front too. Your legs also dangle in the air, which is nice.

When we got out of the ride, the rain started to pour. The souvenir shop was really crowded, probably because people were all taking cover from the rain.

Anyway, we had Butterbeer next. It was really delicious.

It’s 600 Yen for a normal disposable cup, and 1100 Yen for the plastic mug. There’s a premium stein you can get for 3980 Yen as well, but that’s kind of nuts.

We headed into a shop next. The Monster Book of Monsters moves and screams at you. 

There were a couple of other things around Hogsmeade that also moved around, such as the golden snitch, as well as the mandrake plant that screams. I didn’t take pictures of these as it was always surrounded by others.

Ron’s Dad’s flying car. This is along the path from the stones earlier to Hogsmeade.

Out of Harry Potter area, and off to the next. There’s a kiddy area as well. These contain gentler rides like a merry go round, tea cups, car driving (slowly) and this:

Lunch time! We had lunch at Snoopy’s Backlot Cafe. 

I had a teriyaki chicken burger. It was okay. 

Anyway, off to the Minion Park! This is the Despicable Me area of the theme park.

We wanted to ride the Despicable Me ride, but our express pass was booked for 3:10pm. The person at the entrance did not want to let us in, so we wandered around and waited for an hour. Not exactly sure what’s the big deal if people outside their time was let in anyway. 

Anyway, it was finally time to enter Minion Mayhem, and so we did.

Apparently, the theme for this ride is that you’re training to become a Minion. It supposed to be very difficult, but special circumstances made them reduce the difficulty of it. 

I have to say that the beginning of the ride of a little slow and dull, because they just led you through 2 rooms, with videos giving some backstory and explanations about what’s going on. I guess they tried to be funny, but eh. 

Anyway, at the end, there’s another simulation ride. This one was quite similar to the Spiderman one, so it was quite nice to ride as well.

After that, we met with my parents, and we wanted to leave the theme park. But I felt like I should at least try a roller coaster, because I’ve never ridden one before, and it’s on my bucket list. How can you go through life without riding a roller coaster? No way!

I went for the Hollywood Dream, which looked to be less intimidating. Remember the upside down roller coaster I showed earlier? No way I’m riding that for my first ever roller coaster.

Hollywood Dream has a front facing and backward facing version, and I went with the front facing one. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of the full ride. It would have been difficult to do so as well, since the track is right smack in the middle of the theme park, and is occasionally blocked by buildings.

Fortunately, I found a video on YouTube for the roller coaster with the point of view from the rider. Here it is:

It’s very scary indeed. The initial drop really felt like a true freefall. Initially, I held in my screams and kept quiet, but that felt really uncomfortable and it wasn’t fun. So I let some sound out. It sounded really strange, and it wasn’t really a scream, but it was more fun that way.

Also, it wasn’t raining when I boarded the roller coaster, but when the roller coaster drove out, it was raining! I guess that was kind of fun.

Also, when I was boarding the roller coaster, the staff said I can keep my glasses. I was kind of confused, so I put it in the bag. Then I thought to myself that it wouldn’t be as fun if I rode the roller coaster half blind, so I wore it back. The staff didn’t say anything, so I guess keeping my glasses was an optional thing I could do in case I was worried my glasses would drop off during the ride.

While we were leaving the park, the Minions came out to play!

Here’s the main areas that we visited in Univeral Studios.

We were back to the station. Here’s a Universal Studios themed train.

Night time! We headed to Dotonbori. It’s a shopping alley and street food area that’s popular with tourists. 

This is the first thing I saw when I entered the area:

It’s an extremely flashy place with lots of bright signs and giant figures hung on the walls outside shops. 

We decided to have dinner at Osaka Ohsho. If you remember what I said about the place in my Kyushu post, I’m not really a fan of it. I’ve eaten there in Singapore as well, and the food wasn’t to my liking. 

Anyway, I got myself unagi fried rice, and it was quite cheap. It was somewhere around 800 or 900 Yen, which is far cheaper than the unagi in Singapore, which usually comes at around $15. 

However, after eating it, I sort of understood why it was so cheap. It didn’t taste as good as the unagi I had in Singapore, and the skin was left on the unagi. The skin was very chewy and thick, making it difficult and unpleasant to eat.

After dinner, we got takoyaki from a supposedly famous place:

The takoyaki is pretty good. I do recommend it.

More figures on walls:

Anyway, we wandered around the place a little more, and my parents went into a medicine shop to buy some plasters for pain. You know those plasters you paste onto areas that are aching or in pain? Yeah, those kind of plasters.

After that, we headed back to the hotel. There was baseball on TV!

It was the Hiroshima Toyo Carp (seriously, shouldn’t it be plural?) vs the Hanshin Tigers. When I tuned in, it was the Hanshin Tigers turn to pitch. The pitcher was under a lot of stress, and he lost 4 points that inning. Nothing much happened after that, as it was mostly 0 point innings all the way.

Anyway, it was a very long day, so we all went to sleep.

End of day 6.

Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 4 here. Part 5 here.     

[sakurafire3]

She is Queen

Gonna analyze the JP rex’s behavior because fuck it

Okay for my first post on Tumblr I decided I’m gonna go on an analysis of Rexy’s behavior during the first Jurassic Park’s breakout scene because why the hell not. Don’t worry I’m a biologist in training, I know what I’m talking about (not really).

Okay, first a dumb nitpick. The iconic scene with the water tremors is… Really not what would happen. The T.rex is big, but not so big to make the ground literally shake. Elephants are well known to sneak up on people with ease and they’re just a bit smaller than a T.rex.

With that out of the way, the actual breakout scene: She rips out the wires, steps out and gives us the money shot with a cool pose and a mighty roar… Except not quite. She first takes a look around, THEN she lets out that iconic roar we all love. If you ask me, I think she’s probably announcing her presence. She’s knowingly leaving her territory and entering an area she doesn’t know, so she checks if that spot is already taken by telling any other potential Tyrannosaurs she’s coming through.

Oh, but then the mayhem starts! Nope, she just… Leaves. There’s no immediate response, so she’s got green light to just explore this new environment. Really, she didn’t actually want anything to do with humans, at most she nudged the car out of curiosity. Everyone would have made it safe and sound…

Until Lex turns the god damn light on. I guess she was trying to catch Alan and Ian’s attention? Which good job girl, you also caught the attention of a 7 ton predator. Way to gp.

So good old Rexy decides to investigate, and curiously she just seems to be generally aware that the light is coming from somewhere around the area since she’s not really looking at the car.

That is until Tim closes the door.

Well kids, you got her full attention now. So she starts inspecting the car. Like, really inspecting it, sniffing it around to try and get a good sense of what this weird, shiny thing is.

And that’s when she sees there’s something inside. I don’t think she fully understands there’s food in there yet, she’s probably still seeing the car as a whole, but there’s definitely something weird about it, so she roars and tries to get a reaction.

Then she sees the kids moving inside, and she nudges the car. That’s when the kids start screaming and moving all erratically, with Tim trying to wrestle the light out of his sister’s hands and screaming at her to turn it off.

Of course Rexy is seeing and hearing all of it, and that’s when she realizes there’s definitely food in there, plus all that sudden movement and screaming must be sending her predatory instincts into overdrive.

And have you ever seen any video or photo of a big cat in a zoo trying to get a treat out of one of those enrichment balls?

Yeah.

Luckily for the kids there’s a thick enough panel of glass between them and those banana sized teeth, so she can’t get them that way. But that’s fine of course, because there’s always plan B. What’s plan B you ask?

Well flip the car over of course. The top of the thing is armored, so maybe its underside will be softer? That’s how a lot of animals work, there’s a reason predators start eating their prey’s guts a lot of the time, so the logic is sound.

She then bites the tire too, I’m guessing out of curiosity or trying to test different spots. Of course the tire gets completely pierced by the teeth, freeing a lot of air… And making noise, which catches Rexy’s attention… And makes her bite it again.

She gets completely side tracked by the tire and starts trying to tear it off, and I honestly think here she’s just playing and has completely forgotten about the snack.

Not that the kids are in any less peril anyways, with an animal the size of an elephant crushing the car they’re currently trapped in with its sheer size alone. Thankfully Alan’s quick thinking and knowledge of animal behavior are here to save the day!

He grabs a flare and lights it on. This catches Rexy’s attention, because new weird sparkly thing. Then, he throws the flare back into the paddock, and Rexy follows it because she really wants to check out what the hell that new weird thing is. That’s it folks, the day is saved!

Right. For some reason, Ian decides to grab another flare and light it up too. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention because hey, another weird sparkly thing! Then Ian starts running with the flare, and throws the flare while running. The thing is, the point of the flare is giving Rexy a new target to check out, but if you start running and screaming then you become a target. A target that acts an awful lot like prey at that.

So Ian runs straight to the toilet for some reason, and Rexy lunges at him, running her head straight into the small hut because let’s be real, that thing wouldn’t be able to withstand a full charge of something that big lol.

Anyways, the whole thing comes crashing down, leaving poor Gennaro exposed. Now something that’s interesting here is that she doesn’t instantly eat him, she actually checks him out at first! She’s actually curious about him, tilting her head like a quizzical dog.

And eats him. So long for the whole “won’t see you if you don’t move” thing I guess.

Fortunately Gennaro being eaten alive gives Grant enough time to get Lex out of the car (which he would have had even if Ian hadn’t tried to be a hero anyways but I digress), but before he can get Tim, Lex screams. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention, who must be having the time of her life with all this stimulation and she comes back to the car.

We get this scene where she’s supposedly not seeing Grant and Lex because they’re not moving, but IIRC the Lost World novel retconned that to her just not being hungry anymore and honestly I’m gonna roll with that because even if she didn’t see them there’s no way she didn’t smell them. I think she just lost interest in humans after eating a goat and a lawyer, especially when she has a much bigger toy right there!

I honestly think she’s not even trying to get Tim out and eat him anymore, the way I see it she’s just playing around with the car, pushing it around and generally just dicking around with it for the hell of it.

Then she pushes it off a magically appearing cliff like your cat knocking over that one glass at the edge of your kitchen table, either because she wants to get rid of the used toy or simply because she thinks it’s funny. Or because Spielberg didn’t tell her there was suddenly a cliff where she had just walked off. Then she gives one final roar to the camera, which is probably just for cinematic effect tbh.

So… Yeah, that’s all. As you can see, one of the best things of the scene is that the T.rex is… Just an animal. It’s not a movie monster going on a rampage, everything it does is completely normal animal behavior. This is big part of what makes the scene just so good and tense. It just feels real, you can actually believe the protagonists are being put in danger by a wild animal. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what dinosaurs are. Just animals.

Unlike mister “wants to watch the world burn” over here.