Locarno Diary #3: Phil Tippett, the "Mad God" of special effects

by Elisa Giudici

Being a prestigious European movie festival but not one of the crowded and powerful ones, Locarno is the perfect size to showcase the work of  artisans. Every year there are one or two guests who are legends in peculiar, unseen, less discussed niches of the movie industry. I am confident that meeting Phil Tippett, a legendary special effects creator, animator and supervisor, will be one of the most vivid memories of this edition of the festival.

Before Locarno and the opportunity to meet Tippett, I knew close to nothing about his career other than that he was a collaborator and close friend of Paul Verhoeven's. So much so, he said, that on the set of RoboCop they asked each other, with dry humour, who they were forced to be nice to...

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Review: "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"

by Chris Feil

It should maybe be said upfront that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is an improvement over its woebegone predecessor. If you are an optimist at heart (or just a realist, because the “original” World was truly THAT bad), you might have assumed so already. Why you might not have assumed is that Fallen Kingdom is hellbent on crushing that optimism to dust, and even moreso the hope at the heart of its own franchise.

Three years after the destruction of the Jurassic World theme park, a volatile volcano threatens the entire remaining species on Isla Nublar. While the world watches, mired in the ethical battle to let the dinosaurs die or make efforts to save these living creatures, Bryce Dallas Howard’s former park manager Claire Dearing is recruited to help a last-dash rescue mission. That means also reconciling with former lover and raptor herder Owen Grady, Chris Pratt’s wise ass hero. It’s a recipe for disaster that comes to its natural dire conclusion, resulting in the dinosaurs reaching civilization.

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25th Anniversary Memoir: "Jurassic Park"

by Lynn Lee

June 1993.  It was my birthday, and I’d invited a group of my girl friends over for a small celebration that would include a movie outing.  I don’t remember exactly why I picked Jurassic Park.  I hadn’t read the book, I wasn’t yet a full-on movie buff, I didn’t like scary movies, and I wasn’t really into dinosaurs.  Yet something about the tremendous buzz surrounding this “adventure 65 million years in the making” must have penetrated my social bubble because I remember us all being excited to see it.

Whatever our expectations were, Jurassic Park blew them away.  From the moment that opening eerie chorus and single bamboo flute dissolved into the rustle of an unknown, unseen thing in a crate that within three minutes lay savage waste to one unfortunate worker, we were all transfixed in our seats and couldn’t have moved if our lives had depended on it...

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Irwin Allen "Master of Disaster" Centennial

Tim here. Today we celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the birth of producer-director-writer Irwin Allen, one of the great junk-food purveyors in Hollywood cinema. It's by no means true that Allen invented the disaster movie (a genre stretching back into the 1930s), nor even the uniquely '70s-style incarnation of the form, with an impressively well-stocked larder of overtalented, underpaid stars filling out the clichéd melodramas of addiction and marital strife that tend to form the plots of these movie (Airport got there first). But it was under Allen's hand that disaster movies became the greatest, gaudiest spectacles of the decade.

Allen was not always a high-end schlockmeister. In fact, he began his career as an Oscar-winner, taking home a Best Documentary Feature award for 1953's The Sea Around Us, based on a Rachel L. Carson book. Curiously his first taste of the effects-driven spectacle that would typify his later films came in as a way of fleshing out his documentaries. One sequence of his 1956 film The Animal World, on dinosaurs, featured effects by the great Ray Harryhausen, and his very next film was his first all-star extravaganza, the cameo-packed The Story of Mankind.

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DVD/Blu-ray: Choose a Dinosaur, Reenact a Movie

It's that time of the week again. New DVDs and Blurays are out tomorrow which means it's time for a poll. Woohoo. Your answers are totally binding. We begin with the big one, Jurassic World.

Choose your Jurassic death

1. Swallowed by a Mosasaurus

2. Snatched by a Pteranodon

3. Hunted by Indominus Rex & Velociraptors

Poll Maker

 

More new releases / Questions for the comments...

Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief in which Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney takes on the Church of Scientology, its cadre of lawyers and imprisoned celebrities.
Q 1: Which famous Scientologist do you think is the actual craziest person IRL: Cruise, Travolta, or Kirstie Alley? 

Paper Towns after the success of Fault in Our Stars everything John Green is going to get greenlit. 
Q 2: Cara Delevigne. Yay or Nay?

Testament of Youth Alicia Vikander and Kit Harrington fall in love & despair during World War I. (Reviewish)
Q 3: Do you think Vikander called up Chastain for advice on how to survive a 7 film year?

The Wolfpack the popular documentary about a group of homeschooled brothers who learned about the outside world only from the movies. (Review)
Q 4: Which movie could you reenact/quote from heart?

Z for Zachariah the apocalypse is never going out of style at the movies. Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine might be the only people left on earth. Good thing that when they repopulate the Earth all humans will be super duper beautiful moving forward. (Review)
Q 5: Which two movie stars would you be okay with as the last two people with you on Earth?

Peaky Blinders: Season 1 1920s set crime drama with Helen McRory, Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill
Q 6: If you've seen it is it worth our time?