French tale the life at a party
Weekend
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (M, 128 mins)
Directed by J.A Bayona
Most of you know this already, but for those who don’t, the phrase ‘‘jumped the shark’’ refers to the exact moment a TV series or movie stops being even remotely credible and loses forever the audience’s respect and investment.
It has its origins in a 1977 episode of the sitcom Happy Days, in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) did just what it says, on water-skis. Years later, a few commentators seized on that scene as a convenient shorthand for the moment any entertainment begins its irrevocable slide into irrelevance.
I mention this only because I never need to use the expression again. As of tonight, I shall instead be saying ‘‘and that’s when the raptor opened the window’’. And for that dear reader, we have Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to blame.
But let’s back up a little. This is the fifth Jurassic film and the second in a threatened trilogy. It picks up the action a while after the carnage that closed out Jurassic World in 2015. The dinosaurs have taken over Isla Nublar – site of the theme parks – and only a force of private soldiers, led by the requisite gun-happy bully, remain. They are working for a corrupt business type who claims to be evacuating the dinos to another sanctuary to escape an imminent volcanic eruption.
It’s all hogwash of course. If there’s one idea this franchise is absolutely wedded to, it’s that you can never trust a capitalist. Which is a kind of ironic garnish for a series that has so far grossed somewhere north of $US3.5 billion on an investment of around $US600 million.
It all goes horribly wrong, as it must. The plan is cover for a diabolical scheme to auction the beasties off to various shady types on the mainland. Our returning heroes from World – Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt – supplemented by a couple of plucky stereotypes in the shape of Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda, make the trip after escaping the spectacularly unhinged first act.
And then, in the basements and bedrooms of an old stone mansion newly outfitted as a genetics lab and dino holding cells, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom finally gets under way. And yes, there truly is a scene in which a hybrid raptor apparently works out how to open a window latch. At which point I laughed out loud and was pretty gratified to hear most of the audience join in.
It’s not that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a particularly bad film. Director JA Bayona has C’est La Vie! (M, 115 mins) Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toldano ★★★★
Olivier Nakache and Eric Toldano were the team behind 2011’s The Intouchables, which introduced the world to the force of nature which is Omar Sy and was pretty much the most-sheerly enjoyable film of that year. In the years since, Nakache and Toldano have turned in the very likeable Samba – also starring Sy – and now this – C’est La Vie! (Le Sens de la feˆte).
C’est La Vie! takes place over one night, with almost all of the action confined to a single location, a country mansion hosting an opulent society wedding for an ostentatious young tyro of French business and a few hundred of his absolute besties.
Charged with putting the show together and somehow sidestepping the entourage of impending disasters that accompany any unrehearsed