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Re: the business of chick flicks
On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Rick Callender wrote:
> I wonder if Karin cries at that movie? Any dog lover would, IMO.
Hmmmm, I guess I shouldn't bring up the fact that I loved that darkly
humourous bit in _The Lost World: Jurassic Park_ where the T-Rex gobbles
up the dog in someone's back yard, then. At that point in time, when
disaster movies enjoyed a bit of a comeback, I had grown exceedingly tired
of that old cliche where dogs leap to safety at the last possible minute
-- in 1996-1997 alone, we saw this in _Independence Day_, _Dante's Peak_,
_Twister_, _Volcano_ and _Speed 2: Cruise Control_, and in the latter two
films, the dog was entirely gratuitous and had nothing to do with any of
the film's other characters or storylines. Also in that era, _A Time to
Kill_ made a point of letting the dog live when Matthew McConaughey's
house burnt down, whereas in the book, the dog perished in the fire. So
it came as a wonderful relief to see _The Lost World_, and to see that
glorious scene where the suburban family wakes up in the middle of the
night, looks out the window ... and sees the doghouse dangling from the
T-Rex's jaws. One of the best laughs I had that year, lemme tell ya.
BTW, on a related note, it's interesting to compare the two versions of
_Insomnia_ and see how the Hollywood version tries to make the lead
character more sympathetic. In both films, there's a scene where the cop,
who is doctoring some ballistic evidence to cover up a mistake of his,
shoots a dog in order to give a bullet that shot-through-flesh look. In
the 1997 Norwegian film, Stellan Skarsgard shoots and kills a living dog;
in the 2002 American film, Al Pacino finds and shoots the corpse of a dog
that appears to have been rotting for some time. On one hand, it kinda
makes the character easier to like; on the other hand, stumbling across
that corpse does give the film a creepier sense of foreboding.
--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
"I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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