Movie Time!

So, over on this week's podcast, I promised a bunch of home movies demonstrating what occupied my time for the past few weeks.  As I mentioned in the podcast, I did have to go up to Athabasca to fill in.  I was on location from the Bryan Mudryk Golf Classic.  One of the events at the golf classic was the ball drop.  You buy a ball for $50, the drop all the balls out of a helicopter onto the green, and the closest one to the hole wins the pot.




And then, on Father's Day, my Dad said he wanted to go to Fort Edmonton Park.  I hadn't been in a few years, and since it was Father's Day, I gladly obliged.  My sister brought along her family, and we had a grand day at the park.

As is typical when you visit Fort Edmonton Park, the popular strategy is to take the steam train to the far end of the park, and then walk from the old fort, through the years, back to the beginning.  At the fort, there was this one voyageur demonstrating the usage of a cross-cut saw.  So, Dad my brother-in-law gave it a go.




Then, we traveled up to 1895 Street.  Dad's always been a fan of fine fiddle music, so when he heard a fiddle player playing on 1895 Street, Dad had to go up to the guy and find out more.  And then, in one of those weird coincidences that govern this universe, the guitar player accompanying the fiddle player turned out to be one of Dad's old colleagues from his government days.




And then, after all that, and with a weekend to myself, I headed into the city on my own.  It felt different going into the city this past Saturday.  I wasn't on the verge of tears like I'd been my last few visits.  Granted, money is still pretty tight for me right now, and in another month or so, I'll be facing the very serious problem as to how I'm going to pay my rent, but for a few brief moments on Saturday, in the city, I was happy.  Maybe it's because Fatburger is finally coming to West Edmonton Mall.  Or maybe it's because I was just super-excited to see Jurassic World.

Jurassic World is so good.  This is the Jurassic Park sequel I've been wanting since 1993.  Rather than just the usual "dinosaurs on a rampage" formula that the Lost World and Jurassic Park III gave us, this actually takes the concepts introduced in the first film and explores them in interesting ways.  The first and most obvious is, "What if they learned from their mistakes and a viable and successful dinosaur theme park/zoo actually opened?"  The second is, "OK, they filled in the gaps of dinosaur DNA with frog DNA...how hard would it be to start mashing together all different kinds of DNA to create monstrous dinosaurs that never existed?"  And the best concept of all:  "What if the velociraptors...were on our side?" 

I was bouncing up and down in my seat at how exciting it was.  Granted, Jurassic Park is an old enough franchise that there's a formula in place and the formula was at play, but by exploring some of the sci-fi concepts, and some wonderfully likeable leads in Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, and I had a hell of a good time. 

The complete review is over at the website.