O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie I’ve been vaguely aware of ever since it came out, but which I’d never seen, for one reason or another. Mostly that I just kept forgetting about it, and even though I’ve enjoyed the work of the Coen Brothers in the past, there was just something about O Brother that kept me from…well, no, that’s not the way to put it. It just never seemed to jump up past my interest level that can be described as “Huh, maybe I should watch that sometime.” But I was at the library a week ago, saw the movie on the shelf, and thought, “Well, check it out and if I don’t watch it, fine.”

So I watched it, and I loved it. What a wonderfully fantastical movie. It’s really something to behold. It’s an epic fantasy story, with journeys and traps and villains and betrayals; it’s an epic fantasy story with implausible escapes and divine interventions and grim prophecies; it’s an epic fantasy story set in Depression-era Mississippi with no actual magic in it at all. Fantasy, with no magic. Or maybe it does have magic. There are events in the film that could be magical…or maybe they’re not. We don’t know.

O Brother is famously a recasting of The Odyssey, in the deep South. Three prisoners escape from a chain gang, led by Ulysses (!) Everett McGill, who tempts them with promises of a treasure that he hid before his prison sentence. The three men are, at first, literally inseparable; the only reason it’s these three men escaping is because Ulysses is chained to these two guys. So off they go, on their way to McGill’s home, hopefully in search of treasure, with a very scary and relentless law enforcement man (whose actual legal affiliation is never really explained) on their tails. The three men come across a blind man driving a manual railroad car who speaks prophetically; a one-eyed Bible salesman; three women in a river who seduce them with their song; and…well, I don’t want to spell it all out, since part of the movie’s charm is spotting all the parallels to The Odyssey.

One that stood out is the early scene in which the convicts come across a group of people, presumably Baptists, all slowly walking through the forest whilst singing, down to the river for their baptisms. The old pastor at our church actually used this scene a few times in services to illustrate the power of baptism, but seeing the movie, I wonder if the actual parallel isn’t so much to the power of the Holy Spirit but rather to the Lotus Eaters, who are lulled into apathy by the food they eat. But I digress.

I loved the dialogue in this film — there’s an enormous amount of craft in the script, with characters speaking in the kind of long, florid sentences that you just don’t hear much anymore in movies these days (if, in fact, you ever did). McGill, in particular, has a laconically verbose speaking style that’s just a joy to listen to. Early in the film when looking for someone to break the chains that are binding him to the other two men, he asks some hoboes: “Say, any of you boys smithies? Or, if not smithies per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before straitened circumstances forced you into a life of aimless wanderin’?” Or, as when he asks his ex-wife why she’s been telling their daughters that he was hit by a train and she replies that it’s better that than “He’s a criminal and in prison”, “Uh, I take your point. But it does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny.”

The best thing about O Brother is its music, which is deeply steeped in the roots and folk music of the Deep South, including spirituals, jazz, and popular revival music that is the precursor to rock-and-roll. There’s a reason the O Brother soundtrack album sold extremely well back when it came out. I’ll need to get it myself.

Yeah, I’m late to the party, but O Brother, Where Art Thou? really pleased me on a lot of levels.

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James Cameron is working on a 3D version of Titanic, to be possibly released in 2012. This interests me, a little. I think that by then The Daughter just may be ready for that movie. She’s already expressed interest in it, and knowing her tastes as I do, I do think she’d eat it right up. And I personally would not at all mind seeing it again on the big screen, as I’ve never understood the backlash against the film.

But…I’m not that terribly interested in seeing 3D movies. At all. I’m fine with good old 2D; give me a well-shot movie with a good story, and my head will fill in all the extra Ds. I don’t need funky glasses, and I’m afraid I’ll end up with a headache anyway. I hope that if Titanic does come back to the big screen, there’s a concurrent 2D release of the original film, which is just fine for me.

(Oh wait…now that I think of it, there is one scene that might be kind of intriguing in 3D…and it has nothing to do with the ship sinking.)

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So a little while back we watched Jurassic Park with The Kid, a bit apprehensively as we thought she would find it a bit intense and scary. No dice; she just made fun of us for our worries! But she also insisted on watching the sequel, so I got it from the library and we watched it, after some warnings from me that while she might not find it scary either, she also might find it not as good. This because I distinctly recall my disappointment in The Lost World: Jurassic Park back when it came out, and I hadn’t seen it in its entirety since.

Well, having watched it again at long last, I conclude that it’s better than I remember it, but it’s still not all that good.

The Lost World opens with a family setting up lunch on the beach of a tropical island off which they’re moored their yacht. Their little girl wanders off and finds an adorable little reptile thing that acts all cute when she feeds it. This brings out its brethren. Lots and lots of them. Cue the screaming of the little girl, the running of her parents to her side, and the wailing of her mother when she sees what’s happening (offscreen). This is actually kind of intense, and I remember wondering, “Jeebus, did Spielberg actually open his movie by killing a kid?!” That would have been a dramatic departure from Spielberg’s previous efforts with children in his movies.

But no, the kid is later indicated to have been merely injured. That’s good. It turns out that while the original Jurassic Park island was pretty much destroyed (along with all the dinosaurs) in a hurricane, the island next door wasn’t — and that’s where they were doing the actual breeding, or something — all of this explanation stuff whips by really quickly and it’s not all that interesting anyway.

The only character from the first movie who really returns for any length of time is Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, the quirky mathematician from the first movie who was forever telling people what a bad idea cloning dinosaurs is. Since he’s the only returning character, we have to spend some time meeting all of the new characters, some of whom we like and some of whom we don’t. Malcolm is dating a stunningly beautiful paleontologist (Julianne Moore), who just happens to already be on Jurassic Park II. He also has a techno-whiz friend (Richard Schiff, yay!) and a documentary filmmaker (Vince Vaughn) who seems to have ulterior motives. Oh, and he has a kid. Who is all pouty because she’s just been cut from the gymnastics team. And who is also pouty because Malcolm tries, but he’s never quite there for her. And who stows away on the boat to the island. Oy.

Of course, there are the industrialists who want to capitalize on dinosaurs to make money, only they’re a lot more bent on their dino-riffic get-rich-quick scheme this time out (meaning, they bring a lot of guns with them). Other than that, the movie involves a lot of the same tropes of the first one: humans trapped on an island with dinosaurs. This time the dinos get angrier (owing to people messing around with their young), and the set-pieces get more creative. I’ve got to give the movie credit: if seeing people suffer grisly demises at the hands of dinosaurs is your thing, The Lost World has a lot more going for it than Jurassic Park.

Of course, there are some mis-steps as well. I know whom I would place money on in the matchup of a velociraptor versus a teenage girl with some gymnastics skill, but apparently Steven Spielberg feels otherwise.

Watching the movie again, I was disappointed that it’s not really a story; rather, it’s a series of set-ups and pay-offs. Meet people; send them to island. Cut them off from the mainland; release the dinos. Escape dinos; run into more dinos. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the end, when it turns out that the entire movie is just one big set-up for the last giant set-piece, when the stupid dino-capitalists carry out their brilliant plan to bring a T-Rex to the mainland. And not the coast of Peru, either. Nope, their dino is coming to San Diego.

The first film had characters that it was easier to care about, which is part of what makes the second a bit harder to take. Ian Malcolm was the least developed of the characters in the first movie, and yet he has to carry the show this time out, so we have to spend time getting to know him and aside from his quirkiness and the fact that Jeff Goldblum is all kinds of nifty, he’s just not that interesting a guy. And what stood out horribly for me this time is that the movie totally wastes its most interesting new character.

Well into the movie, we meet a very intriguing guy. I don’t remember his name, but he’s a hunter played by Pete Postlethwaite. This guy is calm, cool, deeply smart, wickedly observant, and he’s itching to bag a T-Rex. He’s also mainly used as a villain and a counterpoint for the “more enlightened view” of nature that the film is trying to underline. We only meet him about a half hour into the film, and when we see him last, we still have a half hour of film to go. The way the movie creates this highly intriguing character and then treats him about as disposably as a character can be treated is the most disappointing thing about the movie.

I ended up imagining an entirely different Jurassic Park II. What if we don’t have any of the Ian Malcolm stuff, any of the dumbass-dino-exploiter stuff, and of it — what if instead we have this old hunter who is tired and bored and can’t find any more challenges? And what if we have this hunter hear whispers of an island somewhere? An island where some company was doing some genetic experimenting on animals, experimenting of an indeterminate sort, that resulted in the creation of the toughest big game on the planet? And what if our hunter takes a few friends to go see what’s up, and finds, beyond his wildest imaginings, that he’s hunting — and being hunted by — dinosaurs? That could have been a gripping movie, instead of a movie that gives gripping set-pieces alternating with dull exposition.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is fun to watch. Great action, and I really did like the T-Rex-in-San Diego bit. But the movie is still a misfire. It’s a shame.

(Of course, I may just be a tad bitter toward the film because the T-Rex’s first meal in the movie is poor Richard Schiff. I don’t care if this was several years before he played Toby Ziegler on The West Wing; you don’t get to feed Richard Schiff to the T-Rex! Especially not when he’s gallantly risking death to save his friends!)

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