hacoach

If you want to see a bunch of humans eaten and mauled by Dinosaurs than this is the movie for you.

Steven Spielberg and Dinosaurs so what could go wrong. A lot it seems. When we watch a movie like this, the first thing we demand from the film is people behaving logically. Movies like this go off the rails when people start to do dumb things in deadly serious situations. Hitchcock knew this, his characters are put into similarly intense situations and always act accordingly. They get frightened when the moment calls for it and they immediately try to save their own skin when things get really tough.

The second thing we want from a movie like this is the good guys have a fighting chance and even the misguided guys have a fighting chance, This movie in delights in killing off people it deems deserve to die, and even a few who don't, as if to show the Dinosaurs like storms or natural disasters do not care who is good or who is bad. And the humans just have no chance to fight back, we wait for the moment when they do, but it doesn't happen because its not suppose to happen.

The worst aspect of this film is that humans always seem to be stopped from fighting back against the Dinosaurs, it's OK for the Dinosaurs to kill the humans because -hey they shouldn't mess with them. But Spielberg seems to be adamant that there should be no pleasure taken in humans killing Dinosaurs no matter how many people they kill. So the movie basically turns into a rather unpleasant kill fest.

As for Spielberg; The master seems a little off form here, i would say he is uninspired by the lousy script, but he does give the cinematic world two great scenes. One where our 3 heroes must escape a trailer that us being pushed off a cliff by the dinosaurs in the middle of a rain storm. One of the best things he has ever done. And the spectacle of T-Rex running wild through modern day San Diego.

There is a weird cruelty that runs through this movie, which is strange for a Spielberg movie and strange just for any movie that hopes to be popular entertainment. Which is best observed by the death of one of the few likable and pragmatic characters in the movie: Eddie Carr. Who dies while he is heroically trying to rescue the three people in the trailer. His death casts a pall over the movie. This is the problem with this film, its lack of heart and the human touch. Watching people murdered by Dinosaurs isn't really as much fun as it sounds. humans fighting back against dinosaurs and winning would have been more interesting but somebody took the bullets out of the guns, and fun out of this movie.

The story is pretty familiar, 3 sailors get 24 hours shore leave, and sing and tap dance there way through New York City circa 1949. The film seems to harken back to a few years earlier when every mothers son was going off to save the World, and a 24 hour leave could be the last chance to be alive before heading out to The South Pacific or tangling with Uboats in the Atlantic. With the War as a backdrop the film would have little more poignancy and charm. Three sailors who have never been within a thousand miles of a real battle, and biggest problem is boredom, desperately need to fall madly in love within 24 hours, is a bit silly, but who cares , certainly not me, when the cast is charming and the songs catchy. The entertainment outweighs the shell of a story.

The film begins with a bang, the show stopping number of show stopping numbers; "New York,New York" . 1949 New York was sort of the unofficial capital of the "New" world. This is a romanticized version of New York to be sure, a sweet Disney version of it, a city of museums, dance studios, night clubs and tourist attractions, even the police are whimsical. Anyone seeing this and thinking its the real New York City will be disappointed , its the flip side of more realistic movies from that era like "On the Waterfront" or "Sweet smell of success" but to be frank it's a New York we would all like to live in, or revisit many times especially with Navy men dancing around the top of the Empire States building and pretty cab drivers on every corner, a city of magic and magical happenings.

Of the three sailors Sinatra comes off as the sweetest, Kelly comes off a bit strange, feeling it is his mission to find the girl he spots on a poster, and spends the next hour doing just that, but it's okay because she wouldn't have it any other way.-hey, its a musical after all.

There is a nice ballet sequence with Kelly towards the end, that foreshadows his work on " American in Paris"

In short it's a delightful way to spend 2 hours and wonderful entertainment. As well as an interesting time capsule of New York in the Golden age of post war America.

It was the perfect story, the perfect backdrop to show the un-showable, to reveal the horror of horrors and Spielberg knew it. This man Schindler, this vain, greedy, con man, his transformation from a nobody trying to scheme the system, into one of the great heroes of modern times, is the magic trick that delivers the movie. How did it happen, how did this man of all people, throw a fortune away, and risk life and limb in the very heart of evil, that is the question. So many did nothing, so many did evil in the name of duty, so few heroes, but there were heroes, heroes of the type that saved humanity by showing even under the worst possible circumstances, mankind has the capacity to rise to the occasion. Evil is in abundance, and Schindler is outnumbered, but many heroes emerged in the holocaust, not just Schindler, many hid Jews, many spirited Jews to safety but few were as outnumbered and at the very heart of the holocaust as Schindler. How do you protect, and keep 1,100 people from being murdered, and do it all out in the open, only the best conman could have done it, its almost as if Schindler trained his whole life, all his cons, all his act and charisma finely tuned, just so he could pull off the greatest scheme of them all, tricking the Nazi's out of 1,100 Jewish souls.

While Schindler and Goth battle it out miles above the Jews like New Gods, one with the complete power of life and death over the Jews, the other working as hard as he can to save them. It is Itzhak Stern ( Ben Kingsley who is superb) who is the soul of the movie, the classy and dignified Stern is a Jewish man who overnight has lost his rights to be called human, the Nazis have stripped him of everything but that humanity, which he somehow manages to cling to.

It is through Stern that we see the transformation in Schindler, as first Stern will not even take a drink with Schindler by the end Stern looks at Schindler with an almost spiritual reverence reserved for the greatest of people. the reverence held for very very special people.

We see the slow transformation of Schindler, jump started by a fateful horse ride in the Polish countryside, it is here that Schindler first see's the little girl in the red coat, a beautiful angelic child relegated to extinction by Hitler and his monsters, this is the beginning for Schindler, the push, the horror is revealed to him. the second time he see's the girl in the red coat, she is among the dead in a wheel barrel full of corpses being wheeled to a fire to be incinerated. Her life snuffed out like a candle. This is the moment when Schindler knows he must act, that all the money in the world is worthless to a man who cannot sleep at night., or escape the guilt of not acting when so much depended on people acting.

From that moment on Schindler is relentless in protecting his Jews, the Schindler Jews, he overcomes every obstacle the Nazi's place in front of him, he bargains with the very devil himself, and wins. But not till the last day of the war, and even then can he rest. The Nazi's were relentless in their thirst for Jewish blood and Schindler had to be just as relentless.

A masterpiece and a historical look at Mankind's darkest hour, which will live for a thousand years as testament , the thousand years the Nazis thought their Reich, which ended in flame, destruction and the embarrassment and blight on the character of mankind. Thankfully there were men like Schindler to show the other side of what mankind was capable of, and can aspire to be.