My Favorite Scene: The Great Escape (1963) “Motorcycle Escape”

The Great Escape is both one of the best war films and prison films ever made, and remains the standard for a prison break movie 55 years after its release.  With an amazing ensemble with legends like James Coburn, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and Charles Bronson, this is still Steve McQueen’s movie.  McQueen had a relatively short career for the impact he left, and it’s a testament to how iconic an embodiment of the “man’s man” that he was that his films still hold up today.  There are so many great scenes in The Great Escape (I nearly went with the McQueen holed up in the cooler with his baseball, because it’s pretty much how I view office jobs), but the film’s most memorable sequence is McQueen’s attempt to motorcycle his way to freedom.

The mad dash for the German border is an amazing sequence, made all the more amazing by the fact that McQueen did every bit of the riding himself except the jump at the end (only because the studio wouldn’t let him).  McQueen even plays his own German pursuers because it became clear to the actor, who was such a problem on the set that he quit at one point only to be talked back by co-stars Garner and Coburn, that no one they’d hired was capable of keeping up with him on a bike.  Director John Sturges went through six drafts of the script, 11 rewrites, and began shooting without a finished script, but, in the end, produced a classic.

Star Donald Pleasance actually HAD been a WWII POW, and tried to put in his two cents that not everyone in the camps was always stoically brave or upbeat, but his suggestions fell on deaf ears.  Likewise, the role of a scrounger for the group that James Garner plays is identical to the one he played for his company when he served in The Korean War.

My Favorite Scene: The Lost World – Jurassic Park (1997) “Don’t Go Into The Tall Grass”

We continue our countdown to Jurassic World, with a look at the second film in the Jurassic series: The Lost World.  This was a sequel that was pretty much demanded, but there was no story for it.  Michael Crichton wrote the novel as a kind of quasi-screenplay for Spielberg to operate from, but in doing so had to make a lot of retcon changes to his first novel (for example, Jeff Goldblum’s character dies in the first novel….which was awkwardly remedied).  It borrowed sequences from the first novel, like the opening with the girl finding the compys, but it was more a muddled journey than a cohesive film.  Then you had the dinos eating San Diego and it became a 1950’s monster movie.  Plus, let’s just say Jeff Goldblum is great in small doses, not as a leading man.

There are cool parts to the film, several exciting set pieces, but the most visually striking thing about the film to me was when they’ve escaped the T-Rexes and run pell mell into this field of tall grass and you see an overhead shot of the raptors closing in on them as a pack from all these angles, but all you see are increasingly speedy furrows forming in the brush.  It’s a brilliantly directed scene and had the whole movie been this good, maybe we’d have ended up with something as memorable as the original.

My Favorite Scene: Jurassic Park (1993) “T-Rex Attack”

Jurassic World, the fourth entry in the Jurassic Saga, is three weeks away, so guess what we’re doing in this column the next three weeks?  Oh it is time for a stroll down dinosaur memory lane beginning with the biggie: Jurassic Park.  It’s hard to recreate today the amount of buzz this film had on all levels of the population.  You had fans of the novel, you had Spielberg in his prime, you had a genius marketing campaign and you had every kid in the entire world from 3-103 who has ever gone through a “dinosaur phase”.  By the time the film was released, I was vibrating at such an unbearable rate that even my overprotective parents let me go to my first-ever PG-13 movie.

It was one of the greatest theater experiences of my life, and not just because my best friend got so scared by the time the dilo attacked Nedry that he literally ran out of the theater.  There are films that come along ever five years or so, that reimagine what we think F/X are capable of, and the true mark of one of those films is that the original effects hold up.  The dinosaurs in Jurassic World look no better than the T-Rex, who took its place amongst filmdom’s greatest monsters, with its entrance and attack on the convoy.  Everything still looks stellar 23 years after the initial release and oh my sweet Lord typing that made me feel old.  That’s no knock on Jurassic World, but rather just a measure of how far a leap forward this was for special effects.  The funny part about it, if you listen to interviews with Spielberg, is that out of the whole scene, the hardest effect they had was making the rings of water on the glass emanate outwards!

Movie Review: Jurassic Park 3D (1993/2013)

How can it have possibly been 20 years since Jurassic Park was released?  I can remember the first time I saw the teaser poster with the black and red Jurassic Park logo and the “65 million years in the making” and just the anticipation leading up to its release.  They were so good in hyping it without showing you hardly anything at all.  I can’t remember before or since a non-franchise (at that time) film having that kind of buzz about it before it opened.  Plus, every boy goes through a dinosaur phase at some point and I was no exception.

Jurassic Park was the first PG-13 movie I was allowed to go see in the theater.  My parents were…let’s just say strict about moviegoing and I was only able to go because it was my best friend’s birthday and his dad did some voodoo on my parents to get me permission.  I, for the record, was perfectly fine throughout the movie.  My friend ran screaming from the theater when the Dilo eats Nedry.  Oh yes, I remember.  YOU RAN, DUDE!

Revisiting it 20 years later, it really is a movie that demands the big screen.  I’ve seen it a hundred times, but in the theater it really is just a whole different level of spectacle.  The 3D is well-done.  It’s not intrusive.  The F/X still look fantastic.  In fact, I’ve watched the other two (shudder) since and I think the dinosaurs look better in the first film still than in any since.  The wonderful reveal as the jeeps pull to a stop on the hillside and you see the slow dawning dumbfounded expression cross the characters’ faces and then the pan up to the Brachiasaur.  Still gives me chills

Steven Spielberg had in 1993 possibly the best year a director has ever had.  He released this and Schindler’s List in one year.  There’s no way he could make this movie now.  Somewhere along the way he lost the ability to craft adventure pieces and tightly pace his films, but this was right at his peak.  This stands beside Raiders of the Lost Ark for me as perfect adventure moviegoing fun.  It’s a classic.  It changed moviemaking forever and 20 years later, it’s still as good as the day it was released.  Go see it and take your kids like so many adults in my theater did so they can be permanently scarred by the T-Rex attack.  Or maybe they’ll break at the Dilo like a certain KT reader who’s swearing at me right now…
10/10