Farm to Table Rant

The Wednesday Pop Culture Rant suggests the following summertime activity: As the sun begins to set, pour out your favorite drink, head to the porch, and take a listen to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.” Reflect on summers past, remember nighttime cruises down country roads, conjure an image of friends in the gathering dusk. Wait . . . is that a tear? A tear? There’s no crying at The Rant! Honestly, pull yourself together. We offer a pleasant activity, and you fall to pieces on us.

May we Rant? Jurassic World is the movie equivalent of Ikea furniture. You know how the pieces will fit together, no surprises occur, you have a serviceable product at the end. The question The Rant keep asking is, how did such a mediocre movie, a film a computer algorithm could have spit out, make $500 million dollars in the U.S. and over a billion worldwide?

The Rant enjoys Chris Pratt, but he really doesn’t get to do any Chris Pratty things here. Bryce Dallas Howard plays the Woman-We-Know-is-Too-Ambitious-Because-She-Doesn’t-Like-Kids so sternly even her hair looks uptight. The white power suit she wears resembles a straight jacket. By the end of course she is kissing Pratt and pumping lead into a Pterodactyl. We understand she’s been transformed because her hair is mussed and she took her belt off.

The Rant finds it hard to believe an enormous pent-up demand for CGI dinosaurs eating people existed, but what do we know? Maybe summer blockbusters are just about being released when everyone is in the right mood. Hey, that was fun the first time around when Spielberg did it, the dude from Guardians of the Galaxy is in it, there’s a dinosaur that swims like Shamu in a ‘roid rage and snacks on the British woman that has no character development and therefore deserves to be snacked upon. Why not?

The Rant wonders though if this is all the big studios are now capable of producing: middling competence. The costs have made them so risk averse, so eager to recycle. so content with the familiar, that accomplishing more becomes an ever steeper goal. An Ikea coffee table is all well and good, but every now and then we’d like to take a shot at creating a Duncan Phyfe¹ even if one of the legs is shorter than the other. Great art requires the constant possibility of going down in flames, which is why The Rant will take a big, hot, mess of Orson Welles over the joyless adequacy of Michael Bay every time.

1. No relation to Barney.