Mike Goes To Movies

The Big Chill (1983) I have just arrived back home for a holiday weekend after quite a long time away and one of my first thoughts upon landing down was thinking back on my recent watch of The Big Chill. Driving through old neighbourhoods, I know that I'll soon be seeing friends, some of whom I haven't seen for a year or more, and I know that as soon as I see them it'll be like no time has passed at all. It's a feeling that's both cheesy and bittersweet, tied deeply into nostalgia and sentimentality. And thinking back on Lawrence Kasdan's film, I realize that he made a close-to-perfect encapsulation of this sentimentality - of old friends reuniting, catching up, and, in some cases, picking up where things were left off many years before. The plot of The Big Chill is very simple. A group of very close old friends reunite for the funeral of one of their friend's who has recently taken his own life. After the funeral all of the friends decide to stay on f...

2. Jurassic Park (1993) This may be the one film that I will never grow tired of. No matter how many hundreds of times I've seen it, Jurassic Park is the film that I can't turn away from whenever it comes on. To me, everything about it is perfect. Within the timeline of cinematic innovations, the film was a total breakthrough. Originally, Steven Spielberg had intended to make the film using life-size puppets for the dinosaurs (i.e. classic King Kong). However, upon encountering a few computer graphic-wizards and witnessing the recent strides that had come in VFX, Spielberg was immediately sold on using computer imagery for the film. To creature the dinosaurs he composited the VFX into a perfect blend with massive practical effects to create the creatures on-screen. For a film that is already over twenty-five years old, it amazes me every time to see how well Jurassic Park's effects still hold up. The realness of the famous T-Rex scene, when she escapes her pen ...