Family Ties: Uncle Pablo & The Canadian Surfer

Nick Brady: Paradise Lost does not have the ring of Escobar: Paradise Lost, but then again Nick Brady does not have the charisma of Pablo Escobar. 

But Nick Brady serves a purpose in movies like Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar. He’s our everyman. Our stranger in a strange land. Our innocent guide into the foreign and deadly world of the most notorious cocaine kingpin the world has ever seen. He’s also a foreigner to Colombia, the people and the movie’s plot.

Nick (Josh Hutcherson) is a Canadian surfer who ends up Colombia in 1983. He falls in love with Maria (Claudia Traisac), a confident young woman who points to a billboard with a picture of a menacing face and says that’s her uncle. Uncle Pablo seems nice enough, and he’s some kind of politician. When Nick and Maria attend a lavish party, Nick asks how Uncle Pablo made his fortunes. Maria doesn’t miss a beat, and her smile never fades: “Cocaine.” 

What transpires next is mostly predictable, but altogether fascinating. Nick is so smitten by Maria that he barely notices himself sinking deeper into Pablo’s clutches of money and extravagance. The hacienda where the Escobar keeps his family is paradise: pools, elephants and other exotics animals, life-size fiberglass statues of dinosaurs in the pastures. At one point we see Pablo dusting his prize keepsake: the car that Bonnie and Clyde were killed in. 

The real draw here is Pablo Escobar, played with psychotic finesse by Benecio del Toro. He’s a lovable kind of kingpin. Oafish, domineering, dispensing sage advice in ways that disarm his intimidating 1,000-yard stare. He’s made even more terrifying as he struts around with his wireless briefcase phone, Cosby sweaters and, hilariously, a green corduroy Boston Celtics cap. If you admired Steven Soderbergh’s Che and the great lengths del Toro went to craft that complex character than you will likely be disappointed that this film doesn’t quite reach that level of storytelling. His Pablo is marvelous to watch, but he doesn’t have much arc. He begins the film as Uncle Pablo, and then one day, on the eve of a prison term, he decides to kill everyone, including two infants—two infants too many for this kind of movie. There is no nuance in his monstrosity. And the fact the he would spend so much time doting on and then ultimately trying to kill Nick, seems laughably pointless. A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

That is the peril of these types of movies, these pictures about famous people and their sidekicks, assistants or secretaries: the film can’t sustain itself on the Nick Brady’s of the world, and there’s never enough time to develop the Pablos. It happened in The Last King of Scotland, in which a doctor found himself in the inner circle of Idi Amin, and in The Devil’s Double, in which a body double is roped into Uday Hussein’s twisted universe, and it happens here in Escobar. Hutcherson does what he can, and del Toro hits it out of the park, but they don’t have much to work with because their characters are on different trajectories. 

Di Stefano does do a commendable job holding these trajectories as best he can, and the film has a unique look and feel to it, although I found the drifting focus and handheld shots to be frequently annoying. He structures the movie out of sequence, and it works really well, especially since the flashbacks and flash forwards don’t tip off the plot points any more than they should. The first half of the film is largely a romance and psychological drama, but it quickly becomes a terrifying narco-thriller as Nick is sent on a mission to bury Pablo’s treasure. It’s a jarring acceleration, and doesn’t altogether work, but the scenes are well executed and appropriately nailbiting.

I did find it very hard to believe, though, that Pablo Escobar would ask his niece’s Canadian surfer boyfriend to drive his loot up into the mountains and then have to commit murder to hide it all. And Nick, apparently out of inexhaustible fear, goes along with it to a point. Let me repeat an earlier sentence here: A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

Listen, I’m fond of what this movie does, and what it attempts to do, with Pablo Escobar, who might be one of the greatest villains of the late 20th century. But Paradise Lost doesn’t go far enough. Pablo needs to run, as fast as he can, away from Nick until he finds himself in his own movie.

The Farewell Party gives reverence to death

There is dignity in death and The Farewell Party searches for it in humorous bursts of empathy. 

It begins with an elderly tinkerer ringing up an older woman. “This is God,” he says, and the woman, senile and confused, believes him. “You are certainly going to heaven, but we have no vacancies, so you must get your treatment.” The woman nods. 

At this point you realize you’re in for for something very unique, and likely heartbreaking. 

The tinkerer is Yehezkel (Ze’ev Recach) and he is watching his best friend suffer in pain in a care facility. His prognosis is terminal. Morphine no longer works, and he’s developing bedsores that are increasingly painful. His wife, at the end of her rope, suggests they end his agony and the gears in Yehezkel’s head begin spinning. 

What happens next is a devastating examination of mercy as Yehezkel and his band of helpers plan, build and implement a euthanasia machine. The device is crude -- it is driven by a small motor and a bicycle chain, and uses drugs intended for animals -- but it is effective at ending the suffering of Yehezkel’s “patients,” who seek him out at great risk for themselves and their loved ones.

The Farewell Party handles all this in a serious way, but you can’t help but smile at its subtle brand of bleak comedy, from the gay man literally trapped in the closet and an overzealous traffic cop repeatedly talked out of writing tickets, to a touching scene with much of the elderly cast nude and high in a greenhouse to cheer up a friend with dementia. The gallows humor manages to give brief reprieves between each heartbreaking death. 

The Israeli film, directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, is beautifully staged and photographed. The camera almost never moves, preferring instead static shots that give the scenes and their terrifying implications reverence. When it does move, in a lovely musical number and later in a tragic moment of realization for Yehezkel, it does so to punctuate the delicate nature of life and death.

It ends precisely where you want it to, but it stings even as it rings true. This is a beautiful film, one that gazes long and hard into the soul of the dying, and those who look over them.

"They're dinosaurs — they're wow enough."

Jurassic World desperately craves 1993, when CGI was in its infancy, the internet was not in wide use, and when dinosaurs could inspire awe and wonder from all who gazed upon them. Just picture the film as a Scooby Doo villain, an old crotchety man shaking his fist: “If it weren’t for those meddling kids and their Tweeter and their Facepages, then this park would be the greatest park ever.”

I’m not one to miss the 1990s, but Jurassic World makes me yearn for those halcyon years, before we became cynical and jaded, before we started turning our back on the Mona Lisa to take selfies with selfie sticks, before we started thumbing our nose at the marvelous. That’s the attitude of Jurassic World, in which a theme park with living, breathing, chomping dinosaurs is struggling to pay its bills because “no one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore.” Times are so tough that they have bio-engineer the Indominus Rex, whose DNA is a chunky stew of other creatures’ chromosomes. Kids these days, the film laments, they just want their phones, their Snapchat, and a hoodie to retreat into. One character has to be reminded to put his smartphone down to see a Titanic-sized sea monster gobble a great white the way a child crunches on goldfish crackers.

This is Jurassic World’s most fundamental failure: it wants us to believe that a theme park with dinosaurs would get old. Lions, tigers and elephants have existed longer than man has, yet we still line up to gaze at them at zoos, so what makes Jurassic World thinks we’d be bored with cloned dinosaurs? It’s an idiotic concept that produces no fruit, just leafless limbs that end in broken stumps, and it’s a premise that the entirety of the film is grown around. More on that later.

Jurassic World has many failings, but it is, first and foremost, a rip-roaring dino-adventure. If you watched the first three films and thought “not enough dinosaurs” then this fourth entry in the franchise has you covered in every combination imaginable: I-Rex on raptor, mosasaurus on I-Rex, pterodactyl on human, human on raptor, T-Rex on human, T-Rex on I-Rex … so many variations that it sounds like an erotic personals section in a paleolithic newspaper. The scenes are long and action-packed, and they give heroic treatment to dinosaurs that were only glimpsed at in previous films. The velociraptors, so often the villains in the other pictures, are essentially good-guy sidekicks here. Think of them as trained orcas at SeaWorld, another disaster park with deadly man-eating attractions. 

The raptors are trained by Owen (Chris Pratt), who was with them when they hatched and who now oversees their development as park stars. They may know tricks, but they’re still deadly predators as we see in an early scene involving a rookie taking a spill into their pen. (My question here is why didn’t Owen use the raptor flute from the third movie, but then I remembered that even a raptor flute is too ridiculous for this movie.) Owen has to fight back a corporate stooge who wants to militarize the raptors into some kind of living battle-drones. I wish I could tell you this character was played by Paul Reiser from Aliens, but I cannot — he is played by Vincent D’Onofrio who actually has the line, “These things would have been great in Tora Bora.” At the conclusion of this line the sound of 400 collective eye-rolls was loud enough to fill the theater in 3D sound.

Owen flirts occasionally with park director Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is busy negotiating deals around the park, including a Verizon Wireless sponsorship —”what’s next, the Pepsisaurus?” a computer tech asks. (Yes, says Pepsi.) Claire is hosting her nephews, Zach and Gray, who are taking some time for themselves so their parents can divorce, because what you want in a dinosaur movie is lots and lots of family drama. 

As Zach and Gray set off into Jurassic World the film wonderfully establishes the setting as a working theme park, something way beyond what even Jurassic founder John Hammond could have hoped to achieve. There are canoe trips down brontosaurus-lined rivers, herbivore tours inside glass gyro-bubbles, an aviary with winged creatures, and many opportunities to watch carnivores gobble up their lunches in bloody clouds of pink mist. The mosasaurus exhibit is especially nifty: the bleachers begin topside at the lagoon with live feedings, and then they lower behind glass walls to get submerged views of the croc-like monster. An absolutely adorable petting zoo with pudgy little leaf eaters makes an appearance as well, and it is cuteness overload. 

People look like they’re having a lot of fun, but the evil “board” doesn’t like sagging attendance numbers, so they greenlight the I-Rex, which is smarter than any character in the film and has heat-vision like the Predator. And this is where Jurassic World loses its damned mind. The dinosaur itself is awesome, but its existence, its origins, its supernatural powers … it’s all a bit much. Of course it escapes, of course it goes on a killing rampage, and of course every human character suddenly decides it’s time to make the worst decisions of their lives. I want smarter characters in a movie about the genius of mankind. Instead I get Claire, who would rather watch dinosaurs regurgitate half-chewed guests then evacuate the park; Owen, who carries a John Wayne-style lever-action rifle when everyone else carries machine guns; the military guy who apparently has a contract from Weyland-Yutani; and Jurassic’s CEO, who fatefully admits in his first scene that he’s got two more days of flying to get his helicopter pilot's license. Yep, that helicopter is totally crashing. 

The characters in the original Jurassic Park were guilty of hubris and for “playing God,” but they were generally smart people taken down by a computer hacker with selfish motives. In Jurassic World, though, the gruesome deaths — including one entirely unnecessary devouring of Zach and Grey’s wedding-planning babysitter — are entirely linked to the complete and utter stupidity of the plot, its characters and director Colin Trevorrow, who jams so much garbage into his film that you have to wonder if he really wanted to make a movie about dinosaurs at all. 

The biggest failure, though, is that Jurassic World truly believes that dinosaurs alone aren’t enough, which is why it throws in a romance, family drama, battle-raptors, sulking teens, obsessive marketing mavens and that hulking bio-fabricated dinosaur. “We have to up the wow factor,” one characters says. 

“They’re dinosaurs — they’re wow enough,” responds Owen. Amen to that.