Friday, January 22, 2016

Parking in Jurrasic

Piku playing on Netflix. 
A goes, " Hey Rrrrrr, look the guy from Jurrasic World!!!!" 
R comes hopping, and looks at TV,  "Yaaaaa, Mr Masrani."



They were awestruck - he's in Hindi movie ! For them, Irrfan Khan is big-shot Hollywood hero :)

And boy, they know more about Jurrasic World than I know about Jurrasic Park. Few weeks back, when I screened Jurrasic Park for them, they already knew MrHammond. I mean, what am I for !?! I thought I would be the one to lead them into Science Fiction and introduce all fundamentals to them. But with a handy iPad Mini, they are rolling right from Mars Rover chapter. I feel antiquated.

Jurrasic Park was my "time" movie. I was in 12th. Dad took me & my bro to the Arun theater, the only one playing English movies in Belgaum (atleast the respectable kind). All 3 of us were completely blown away by the movie. In 1993, the only marketing hype we could get from, was Doordarshan (DD). Cable TV was in early stages and we did not have it at home. And Internet was something I was going to learn about in textbook, as one of the top layers in ARP, in next 4-5 years. Now I really wonder, what told me that this was a must see movie ? I mean we had no known craze of Dinosaurs in India before this. Yes DD had taught me well, what a big-shot Steven Spielberg was. But seriously who hyped this movie for me ? Maybe some word of mouth publicity, slowly flowing into the small town. Movies were usually released months after the actual release in small town. So enough time to buildup. 

We saw the movie in big-screen theater; were mighty impressed. Kept trying to figure out how did they recreate the animals for the movie ? Eventually learnt about CGI. Got interested in fractals. After I started working in big city, Jurrasic Park was one of the first books I bought. Micheal Crichton became my favorite writer and I gobbled up all of his books, with strong opinions about each of them. In IISc, I even bought & read a book on Chaos TheoryHmm, mighty influential movie indeed.

When Jurrassic World hype started, I easily ignored it. I am a grown adult, who will not fall for marketing hypes (so I would like to think of myself). But Dad was in town too. I knew I had to make it a family movie night. Dad, Hubby, A, R & me went to AMC for JW. All of us impressed again. I found the Indominus a bit icky. But I loved Claire (Bryce) and Masrani (Irrfan Khan) characters and their scenes. T-rex and Velociraptors were good. What bugged me was that one of the kids was not a girl and there was no one like Jeff Goldblum and Samuel L Jackson's character in this reboot. No fascinating science theory I could research offline.

But since then, the kids did their own research on Youtube, for more videos on this movie. Most of it is junk parodies. I sometimes wonder, are they learning anything ? If anything, they do know many dinosaur names, as fluently as Ramesh-Suresh. And they have loads of inescapable merchandise. 


No comments:

Post a Comment