Tuesday, April 10, 2007

So Who's Helming Jurassic 4?

Now that director Joe Johnston has publicly stated he is not interested in directing Jurassic Park IV (after having done the 3rd film and having been called, by Spielberg himself, the "go-to Jurassic guy"), and Laura Dern has publicly stated she has been approached to be a part of the cast for the fourth film and that - jokingly, I'm assuming - her ideal director for said fourth film would be David Lynch (god, just imagine it!), I thought I'd check out some outside-the-box suggestions in answer to Cinematical's question as to whom we think should direct the film now.
Woody Allen's Jurassic Park IV - The dinos made their way to San Diego in The Lost World; unable to deal with that sunny climate, however, they've migrated across the country to take up residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There the T-Rex meets a girl about 65 million years younger than him that studies Paleontology at Columbia, but she eventually grows bored of the T-Rex - who's often imagining himself having a conversation with an animated meteorite about death - and so she takes up with the much more suave Dilophosaurus, who teaches Film History at Yale. Werner Herzog's Jurassic Park IV - Dino-entreprenuer John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) returns, only this time he's gone even more drunk with power, and decides to roll a Brontosaurus egg over a mountain using one thousand velociraptors as his workers. Hammond, foolishly believing he can live among the raptors if he pretends to be gay and fusses with his hair, is devoured in a first-act twist, and then the film winds back and shows us how goddamned stupid he was the whole time. Quentin Tarantino's Jurassic Park IV - Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum sit in a diner talking about how fucking happy they are to not be on that fucking island. When they take bathroom breaks, the camera follows them part of the way and then veers into the kitchen, where we see a title card - one day earlier - and where we learn that two waitresses, by the names of Tapioca Brown and Coffee Black, have been fighting an infestation of ninja-cockroaches, which were created by mutating with those dino-embryos in the shaving cream container which were spilled in the first film. Cut back to the current day, where our stories intertwine and an all-out brawl breaks out set to an obscure Dusty Springfield song - a Dusty impersonator turns it on on the jukebox and pantomimes the lyrics in the background - while our kung-fu cockroaches fight our four heroes in varying film stocks. Spike Jonze's Jurassic Park IV - Charlie Kaufman pens and Jonze directs a mind-bending tale in which Jurassic Park actually turns out to be a minature land in the backyard of Steven Spielberg. Whilst filming Part IV, star Laura Dern tries to leave the set only to find herself lost in an overgrown wilderness where Hollywood used to be. It turns out all of Hollywood is actually Steven Spielberg's backyard, only his gardener has stopped coming to cut the lawn because Kate Capshaw's forgotten to pay him, as she's passed out drunk in the poolhouse again cursing the name "Cate Blanchett" in her sleep. Michel Gondry's Jurassic Park IV - Just like Spike Jonze's film, only without a script by Kaufman it gets kinda self-indulgent in the third act. Christopher Guest's Jurassic Park IV - Guest's formidable troupe of actors are a group of bumbling anthropologists and a documentary crew on a Kong-like excursion into the jungle in search of a lost tribe. They stumble upon the dinosaurs and become convinced they've somehow travelled backwards in time, perhaps through the erratic camera apparatus invented by their marble-mouthed boom-mike operator (played by Guest). Catherine O'Hara becomes their Jungle Queen, and Eugene Levy marries a Stegosaurus due to his bad eyesight. Jennifer Coolidge pops out of the bushes with google-eyes rolling as a cannibal princess for two scenes and steals the whole film. .

3 comments:

J.D. said...

For some strange reason, I'd love to see the David Lynch version. That would probably be better than a lot of those others, unless Allen places it in London and Scarlett Johansson is quirky and gets eaten first.

Glenn Dunks said...

teehee. The Kaufman/Jonze one sounds great!

NicksFlickPicks said...

Totally hilarious. The Woody Allen version has still got me laughing.