Word: derning
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...creaks when it's not playing with the beasties. For the first half-hour -- the preshow before the thrill ride -- you are advised to bide your time. Screenwriter David Koepp's subplot, in which a paleontologist (Sam Neill) is force-fed lessons in fatherhood by his paleobotanist girlfriend (Laura Dern), is laid on with a trowel. And the plot occasionally beggars belief. If you were up a huge tree and a van were teetering on the branch above you, would you race down the side of the tree just ahead of the plummeting vehicle, or would you move sensibly...
...book and the movie, which stars Sam Neill and Laura Dern, are essentially theme-park rides -- say, EPCOT Center's Universe of Energy, the one with the Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs -- which Crichton has given a cunning tweak. The novel is also a dark musing on the hubris that can infect science and capitalism in the heady, dicey enterprise of cloning DNA. The biotechnologist thinks he is God; the businessman dreams he is Croesus...
...Laura Dern's innocent horniness as the servant girl who gets a middle-class Southern family all hot and bothered was one of the year's comic and erotic delights. Calder Willingham's script and Martha Coolidge's direction flavored a warm, steamy brew with just the right amounts of lemon and honey...
...anyone confuse Mary Agnes Donoghue's Paradise, a well-acted, sweetly stated and emotionally predictable tale of an estranged couple brought together by a visiting child, with Rambling Rose, which portrays a much more genially dysfunctional family involved with a randy and amiably obliging serving girl played by Laura Dern. Based on a script that Calder Willingham derived from his own novel, Rose's true preoccupation is one that the movies always cater to slyly but almost never directly confront: basic, down-and- goofy human horniness...
Wild at Heart, which sends a pair of loser lovers (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) on a trip into the dark night of the Southern Gothic soul, is a tonic for the senses and an assault on the sensibilities. Heads splatter, skulls explode, biker punks torture folks for the sheer heck of it, and a pair of loopy innocents find excitement in a side trip to hell. Pretty much like Blue Velvet. Yes, it's different, but the same kind of different; Lynch could no longer shock by being shocking. Many critics figured they had solved the mystery...