Yes, it’s back for a third iteration, to use a word that Ian Malcolm would relish, Jeff GoldBLUMSDAY returns to the Lighthouse on June 16th.
Sure, some people will be dressing up in Edwardian boater hats and cycling around town pretending they’ve either actually read or read and liked James Joyce’s Ulysses. But some people will be dressing up in whatever feels right to celebrate the hesitations and mumblings of one cinema’s most famously uh-ing actors. Screen 1 is taken over for the day to showcase the charisma of Goldblum as supporting actor, leading man, and glorified but glorious cameo. Last year saw an unmanageable 5 films, but this year it’s much easier to sit in the same seat for 8 hours and Goldblum thrice.
Thor: Ragnarok
Screen 1 14:00
Thor and Loki come up against their long-lost sister Hela, and get their asses kicked. She takes over Asgard with literally contemptuous ease. And so Thor finds himself pitted against the Hulk in gladiatorial combat on a strange world presided over by an even stranger dictator: The Grandmaster. Is his character name a joking reference to Goldblum’s prowess at chess in Independence Day? Definitely not. But Goldblum is clearly enjoying himself as part of the parade of rambling, improvised tangents as Maori magician Taika Waititi produces the funniest film Marvel Studios have ever permitted released.
Jurassic Park
Screen 1 14:00
Sam Neill and Laura Dern are the palaeontologist heroes, but Goldblum steals scene after scene as mathematician, sorry, chaotician, chaotician Ian Malcolm; who pours cold water over the idea that the genetic power unleashed by Richard Attenborough’s genial proprietor can be controlled. It’s almost like he saw writer Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie Westworld about a theme park that can’t control the digital power it’s unleashed… John Williams provides a score of stirring majesty, Stan Winston provides incredible animatronic dinosaurs, and ILM provide sparingly used and therefore magnificent CGI for Steven Spielberg’s perfectly paced monster movie.
Jurassic Park: The Lost World
Screen 1 20:00
Goldblum becomes a sardonic leading man as Richard Attenborough convinces him to go to a second dinosaur-infested island, Jurassic Park’s B site. There he will find his girlfriend Julianne Moore already researching the terrible lizards along with Vince Vaughn and Richard Schiff. What could possibly go wrong? Apart from corporate malevolence dispatching Pete Postlethwaite’s great white hunter to bag a T-Rex and transport it to the mainland. Spielberg has disparaged his own work as Godzilla homage, but he deliriously appropriates a trick from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps for the introduction of Goldblum.