Yes, Jurassic Park is a great movie. But the best thing about it was watching it with my dad.

I first heard of Jurassic Park from my dad. I’d never seen him so excited about a book before and I’ve never seen him so excited about a piece of content since. So, to my knowledge, 1990 is the year my dad’s pop-cultural life peaked (Between that and not going to a movie theater since LA Confidential, the 90s were a big decade for my dad.)

In one of my earliest memories, my dad comes bounding down the stairs, sits at the breakfast table, and immediately regales the rest of the family about the Most Amazing Book he just read. It was so good, he couldn’t put it down. He’d stayed up all night and read the entire thing. It was called Jurassic Park, and it was about the most clever idea: They took the blood out of mosquitos preserved in amber, and used it to clone dinosaurs. 

Now, that was a great hook, but what really sold me on the book was my dad’s enthusiasm. He is not normally an exuberant guy, but he was into this. I was down to check it out, but there was just one problem: I was 6-years-old. Granted, I was an avid reader, but I probably wasn’t up to a book like that yet. Fortunately, a solution was found: My dad read it to me. For the next week, he read it out loud to me every night before I went to bed. It was fucking awesome.

Cut to three years later.

My dad had just taken me to some crappy movie at the Fresh Pond theater in Cambridge. The kind of thing he’d never see anymore (remember: LA Confidential). He went off to hit the bathroom, I milled around in the lobby, and that’s when I saw it. The best logo ever. The single greatest piece of film-related branding in history. The poster that launched my life-long obsession with Hollywood advertising. The poster advertising the movie adaptation of Jurassic Park.

And I’ll say it: “A movie 65 million years in the making”? A tagline yet to be topped.

Anyway, I was stoked as shit. The movie is set to come out in early June 1993. A week before it’s set to premiere, I get a surprise: My dad has already bought tickets to the film. Not only that, he bought tickets to the sneak preview, midnight screening the night before the official premiere. As a fifth-grader, getting to stay up after midnight to go see a movie—on a school night, no less—was a big deal. I bragged about it for weeks. For months afterward, whenever I talked about seeing the movie, I slipped in the date that I saw it so that people could work out that I’d seen it a day early. (As if anybody cared.) 

The viewing experience was something else, still one of my all-time best movie-going experiences. I could wax rhapsodic about Jurassic Park all day long, but I’ll limit myself to calling out just a handful of highlights. As a fan of the book, I was most excited to see my favorite character, Ian Malcolm, brought to life. Jeff Goldblum did not disappoint, and I was surprised and thrilled by the change from book to movie that saw him surviving the island. And as a fan of velociraptors, boy oh boy did I love their portrayal in the movie. The danger they posed is set up so exquisitely at the start, and the climactic scene in the kitchen remains one of my all-time faves.

The thing is, though, every one in my generation can do this. We can all quote the entire film. We all remember the T-Rex scene. All of us know the trivia tidbit that the movie and book flip all the secondary character survivors and deaths. I even have a friend who walked down the aisle to the score at her wedding. (And for the record, it was elegant as hell. John Williams should be the official bridal march from now on.) But for me, as much as the movie holds a special place in my heart as a dope-ass movie (and it is a dope-ass movie), its singular place in my personal pantheon is because of the experience of seeing it with my dad.

Submitted January 20, 2021 at 06:32AM by musicmoviesandhoops https://ift.tt/3oYYFKg