Despite a lackluster plot and undercooked characters, Jurassic World really won our cenozoic world over: it is now the third top-grossing film of all time. And so, coming on the scaly tail of that news, the inevitable sequel has officially been announced: it’ll be out in 2018, and both Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt are signed on. As /Film notes, director Colin Trevorrow (who won’t be directing the next film) had formerly discussed how his film set itself up for potential sequels, saying:
There are themes and ideas in here that we’re setting up, such as the coexistence of these animals on the planet with humans. In the same way that we exist with animals now. And imagine a world where just like, you know, don’t go into that jungle, there’s tigers in there. They’re gonna eat you. Just replace that with raptors. And I think we set up ideas in here. One of them, the one we address the most is the weaponization of dinosaurs and the fact that animals have been used in war for centuries.
Brokeback Mountain is another historic film (which managed to make film history with a lot fewer Starbucks and Mercedes plugs), and which, thankfully, will — unless the sequel machine gets really desperate, oh wait — never need to add anything to what the original said and did. 10 years after its release, Jake Gyllenhaal remembered the one and only film (how refreshing and rare it is to say that about any film!) on NPR. In the interview predominantly about his new film Southpaw, he spoke in fond and bittersweet memory of working on the film with Heath Ledger. He also brought up Brokeback’s importance in an interview with BET, in relation to the SCOTUS marriage ruling, discussing how far we’ve come since the release of the film in 2005:
My brother said to me a few weeks ago, all we leave behind is the wake of our love — that’s all we have. And to know that wins out sometimes is an inspiration to me.
In other movie news, the trailer for Experimenter (starring Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Kellan Lutz, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning, Anton Yelchin and Jim Gaffigan) was released today. The film follows Stanley Milgram, the psychologist who came up with the controversial experiment that asked people to administer what they thought were near-fatal shocks to strangers; as the synopsis (and history) explains, despite the strangers’ pleas “for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment.” It’ll be an especially interesting film to compare to The Stanford Prison Experiment, which was just released and likewise focuses on another pivotal mid-20th century psychological experiment whose results were seen as revelatory of humans’ scary potential for cruelty.
And now for some visual stimuli. Much like planet Kepler 452b — Earth’s recently discovered nearest cousin — the haunting otherworldliness of Deep Dream comes from it actually being composed of recognizable elements. It seems as though, naturally, the longer Deep Dream software exists, the greater the deep-dreamt achievements: few things have been so perfectly deep dreamt as David Cronenberg. But if you’re (for some inexplicable reason) feeling tired of these viral software-mediated nightmares, perhaps you’d prefer to get your visual simulation through a good old fashioned coloring book by Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson. The images within are mostly New York cityscapes — and in a week where news breaks that city’s planning to raise the minimum wage for fast food workers to $15/hr, NY is worth considering, at least for long enough to color in a page, without the trademark New Yorker cynicism.