The visual form of comic books, what we as readers see splashed across the funny pages and beyond, is something very unique. It is something that has been experimented with during its infancy and is still tampered with today. One thing that made comic books so accessible to readers and the general public was a …
Joel Allen Schroeder’s documentary Dear Mr. Watterson is billed as “An Exploration of ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’” but it might be better described as an adoration of the famed newspaper comic. Not only does every person who appears in the film love “Calvin and Hobbes,” but they love it above all other examples of the form, and view it as the most formative part of their lives. “Calvin and Hobbes” is a masterful work, so the adoration is well-deserved, but such an outpouring of love makes for an uninteresting documentary.
Jurassic Park, like many of Spielberg’s best films, allows us to be children again, even if this is, ironically, a film most kids would be scared to death by. It’s a movie that indulges in horror-movie tropes while making them feel fresh, layering a patina of intelligence over the intense, earth-rattling action. Though the human-dinosaur face-offs are the stuff of movie legend, the early sections where Drs. Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, and Ellie Sattler debate the ethics of a theme park full of the living, breathing extinct are strangely fascinating and entertaining, at least to 28-year old me.