Positively volcanic

I "finally" saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom on Friday night after farewell drinks with a couple coworkers whose last day was that day, it being the last day of the financial year, and their contracts not having been renewed. I say "finally" because usually I don't wait a full eight days to see new releases -- if I do, usually the next week's big new release takes precedence. I thought having a few beers might help, but it didn't really.

In fact, I planned to write nothing at all about the movie on my blog, and would have, had it not kicked off a weekend of seeing movies with erupting volcanoes in them.

You know me with the noticing of the patterns and the like.

If it had just been two movies, I might still have written nothing. But when a volcano erupted in the third consecutive movie I saw, well, I had to share it with you, dear readers. For your own good.

I hadn't watched any trailers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so I didn't actually know that volcanoes played any role in the movie. (Didn't see this poster either, apparently.) But yes indeed, Isla Nublar, the home of the theme park (both theme parks?) in these movies, is swallowed up by lava when a previously dormant volcano goes active. Now, maybe it's just me, but I hardly think you build an expensive dinosaur theme park on an island that has even the remotest possibility of volcanic activity. But maybe they never consulted any seismologist. Anyway, good thing Indominus Rex et al destroyed it three years earlier.

The second movie was the previously discussed Hotel Transylvania 3 on Saturday afternoon. Not previously discussed was the fact that the cruise Dracula et al have boarded starts in the Bermuda Triangle and then visits a number of ocean-related stops where monster activity would be implied and/or welcome. One of these is an erupting underwater volcano. I made a mental note and said "Huh," but as I said, I expected that would be all.

Until that night when I watched the previously discussed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In the title character's search for the elusive Life magazine photographer who is the very definition of off the grid, because he needs to find the negative that is going to be used for the magazine's final issue, Walter ends up in Iceland right as a volcano is about to erupt. Which it does, leaving the Jeep he's escaping in covered in soot.

The streak did not continue when I watched Agnes Varda's The Gleaners & I on Sunday night.