SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With J
Jackie Chan Presents: Gen-Y Cops (2000 Hong Kong) NR!!!
Genres: SF Act
Watched: 10 min
You'd think this mesmerizingly idiotic script was written by an unexceptional ten-year-old. Until you recall your college English class where the prof made the students read each other's papers. At any rate you'd think Jackie Chan has enough money without putting his name on this (he isn't actually in the movie). But, Jackie Chan is pretty great! And with greatness come various unpleasant qualities.
J says: The 10 minutes of the plot we saw was lifted entire from Robocop.
J also says: It had pretty decent CGI. The robot CGI really looked OK.
Jeepers Creepers (2001) NR
Genres: Hor F
Watched: 30 min (ending)
Well, they've managed to make a movie based on about a sentence of plot. Badly.
The monster is not a bit scary because it's so stylized that that is what one notices -- that it's so art deco. That's a peril of stylish design I've never considered before.
Jesus Christ Superstar (2000 UK) NR
Genres: Dra F Mus
Watched: 10 minutes
It's Kenny G-sus! This is so gay. Holy cow, look at these people.
Judas is bummed out because he's balding and has trouble getting dates. Everyone else has nice stylish hair. And nice leather and vinyl! Well, he has that too. But he's no longer a pretty boy and that hurts.
I can just imagine where they take the Crucifixion scene. An orgy of whipping, followed by . . . spearings . . . I bet Christians object to this movie much more than to The Last Temptation of Christ.
It could be that it's not supposed to be gay. The director might have set out to make a modern version with normal people. But all the people he knew were gay.
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) NR
Genres: SF Act
I remember that it's about this guy, Keanu Reeves, who is supposed to smuggle secret data, and the way they work it is they implant a secret CD drive in his head to store the CD, I think because the skull bones would keep it from being detected.
Judge Dredd (1995) 
Genres: Act SF
I don't mind the bad science when it's a superhero comic thing. Because how can you take superheroes seriously? This movie however really takes the comic-book thing seriously. Everybody glares so much. I mean, instead of saying "I want a sandwich" they'd scream "I! Am! Hunger!" and bug their eyes out and make their veins pop.
Stallone looks really silly in that Judge uniform. But again, it's comic-book flashy. He looks much better later when he's running around in his little revealing top and hot pants. He is really pretty.
Junior (1994)
Genres: Com SF
Barf! Eew, eew, eew. But perhaps I understand. I would be angry too if I were Schwarzenegger if I gave the public a marvelous movie like Last Action Hero and I got deluged by abuse from the scummy critics because of its hysterical and dead-on anti-liberal jokes, resulting in diminished profits. Yup, I too would want to pay the unappreciative idiots who listened to the scummy critics, and what better way to do it than taking up this project. Barf.
Jurassic Park (1993)
Genres: Act Adv SF
Nice graphics. Awful plot. Apparently adequate fences are extremely hard to build. It's much harder to build a fence to contain a T. rex than it is to create the dinosaur.
And coming back to the point I made in the review of AI, apparently this is the belief Americans hold in their consciousness. (Spielberg is so good at tapping into these.) That fences are harder to make than dinosaurs. Someone really should teach us the basics of science at some point in our school careers. As is we view it as unfashionable and incomprehensible black magic.
On the bright side, the dinosaur ate a lawyer hiding in an outdoor potty! Way to tap into the American consciousness, Spielberg. And it would appear that the American consciousness has a great deal going for it.
J says: One good thing this movie brought was Trespasser, which was one of the most hilarious computer games ever. The designers decided to give you direct control over the muscles in your arm . . . so you inevitably were trying to get your arm untangled from around your neck with awkward controls while velociraptors were charging at you. The characters in the movie never had THAT particular horror, at least their limbs worked properly. To compensate for the fact that you weren't likely to master the controls well enough to swing a branch at the attacking critter, they made even the lightest touch of a branch on a dinosaur have the force of a wrecking ball, spewing its brains onto the far wall. Another innovation was putting the health meter in a tattoo on your breast (you had big ones) so to check your health you looked down your own cleavage.
Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie.
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