The View From The Mountain

I recently completed this 1/24 scale model kit of the Ford Interceptor from the Mad Max films. From the Japanese model kit company Aoshima, I've had this kit sitting unbuilt in a box for way too long, and I thought it was time to finally build it. After painting it black, I gave it a weathering of light tan dust over the hood and roof, and along the sides. It comes complete with all of the details from the movie, including the gas tanks, a spare tire, and a can of dog food that serves as Max's dinner. This was an enjoyable build that was out of my wheelhouse. I don't build many car models, but this was the hero car from my favorite post apocalyptic movies, the Mad Max saga. So I couldn't resist building this one. And I'm glad I did it.

Released 32 years after the original Jurassic Park , and ten years after the first reboot, Jurassic World , the latest film, Jurassic World: Rebirth , is the seventh entry in the long-running cinematic series and, judging from its strong box office take, it won’t be the last. Scarlett Johansson, who was nine years old when the first JP film was released, is now the lead of Rebirth , starring as Zora Bennett, a mercenary who gets hired for a special mission in the jungles on the equator. And she convincingly plays the part with casual ease. The dinosaurs that had been returned to the modern day through science have not been doing too well in the intervening years, with their numbers dwindling to the point to where they now only thrive in areas along the equator, which is designated off limits to humans. Zora is hired to take a team of her fellow mercenaries to one of these forbidden locations that plays host to the dinosaurs because a pharmaceutical company wants them to e...

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent . Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next. And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two , and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow . Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some mu...