We Must Stop This Fourth "Jurassic Park" Movie
by Christine Quinn
From time to time, we offer up this space for everyday New Yorkers with a point of view on the issues of the day.
It’s a big week, with gay marriage up before those old fuckfaces in the Supreme Court, with hackers trying to take down our Netflix accounts, and with old straight men confessing their love of high-heeled boots and also apparently doing dudes during their midlife crisis. What an era in which we live! By which I mean, the Cenozoic. But more importantly, weighing heavily on all our minds, is the forthcoming Jurassic Park 4, which is expected to hit theaters next summer, which will be my first summer as mayor of the fine City of New York, or so Mike Bloomberg used to tell me, back when we still talked.
I’ll never forget the first Jurassic Park. I’d never been so excited for a movie before. The year was 1993, and I’d been that crazy queen Tom Duane’s chief of staff for a couple years. Me and my then-girlfriend Laura went to the Chelsea Clearview on opening night! (We’re both huge Laura Dern fans.) I made Laura — my Laura! LOL, not Laura Dern — pack the flasks, and as much as we enjoyed the film and its Spielbergian magic from the back row, getting crunk, still I found the film’s message gratifying. You can’t fuck around with dinosaurs, everyone learned that day. And in the intervening twenty years — has it really been that long! — people haven’t fucked with dinosaurs once. Not once!
And then The Lost World happened in 1997, and it was so-so. Jurassic Park III came out just before 9/11, while I was already on the City Council. That was the one with that Téa Leoni. I hate that stuck-up bitch and her snooty accent. Don’t ask. Even though these two movies weren’t as great as the first, still, I’ve seen each of them at least three times, and when I am tucked in my nest of straw and gravel at night, flipping channels alongside my wife, and we come across any of them on TNT or whatever the fuck channels are way up there, of course we’re glued to it and we stay up late, giggling and clapping our forearms together.
I related to these movies so much because actually, genetically speaking, I am also part dinosaur. Not a very large part! But it is why I have such piercing eyes, and a long-ranging sense of smell, and why my voice carries so. Of course it also explains my wonderfully armored neckplate.
And now Jurassic Park 4 is breathing down my frill, and I must admit: I’m fucking furious. Some pussy named Colin Trevorrow is directing it. He did some film with that Aubrey Plaza (why does she have that name?) that nobody saw. But worse, it’s written by those jackaninnies that did Rise of the Planet of the Apes. If there ever was a movie about a savage animal that failed to capture the nobility and menace of its species, it is that piece of James Franco toilet-scrape. In their envisioning of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are likely to be little mushy pantywaists, scraping and bowing before the humans and their horrible stunguns, instead of biting off the heads of adults and ripping the bowels from stupid human children with their delicious and amazing claw-fingers.
Why must this happen. Why must this happen to me?
My makers have made contact, an increasingly rare occurrence, to reassure me that my genetic legacy will survive this torture-by-Hollywood. And yet I despair. I thrash in my basalt-clad office, shrieking obscenities, kicking straw. Why must I suffer all alone these degradations of depiction? It hardly seems fair.
Christine Quinn is the next mayor of New York City, she is pretty sure.