The End of Oak Street

Cafe Society
1

Saw this this weekend because I can’t not see a dinosaurs raiding a suburb movie. And that is basically what you get.

It’s was a fun, kind of cheesy (in a good way) violent action movie where ET meets Jurassic Park with a really good performance by Anne Hathaway (!).

People talk about popcorn movies and often use that as a way to excuse a bad movie but this is an an example of good, kind of silly popcorn movie. Anyone else see it?

The End of Oak Street {Spoilers within}
2

Huh, i saw a preview of it when i went to the Odyssey, and other than “violent action movie”, that’s not what i expected at all.

3

I have not seen it, but have seen previews, and when my wife and I were looking for a movie the other day, we found ‘The Last House’ on Netflix, and I said "oh, is this that ‘dinosuars in suburbia’ movie? No, it was not. It’s Cthulhus in suburbia.

4

I found the acting to be uniformly terrible. Especially Ewan. His lines were just so flat and insipid. There were some good moments throughout and the dinosaurs were cool but I hated the ending.

5

I’m a sucker for dinosaur movies and went in with pretty high expectations. I thought it was just okay. What surprised me was seeing Anne Hathaway has so much better running form than Ewan McGregor. She looked like she could be a sprinter, he ran like an old man. The giant snake thing that came out of the pool was kind of funny looking, but apparently it was extremely stealthy…how did they not notice it slithering right past them in the house?

6

Well, she WAS cat woman.

7

Of the two movies this summer featuring a desperate attempt to find home, fights with scary monsters, a guy with a bow-and-arrow, a loyal dog, and Anne Hathaway….i liked this one better.

8

Just saw it. It was a very 1980s movie and I don’t mean the year it was set in.

9

My comments from the generic movies thread:

10

Okay, my 2-¢ (mild spoilers)

  1. I think the movie somehow worked better that the starting point was 1982; although it did not give us the ending this led me to expect:
Summary

They returned to their own time, not 2026 like I’d somehow expected

  1. The Mesozoic had an astonishingly dense population of predators, who were all extraordinarily aggressive.
  2. Predators apparently have a psychic power that causes humans to keep their eyes turned in any direction whatsoever other than toward the predator that’s sneaking up on them.
  3. Most people are badly unprepared for a serious crisis. How many monster movies would be less scary and much shorter if people were properly armed?
  4. Re. the above, why are people stupid enough to go out to confront lethal monsters armed with their trusty hockey stick?
  5. A smoking volcano in the distance? Seriously? (At least they hung a lampshade on this by foreshadowing that they were in a geothermally active area.
  6. A really nice use of time-cloning.

Altogether I’d give this four out of five stars; like a better than average SyFy movie of the week.

11

I saw it yesterday. It was fine for a silly dinosaurs-eat-suburbanites movie. My single biggest beef was that I feel like they went overboard with the idea of feathered dinosaurs. There is zero evidence that sauropods, for example, had anything but pebbly, stereotypically-reptilian skin.

The fauna that was encountered was all over the place, though, time-wise; it was a weird mix of critters from vastly different time periods, supposedly native to the area. I like the tortoises, though, even if they don’t match with known genera; I don’t actually have a problem with that, since we don’t know all of the species that would have been present in any given assemblage at any given time and place in the Mesozoic, so some ‘new’ species created for a movie is fine (I felt the same way about some of the stuff in 65).

Oh, and there were people in it, doing people things, I guess. They weren’t that interesting. Though I did like that the kid that carried the bow everywhere turned out to suck at actually using it. And they all apparently had really bad peripheral vision. Hopefully they all got optometry appointments when things settled down.

12

That was more or less a toy bow, damn near useless for shooting anything bigger than a squirrel.