Clever Girl

Yet again Hollywood decided it didn't need my opinion of a major motion picture, so they screened it after my press deadline. But the man can't hold me down! Instead of reviewing Jurassic World, the newest entry in the famous dino franchise, I decided to interview a 10-year-old girl about dinosaurs.

Una: Ummm.

Alex: There was a dog there.

Una: Oh yeah! I don't remember you, but I know there were people there.

Alex: That's OK. I'm forgettable. Anyway, your dad said you're excited about the new Jurassic Park movie?

Una: Yeah! I've seen the previews for the other ones, and they weren't as good quality because they were made a long time ago. I'm really excited about the scene where the sea-dinosaur totally owns that shark. That looks aaawesome.

Alex: So does it seem scary at all?

Una: Ummm…I guess.

Alex: Which part?

Una: Because there's this new mutated dinosaur, and he's really intense. There's a scene where he's behind a door and they're trying not to breathe. Those kinds of scenes are very suspenseful.

Alex: Is mutating dinosaurs a good idea?

Una: No! It's such a stupid idea. That's like combining Loki and the Hulk. It would be so scary. Or like combining a spider and Annabelle, the creepy doll from that one movie. Then you'd have Annabelle with eight legs.

Alex: Jesus, yeah. Yuck. Una, it seems like you're kind of into scary things. So when you watch scary movies, how do you deal with it?

Una: My friends always watch movies before me, so they tell me the scary parts and then I watch those scary parts on YouTube 10 million times to prepare myself.

Alex: That's the best thing I've ever heard.

Una: It works pretty well. In Lord of the Rings there's this scary part where this gross orc jumps out of the mud, and it's like, "whaaa," so I watched that like 10 million times until I got used to it.

Alex: That would give me nightmares!

Una: I didn't get nightmares from that. But when I was 6, I probably shouldn't have been watching a Scooby Doo movie, but I did ,and I had a nightmare about a mutated wrestler chasing me and my dad. 

Alex: If you had to rank them, which of those three things is the scariest?

Una: Um, I would say mutated wrestler, then orc, then dinosaur.

Alex: Really? When I was 10, I saw Jurassic Park. It really scared me, and I think that's because I lived on the second floor, so a dinosaur could just poke through the wall and eat me because he was already that tall.

Una: [Unimpressed] I guess that's reasonable.

Alex: You don't seem scared of that.

Una: Well, my dad and I live in a pretty small house, so they'd probably just walk by and not notice us.

Alex: Does your dad like scary things, too?

Una: Kinda. I guess I'm braver than my dad.

Alex: Does he just let you watch all these scary movies?

Una: He won't let me watch Human Centipede, but besides that.

Alex: Oh my God, Una. He's right. You don't want to see that. But the thing that scared me the most in the original Jurassic Park is this terrifying scene with these kids in the kitchen getting chased by raptors. What would you do in that situation?

Una: Hmmm…I would probably grab my dad's really big knife and then turn the kitchen into a murder scene and then run away as fast as possible.

Alex: Really? You'd fight the raptors? That would never have occurred to me.

Una: But if I didn't fight them, then they would just go kill everybody else.

Alex: You are the coolest person I've ever met.

Una: OK. 

SEE IT: Jurassic World is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Mill Plain, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, Wilsonville, Sandy, St. Johns.

WWeek 2015