Section B·Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Monday, May 4, 1998
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Commentary
Black Dog lacks action; Swayze's acting scarce
By Jeremy M. Doherty jdoherty@kansan.com Kansan movie critic
Critics like to complain that action movies focus exclusively on plot at the expense of character development.
Black Dog, yet another movie that shoots for terror and mayhem in the boomies of the United States, should be so lucky.
In fact, Black Dog's affection for 18-wheelers and crusty, inbred villains calls to mind only images from Breakdown, the ominous, disturbing thriller from last year starring Kurt Russell.
That underrated nailbiter understood that people are not interested in watching supermen battle cartoonish bad guys. Instead, Russell played a wimpy city dweller, and the real action was kept on reserve while the audience developed empathy with his beleaguered character.
In Black Dog, we are saddled with Jack Crews (Patrick Swayze), a struggling ex-con and former big.rig driver. The movie opens with Crews facing a probable foreclosure on his
New Jersey house unless he can come up with a quick $9,000.
Coincidentally, Crews has just been offered a $10,000 proposition at work: pick up a shipment in Atlanta and haul it up to New Jersey. Crews agrees and catches the red-eye down south.
As it turns out, the shipment is actually a $3 million cache of illegal AK-47 assault rifles. And the arms supplier (Meat Loaf), a Bible-quoting lion named Red, decides to sabotage the transfer and snatch the weapons for himself.
But Crews knows how to maneuver an 18-wheeler, and he easily dispatches the eviduores without shifting a facial muscle.
All of this is the setup for a series of highway confrontations as Red's lackey stage futile attempts to run Crews off the road.
If this is supposed to be hell-raising excitement, then someone forgot to let Swayze in on the plan. His stony, uninvolved style of acting worked when he was playing a surfer in Point Break, but it betrays the actor's lack of range in straight roles such as this.
BLACK DOG
Rating: * 1/2 out of ****
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Rated: PG-13 for violence and mild profanity
Swayze is not helped much by William Mickelberry and Dan Vining's insipid screenplay, which shamelessly recycles every action cliché that we never wanted to see again: bickering federal agents, the hero's pristine family and the undercover agent who has snaked his way into enemy territory. For some reason, they expect us to find Meat Loaf's fondness for Scripture frightening, but they never give Red any real sense of menace.
What they do muster is some of the most laughably bad dialogue ever written. The line, "I've got a bladder the size of a pea" seemed to invite the most laugher. The best way to enjoy Black Dog may be to bring along a few quick-witted friends who would enjoy spending 90 minutes roasting a turkey.
Projects to link museums
By Aaron Knopf
aknopf@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Several projects taking place at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum have the potential to revolutionize the way all natural history museums function.
The collective goal of the projects is to use computer technology to manage and manipulate the information natural history museums have been gathering for the past 300 years. The projects fall under the umbrella of the Biodiversity Informatics Initiative.
"This is a revolution that's spreading in museums," said Leonard Kristhtalka, director of the Natural History Museum.
life, surveying and documenting information about plant and animal species on the planet. The second is to study the patterns and processes of these species to make sense of life on earth. The third is to disseminate all of this knowledge.
Krishtalka said natural history museums had three purposes. The first is to function as libraries of
Biodiversity informatics helps museums fulfill these purposes more effectively. Kristishalka said.
The development of computerized standards for managing collections is the first step, Krishtalka said. He said there were seven million specimens at the KU museum and there were probably a total of three billion specimens around the world.
Laura Green is the project manager of a team at the KU museum. The team is developing a computerized database system for natural history museums to manage the catalogs of specimens. She said the first version of the system should be completed this fall and 200 museums were considering implementing it.
The grant for the project comes from the National Science Foundation. The product will be available for free to any museum that wants to use it, and the Foundation will finance ongoing support for the product, Green said.
Green's project is one of seven in the informatics initiative, said Brad Kemp, Natural History Museum assistant director for public affairs. Kemp said the projects were financed by about $1.5 million in grant money.
Kristalka said once the information was in an online form, there was much that could be done with it. He said a main goal of the informatics initiative was using computational technologies to analyze the data to improve the understanding of life on the planet.
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