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Professor Richard Dawkins

This article is more than 24 years old
Scientist, author

I love the great lawyer scene in Jurassic Park. It is a moment of pure, sublime happiness, even though only one lawyer is eaten. Perhaps it would have been slightly more artistic if the tyrannosaur had tossed the lawyer in a graceful parabola straight to the back of its throat, as a toucan deals with a nut. But there's a lot to be said for the scene as it stands, and it has surely given much innocent pleasure to a great many people.

During the scene when Dudley Moore, dressed as a nun, joins the nuns on the trampoline in Bedazzled I came nearer to dying of laughter than on any other occasion not involving John Cleese. I was helpless, winded from laughing, struggling to breathe.

I was also very impressed by the astounding liberty taken by Baz Luhrmann at the end of his terrifyingly futuristic Romeo And Juliet. The whole film is amazing enough: no West Side Story this, but real Shakespeare, shatteringly real. I was completely sceptical until I saw it, car chases, gunfights, helicopters and all. It works. But most memorable of all is the end, the main place where the plot significantly departs from Shakespeare. Juliet stirs awake before Romeo takes the poison. The audience sees it, but Romeo doesn't - until it is too late. When it came to tragedy, Shakespeare brooked no half measures, and one feels that he would have done it this way if he had thought of it.

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