It’s Jeff Goldblum‘s birthday! To mark the occasion, here are a mixture of five films featuring some of his lesser-known or my fan favorite performances. Check some of these out!
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
This film gets a lot of unnecessary hate thrown at it because it somehow didn’t live up to Jurassic Park. Newsflash: that was always going to be impossible. Nothing could ever top seeing dinosaurs fully realized on the big screen. I’m actually glad Spielberg chose to go darker with the sequel. I think the rain sequences and the two dinosaurs attacking the souped-up RV control center is a fantastic scene that leave you on the edge of your seat. The film also expands Ian Malcolm’s backstory and gives Goldblum plenty of material to work with. It’s easily the second best film in the Jurassic Park franchise (I know that’s not saying much), and deserves far more praise than it is given.
Vibes (1988)
I guess it was the ’80s that developed Goldblum into a nerdy sex symbol. Vibes is certainly one of his weirder movies. For starters, it has Cyndi Lauper (“Girls Just Want to Have Fun”) and Goldblum playing psychics who get swindled into searching for the “source of psychic energy”. It involves a lot of weird stuff that gets shrugged away as “psychic intuition”. Honestly, don’t watch this unless you like ’80s cheese, Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Columbo, or a mixture of the four.
Into the Night (1985)
Goldblum plays a depressed insomniac who finds himself rescuing Michelle Pfeiffer’s Diana for a group of Iranians. It’s a black comedy thriller featuring supporting roles and cameo appearances from a number of high profile ’80s celebrities from David Bowie and Dan Aykroyd to Amy Heckerling and Jim Henson. It’s probably one of the best movies to watch if you’re going to play “take a shot everytime you recognize someone famous”.
The Fly (1986)
This is easily Goldblum’s biggest role of the ’80s. The science-fiction body horror film from David Cronenberg featured Goldblum in the lead role as scientist Seth Brundle. The creature effects are great, as is Goldblum slowly losing his mind and becoming one with the fly. Geena Davis also does an equally good job in the role of Brundle’s girlfriend-turned-captive. The Fly is the type of material Goldblum should have stuck to making instead of more eccentric works like Vibes and The Tall Guy.
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Goldblum’s star power began to fade in the early 2000s, but thankfully it rose to new heights in the mid-2010s. Goldblum returned to his second biggest role of the 1990s in the sequel to Independence Day, and then jumped aboard Thor: Ragnarok as the secondary antagonist. Goldblum’s Grandmaster is a welcome addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and fans loved every second of the character onscreen. It marked the true beginning of his career renaissance, and showed studios that the world still loved Goldblum.
What are some of your favorite films to feature birthday boy Jeff Goldblum?
