wonder

It’s the game of the year in high school flag football.

On Tuesday at 5:45 p.m. at Orange Lutheran, the unbeaten Lancers (18-0) take on unbeaten JSerra (19-0) in a game that should attract a large crowd and produce a memorable matchup.

Orange Lutheran and quarterback Makena Cook are the defending Division 1 flag football champions. JSerra, bolstered by a group of talented freshmen, have been surging and preparing for this showdown. Freshman quarterback Katie Meier and freshman receiver Ava Irwin get to test themselves on a big stage.

No Southern Section team has come closer than 14 points when playing JSerra. Orange Lutheran’s toughest game was an overtime win over Dos Pueblos, which hasn’t lost since.

There will be a rematch on Oct. 9 at JSerra and perhaps a third meeting in the playoffs.

But this game should do wonders for flag football as some of the top athletes in the sport show their passion and talent.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Hold on to your water glasses because you can hear the plot of “Jurassic World Rebirth” coming from a mile away. A ragtag group of adventurers land on a remote island planning to exploit dinosaur DNA — and some of them get chomped. The only new thing about this seventh installment is the cast: Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as freelance covert operatives Zora and Duncan, Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis and Rupert Friend as a pharmaceutical titan named Martin who wants to treat coronary disease by harvesting samples from three massive reptile hearts. Gauging by the response every time this sequel has come up in conversation, it should have been subtitled: “This Time There’s No Chris Pratt.”

I went to the theater with my own heart as big as a Titanosaur’s. (Goofy name aside, it’s a real herbivore and you’ll see a herd of them.) After all, screenwriter David Koepp wrote the screenplay for the 1993 original and the franchise’s latest director, Gareth Edwards, made a serviceable “Godzilla.”

Alas, Edwards has made “Godzilla” again. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined. You’ll see a nod to the 1962 adventure “One Million Years B.C.” (you know: Raquel Welch, fur bikini), which is more of a template than a kitschy joke. There isn’t a shiver of surprise about who gets the chomp, only disappointment that the fatalities are so bloodless — they’re mild even for PG-13.

Some of this ennui is by design. The narrative backdrop is that after 32 years of who-coulda-thunk-it rampages, humankind is tired of dealing with the darned things. Audiences can relate.

To establish this miserliness of spirit, the present-day scenes start with a Brooklyn traffic jam caused by an escaped sauropod lying collapsed and dying on the side of the road. It’s the same species that transformed Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum into giddy, glassy-eyed children, only now drained of all majesty. Some creep has even spray-painted its hindquarters with graffiti.

Plenty more dinosaurs will arrive in the film’s two-hour-plus running time: swooping Quetzalcoatlus, splashing Mosasaurus, frilled Dilophosaurus and a bitty Whoknowswhatasaurus that Ali’s Duncan keeps in a bamboo birdcage by his boat dock in Suriname. But the only one that made me feel anything was that pathetic sauropod abandoned like a sidewalk sofa.

A beat later, “Rebirth” cuts to a shuttering museum exhibit where workmen are trashing their copy of that iconic banner that reads “When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The original “Jurassic Park” inspired a generation of kids to dream of scientific discoveries. This era is throwing in the towel.

The action sets sail with a hefty oceanic sequence where Edwards leans on his expertise in sluicing fins and underwater ka-thumps. Our heroes also scoop up a rather ungrateful shipwrecked family: yachtsman Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Teresa’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono). Initially, we can’t wait for Iacono’s louse to get eaten but we come to treasure his comic relief, particularly when Xavier wanders off to relieve himself next to a nest of velociraptors. Danger lurks and the doofus just stands around with his johnson in his hand.

Eventually, the crew makes land on Ile Saint-Hubert near French Guinea, where a genetic dinosaur laboratory was evacuated 17 years earlier. In an opening flashback, we learn that a technician concocting a freakish T. rex littered a Snickers wrapper, causing a chain reaction that within two minutes resulted in the snacker becoming a snack.

You may consider yourself inured to product placement. Even so, its use here is brazen and strange, from this case of death by chocolate to an “E.T.” embezzlement in which Isabella befriends a baby Aquilops with red rope licorice. There’s even a scene in an abandoned convenience store which, despite a decade and a half left in the custody of pesky dinosaurs, the snack labels remain tidily pointed toward the camera. At least that setting has a modified raptor pausing at a soda cooler to admire its reflection.

I don’t think Johansson and Ali will take as much pride in “Rebirth,” assuming they bother to watch it. Both get through the film without embarrassing themselves, in part because neither is very committed. Johansson’s tough security expert swaggers, Ali smiles and our sturdy goodwill for both actors keeps us from holding the movie against them. Early on, the two get one scene together where they put on a pretense of speaking in shorthand about the emotional costs of a career in Blackwater-style skulduggery. It has the air of a stretch before buckling in for a long haul flight.

This is composer Alexandre Desplat’s “Jurassic” debut and he dutifully reworks John Williams’ famous notes of wonder and yearning a few ways, like a subtle tinkling when Bailey’s strapping science geek imagines the joy of witnessing a dinosaur not in a zoo or a theme park, but in the wild. Bailey is a fine actor and his Loomis would be the soul of the movie if he wasn’t battling for screen time. He’s the only character who seems to like dinosaurs — everyone else sees them as dollar signs or boogeymen.

The series itself has gotten so bored with the beasties that it continues to invent new ugly mutants. “Rebirth” unleashes the Distortus rex — imagine a parakeet’s head on a bodybuilding cockroach. All the dinos struggle to feel convincing as they seem to change size every time you look at them (and the CG backdrops are chintzy). Yet, I still prefer the trusty regulars like the amphibious Spinosaurs, who resemble dog-paddling hellhounds, the pecking Quetzalcoatlus that gulps people like sardines and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, now striped and able to hide in ways that defy physics but at least get an audible chortle.

“Rebirth” is a confounding title for a downbeat entry that’s mostly preoccupied by death and neglect. Who knows whether we’re at the head or tail of the Anthropocene, but the movie seems weary of our dominion. “I doubt if we make it to even 1 million,” Loomis admits, adding that he hopes to die in shallow silt so he can become a fossil too. With the franchise officially out of ideas, how about skipping to “Jurassic Park: One Million Years A.D.” so a futuristic species can resurrect us for some malevolent fun and games?

Near the end of an evening ruled by queens, a king was keeping Chaka Khan waiting.

“Stevie Wonder’s in the house tonight,” Khan said late Sunday as she stood in the spotlight at Inglewood’s Kia Forum. “I don’t know where he is.” The veteran soul-music star wandered over to the edge of the stage, the black fringe of her bedazzled cape swaying with every step, and peered out into the crowd. “Steve, you over there?”

Khan was in the middle of her set to close Sunday’s installment of a traveling R&B revue called “The Queens” that launched last week in Las Vegas and has her on the road through the fall with three fellow lifers in Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight and Stephanie Mills. (One longs to have been in the room when they decided who plays last.) She’d come out singing “I Feel for You” — saucy, casual, effortlessly funky — then glided through “Do You Love What You Feel” and “What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me.” Now her would-be special guest was nowhere to be found.

Chaka Khan performs with Stevie Wonder.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

“Stevie Wonder!” she said again, attempting to summon him to the stage. “We go back a long, long way. I remember once we did a tour, he and I — must have been back in the ’80s, the ’70s or something. It was that long ago. We were on tour for dang near two years. Two friggin’ frack years.” Khan went on for a minute about a vexing old record deal then seemed wisely to think better of that. “Call him,” she instructed the crowd, which started up a “Stevie” chant.

“What?” boomed a voice at last over the sound system. It was Wonder, shuffling out from the wings wearing his signature shades and beret to join his old friend for — well, for what? Khan had set up Wonder’s cameo by saying they should do “I Feel for You” again since Wonder played harmonica on the original record in 1984. But Wonder didn’t appear to have gotten that note: After clasping hands with Khan, he started telling the story of writing “Tell Me Something Good” a decade earlier for her group Rufus, which led Khan to cue her backing band on that number instead.

And what a number it was — that slinky up-and-down riff still a marvel of rhythmic ingenuity that inspired Khan and Wonder to go off in a volley of ad libs like the seasoned pros they are.

Patti Labelle performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Signs of life such as that one are precisely the reason to go to a concert like “The Queens,” in which the vast experience of the performers — Mills was the youngest at 68, LaBelle the oldest at 80 — serves not as a safeguard against the unexpected but as a guarantee that whatever might happen is fully roll-with-able.

Mills got up there Sunday and discovered an unwelcome climate situation — “I wish they would cut that air off,” she said, “it’s blowing so cold on me” — but went ahead and sang the bejesus out of “Home,” from “The Wiz.” LaBelle put out a call for willing men from the audience — “Black, white, straight, gay,” she made clear — then presided over an impromptu talent show as each guy did a bit of “Lady Marmalade” for her. And then there was Knight’s handler, who seemed to show up a few beats early to guide her offstage after “Midnight Train to Georgia.” No biggie: He could just stand there holding her arm gently for a minute while she traded “I’ve got to go’s” with her background singers.

Gladys Knight performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Another reason to go to “The Queens,” especially on Mother’s Day, was to behold the finery displayed onstage (and in the crowd). Knight wore a crisp red pantsuit with glittering figure-eight earrings, Mills an off-the-shoulder mermaid gown. LaBelle showed off two outfits, emerging in a silky blue suit before changing into a long tunic-style dress. During “On My Own,” she kicked off her heels, sending them hurtling across the stage; later, she spritzed herself from a bottle of fragrance then spritzed the front row for good measure.

As a three-hour program — Knight opened at 7 p.m. on the dot — Sunday’s show moved quickly, with a rotating stage that whirred to life after each woman’s set. And of course nobody stuck around long enough to offer up anything but hits. The musical pleasures were the ripples of detail in all those familiar tunes: a little ha-ha-ha Knight used to punctuate “That’s What Friends Are For”; LaBelle’s frisky vocal runs in “When You Talk About Love,” which she sang as a stagehand came out to help put her in-ear monitor back in; the way Khan toyed with her phrasing in “Through the Fire,” slowing down when you thought she’d speed up and vice versa. (Nobody wants to start a fight here, but Khan was undoubtedly the night’s best singer.)

Stephanie Mills performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

After bringing the Mother’s Day audience to its feet with “I’m Every Woman” — somewhere out there was Khan’s own 91-year-old mom, she said — she started to make for the exit when her band revved up the throbbing synth lick from “Ain’t Nobody.”

“Oh, one more?” she said to no one in particular. “S—. One more!”