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May 08, 2008
INDIANA JONES AND A JOKE OF YOUR CHOICE ABOUT A WHEELCHAIR OR ADULT DIAPERS
All right! All right! For those of you who keep bothering me about my thoughts regarding the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, here it is! Now stop bombarding my email: you made me miss an important message from Zooey Deschanel asking me to run away with her. forever I know you’re all waiting for me to give the time-honored Andytown seal of approval/shame to this project, but in case you can’t tell, I’ve been really busy. Running the most popular blog on the internet is a time-consuming venture, space kids, and recently I’ve been dealing with publishers who all want the rights to any past, present, or future ideas.
Here goes:
The very title INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE suggests finality, and the movie did much to confirm that the Indy movies were a trilogy, nothing more. As such, they did not outlive their welcome, but gave us three superior entertainments thankfully bereft of the tedious mythology of the trilogies of PIRATES, MATRIX, and the STAR WARS prequel. Maybe you were interested in all the post-colonial intrigue of PIRATES, but I just wanted to see Johnny Depp play the guitar solo for "Brown Sugar."
On a side note, the PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN movies should have taken the Indy films, and not the Star Wars films, as their template. (Anyone who thinks that the 2nd and 3rd PIRATES movies are not pretty direct ripoffs of that franchise is in that crucial 4 to 8 year old demographic that George Lucas decided to write for). Instead of getting trapped in a goofy mythology and recurring villains both a) boring and b) kind of boring, why not just have each movie be a series of adventures involving the three “good guys” – Depp, Bloom, Knightley. Not that the result would be one the level of the Indy films, but it would have been a whole lot better than that overblown, headache-inducing storyline that was mainly an excuse for filming Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards imitation.
Making a cogent point as they often do, The AV Club says:
"Expectations are extremely high for a film that reunites the kings of the summer blockbuster, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with a beloved character. If it sucks, it might be discouraging enough to put audiences off blockbusters forever. It's not like all of Indy's adventures have worked out that well, either. Temple Of Doom continues to fail to improve with the passing of time, and the last time Lucas tried to revive a long-dormant, fervently appreciated film franchise, we all know what happened."
First, I totally disagree that TEMPLE OF DOOM is mediocre. Rather, it's awesome. Indy can't fight the Nazis in every movie, and voo-doo baddies straight out of GUNGA DIN make for some pretty cool adversaries. Of all the three movies, TEMPLE has the most wall-to-wall action and is probably the funniest of the bunch, thanks to an underrated performance by future Speilberg wife Kate Capshaw, who recalls Ava Gardner and Claudette Colbert. Also, it's clearly the darkest of the three, which takes Indy as a "Treasure Hunter" to interesting new places.
But I agree that the fate of the blockbuster is in Indy's rapidly withering hands. Other than the first three STAR WARS, there is not a more revered group of movies than than the Indy films - for us, they gave us the opportunity to watch the brains, brawn, and roguish charisma of a true movie star put in impossible situations where we rooted for him to get out. RAIDERS is Speilberg at his finest: fast, suspenseful, full of a lot of interesting scenery, and possessing all that childlike wonder always associated with him.
And I think America may have a falling out with Speilberg if it fails. If IRON MAN, starring that box-office superstar Robert Downey Jr, can make 100 million bucks in early May, that shows the movie-going public still hasn't satiated their desire to see crap digitally blowing up*. The Blockbuster is safe. Speilberg, on the other hand, has seen diminishing returns recently. No one is clamoring over WAR OF THE WORLDS, and MUNICH was fascinating but flawed. Other than possibly CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, it's been since 1998 and PRIVATE RYAN that Speilberg rocked the popcorn/projector world. And who knows . . . kids who are graduating high school this year were just being born when CRUSADE was hitting theaters. Have they followed these movies as closely as I did when they were coming out?
I hope it is good. I hope it is as good as the first three. But like everyone else, I'm a little skeptical.
* - On this point, the Hater has an interesting point:
Mark Burnett, the show’s producer, said that he thinks the MTV Movie Awards are “the most relevant movie award show in America today.” And who knows more about cultural relevancy than the creator of My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad? Burnett also added:
This show honors the movies that millions of young Americans go to see.”
Unfortunately there’s already an award for that, Mark. It’s called money. Young Americans have already honored those movies with the millions of dollars that they spent to go see them. It’s not as if young people are a reclusive minority whose voice goes largely unheard by the entertainment industry. Who do you think they made Disturbia for? Why else would there be an Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem?
| By Andytown | 01:09 PM
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Comments
Andytown, you are on a role. Keep pumping the good stuff. Also, that call you missed. Yeah, that was Zooey. Sorry. She is running away with Dane Cook. Ouch.
Posted by: Harvey at May 8, 2008 02:40 PM