Like going to see that Doors Like Thing™ Ray Manzarek put together at your local State/County Fair, sort of like the real thing, good for nostalgia's sake, good for making a buck, but not much else.
I'm not quite feeling as fully childhood raped as I feared (there's no full on Jar-Jar moments in this one), but I think it's safe to say that my childhood was fondled in an inappropriate way by Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Lucas.
Other spoilerish quibbles to follow, not that there's any real plot to spoil, and it's not like any of the other Indy pictures were full of stunning plot revelations where if you know what happened in advance you'd enjoy the film less, but to remain unspoiled don't read any further .
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OK, you've been warned appropriately, don't blame me if you read something that you didn't want to read in what follows. First off, Cate Blanchett's fake Russian accent was especially bad, especially when they hired actual Russians for the other roles, since she was just the over the top baddy, seems like they could have hired any comely Russian/Ukrainian lass and she'd have done a better job than Cate. She's a great actress, but this is a silly role, and she doesn't sell silly well. Shia Lebouf isn't horrible, he's actually quite good, but the Brando outfit is just embarrassing, the Tarzan moment swinging from tree to tree was ludicrous, and the big snake gag was silly.
I'm getting sick of blue screen action sequences. There's no sense of danger, it's just people running in place, or slammed around on a gimbal. You know they aren't really leaping from an actual vehicle to an actual vehicle, and it just gets repetitive after awhile.
At the beginning, they introduce a subplot that gets dropped almost immediately, and I'd like to call this the, 'I don't want people to question my big fat Hollywood liberal bona fides by making Soviets the actual unremittingly evil and ambitious bad guys in this film, so I better tack on an anti-McCarthy subplot to show that even though those poor Marxist were misguided in their ideological fervor there were people running around on our side that were easily ten times worse' subplot. It was completely unneeded, doesn't add anything, I guess the thinking is something like this, 'gee, Indy Jones survives a nuclear blast, is picked up alone at a highly secure facility in the middle of nowhere, aids Soviet agents to raid a sensitive American storage facility and they sneak away with alien technology, but the nerve of those eeeevil FBI agents in questioning Prof. Jones, a war-hero, about whether or not he was coerced in cooperating, or whether he was in cahoots with the Reds, just shows what an evil and horrible time the 50s were and how there were witch hunts left and right, even in academia (yeah, cause there certainly weren't/aren't any Marxist in archaeology departments on American campuses)'. There's even a line where they question if he really earned his WWII medals, can't help but think that was meant to recall the 'horrible' 'swift-boating' of that other pure and blameless war-hero Sen. John Kerry. This crap happens so commonly in pictures (especially the most recent Spielberg pics, plus he's credited with helping Lucas come up with that insipid 'Is this how democracy dies . . .' line in the last Star Wars film), that you just have to let it wash over you like a wave of stupidity and knee-jerk liberalism, but it shouldn't go unnoticed.
As far as on the best or worst of Spielberg pictures, it definitely won't crack the top 7, or even the top 15, but it's also solidly out of the bottom 7, so I guess that's something. If you are jonesing for an Indiana Jones fix, this is better than nothing, but not by much.
4 comments:
Directors are are lot like baseball managers or football coaches. They are full of piss and vinegar when they first start out and produce their best work in their first couple of gigs. Then they start to repeat themselves. Or at least repeat the same mistakes. So you can keep buying into the same old, same old, or look for something new. I wouldn't go to see Indy 3. That's Bill Parcells with the New York Jets. Used up and out of juice.
I forgot you were a big NBA guy. Think Don Nelson. Great with the Bucks. Ok with the Warriors. Stunk up the joint with Dallas and the Knicks. Speilberg is over the hill and should hang it up.
He might as well be wearing fish ties and white shoes with a matching white belt.
Depends on the person, I think. Eric Rohmer directed some great films beyond his 70s and into his 80s. John Houston pulled off some pretty nice pictures late in life. I personally haven't liked any of Clint Eastwood's pictures that he's made lately, but he's certainly received plenty of acclaim for his work.
I don't think it's impossible for directors and writers in general to be good into their late 50s and 60s and beyond, but I do think it's particularly tough for former-wunderkind Baby Boomers to do so. They've been a self-centered youth obsessed bunch for so long, that growing up hasn't been an option, collectively incapable of self examination, so instead of finding new textures and plots to examine, they instead go for the re-hash, and hope that audiences won't mind.
But in sports, there's some old guys doing pretty well. In football, Marv Levy seems to still know what he's doing getting the most out of the Bills each season, in baseball Jim Leyland's Tigers have had success (though their struggling this year), and when you look at the NBA, I think Larry Brown will lead Charlotte to the playoffs within two seasons, if not next year (if they make some good trades, but given Jordan's history as a GM so far, that's doubtful), helps being the East, if they were in the West, no chance.
It's not impossibe for directors to be creative into their fifties, sixties and seventies, but they just repeat themselves. For example Howard Hawks just kept remaking movies calling it Rio this and Rio that but with the same formula. George Lucas with all his sci-fi bells and whistles got boring and repetitive.
As for sports, Marv Levy and Bud Grant kept repeating themselves. They kept losing. Jim Leyland along with Sparky Anderson and Alex Harnum in b-ball were among the few to win championships with different teams. And as far as Larry Brown is concerned, in my humble opinion he is the most over-rated and over paid coach in the history of basketball. His idoicy was fully illustrated in his Knick debacle. It's all about Larry Brown and his genius. Give me a Rudy-T or a Popovich or Tark the Shark any day of the week over that over praised moron.
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