Please forgive my absence this week. I was overtaken by a small collection of illnesses that took me down for the proverbial count. Now that I’m sitting upright again I have for you some really, genuinely awesome movie posters and artwork by a guy named Tom Whalen. I wish all posters were this awesome. My personal favorite is UHF. I love that movie. Go Weird Al. Whatever happened to that guy?
Go here to scroll through a bunch of his stuff, but visit his own site (linked above) to see it all. Keep up the awesome work Tom!
This movie is what comes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg sitting down, having too much beer and reminiscing about the good old days. In my head I imagine this conversation to go like this:
G: Hey Steve, you wanna do another Indy movie?
S: Maybe. But what could it possibly be about?
G: Well…. I think that we should start with that fun drag race I did in American Graffiti. Everyone seemed to like that.
S: Huh. Yeah. That’s not bad. And since we’re going to move it to the Fifties, we’ll need Russians, because people are SO over Nazis. Also, I killed that with Schindler’s List and Munich.
G: You got that right! So after we intro the Russians, I think we should do some of that stuff you did in Jurassic Park. But more. So much more.
S: Hey that’s good! I like jungles. And I totally loved Jurassic Park. You know what else I loved? ET. I don’t think there’s enough movies out there like ET anymore. I think we should do something that feels like that.
G: Okay. What about with monkeys? We had a monkey in the first movie. Monkeys are just like ET.
S:That’s what I always thought.
G: This is all sounding great. But how do we tie it all up?
S: I’ve always wanted to get back to Close Encounters, but the ending on that was pretty sealed up. You think we can work that in?
G: Yeah, yeah. Fer sure. I think we’ve really got something here. People will totally come see this! (turns around and yells) Hey Jar Jar! We need another 2-4!
And that, my friends, is how this thing happened. In a nutshell. I can’t categorically dismiss it because it certainly had some very good points. Like the cast. Harrison Ford was better in this than I’ve seen him in anything for some time. He actually looked like he was present for most scenes. Shia LaBoeuf is certainly one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars. He really knows how to carry stuff and — even when he’s crying for what seems like no reason — you really want to go along with him. At the risk of being a wagon jumper, not to mention sounding cliche, he really is a lot like Tom Hanks. Cate Blanchett was, as always, excellent. She has the same intensity while screaming “I, too, can command the wind, sir!’ as she does when she’s kicking Shia in the gut. I was a little uncertain about Karen Allen at first, because she seemed a little like she somehow went back to high school drama in her first few scenes, but once you got used to the fact that she wasn’t *quite* the same Marion, I throughly enjoyed her.
The action was pretty great. I must admit that the opening is pretty bad, but if you can get past it it starts to feel very much like the Indy you remember. It’s good fun and Harrision did a pretty good job pulling it off. I was saddened that it seemed that Shia’s stunt double did more than his fair share, but it could have simply been the way that it was shot. I’d like to think he does a lot of his own stuff. Speaking of editing, it was horrible. In the opening sequence alone there was no less than 4 harsh, horrible cuts that even the most untrained eye could see. I was glad that this didn’t continue on to the rest of the movie, becasue it really took me out.
While I can honestly say that I didn’t love this movie, I did love that people got excited about going to the movies again. And not just for a flash in the pan. Not just for a big opening weekend, but for a movie that actually gets talked about at the water cooler; around the dinner table; and at the gym. People didn’t just come to see this movie, they came in groups. And while I wholesale object to a movie made only for the purpose of nostalgia, I must say that the kitchy ‘Hey! There’s that thing they did in the first movie!’ factor was a lot of fun. If for nothing else, I must applaud George and Steve on that front. It’s what all three Star Wars prequels were missing.
If you’ve got movie money to spend this weekend, I say see Iron Man. If you’ve already seen it, see it again. And if you’ve seen it twice, don’t want to see it again and have just watched all three Indy movies in a row, then definitely go see this.
Amusing P.S. I was in LA last year at exactly this time. (I’m really missing it to. I love LA. I know. I’m alone.) While we were there, we went on the Paramount Studio Tour, which takes you through their backlot. We got to go on the set of Everybody Hates Chris (which was really cool) and walk through some other fun stuff. A ton of stuff is shot on that lot. Much of the city street scenes were shot there for Transformers (and they kept switching between that and a section of downtown), and also the cafe scenes from Spider-Man 3 were shot there. I went and stood inside the cafe shell. It was used as the cafe in this movie too. See below for my pics. I must say that if you’re a ‘movie person’ and you like ‘experiences’, there is absolutely nothing cooler than actually being in a place where they shot stuff you’ve seen. We were also on the set of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button when we were at Sony, a trailer playing ahead of this movie. Cool. Intensely cool. Okay, now I’m just bragging.
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