kitewithfish

Spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I saw it last night with Colleen, and I was pleasantly surprised. It's been a while since I last saw an Indy movie, but these seemed to be in the same mode as the first ones.

Some notes:
It was clear from the minute ~~The Fonz~~ Mike walked on screen that he was going to be Indy's brat. Absolutely no other possibility at all. If the character were going to be anything but The Son, then he would quite simply be female: Hollywood loves to throw a pretty girl on screen for some sex appeal but keep the same basic outline as a male character. (Hey, it gets girls in film. I'm not going to shoot it down entirely.) However, since Indy and Child are family, there can be no chance at all for the creepy incest tones that might pop up if the child were a pretty girl, so he has to be a boy. The actor.... was not that great. He lacked something in the delivery. I think the obsession with his hair (probably meant, like the sword fighting and various other habits, as a nod to his father's famous traits) was really silly.

The action scenes were actually a lot of fun. The ones set at the University particularly tickled my funny bone, because Swelles honestly looks a lot like that- I would love to see a car chase going through our library. Indy in bow-tie was just... kind of perfect. I love seeing badass characters being a little goofy in their personal lives, and it was a very professorial look.

In general, the funny was fairly good and consistent. There were some rather good lines that I thought were underplayed (mostly by The Son, which went a ways into making me dislike his character as a washed-out version of his father), but there were also some moments that were just well thought-out funny moments that were allowed to stand without attaching a contrived bon mot or punchline. (Boy in library asking advice from his professor who just knocked down the building doors on a runaway motorcycle, only to get told that he should get out of the library: a great teehee moment).

Flaws: Well, I have to say that little baby Jones' character needed some fleshing out. I'm also annoyed that the boy could be legally named after his biological father, including NUMBERING, and still be unaware that Indy was his dad. Or, at least, that his mother's husband was perhaps not his father. However, he redeems himself somewhat by his skill in the fight scenes. I'm willing to let it go for the moment based on the implied character arc from churlish James Dean knock-off to actual adventurer.

Pet peeve: SNAKES DON'T WORK THAT WAY. That snake would have been dead by the time the mom had gotten herself out the not!quicksand, and I seriously doubt it's spine would have held up long enough for even just her to get out. I think rather that she be left holding a severed snake's head and a dazed expression as she slipped under the surface.

I realize that this whole story idea was based on the random coincidence that the 'Roswell aliens' have a similar skull shape to what was fashionable in certain ancient South American cultures, and I am okay with that. I think it's probably harder to write a good Indiana Jones movie in a post- WWII setting, but this did an okay job of divorcing the adventure from the Cold War politics of the time (aside from a brief nod to the FBI at the start) to get straight to the ridiculous chase scenes.

Cate Blanchett manages to balance the opposing forces of evil mind warping sex goddess with those of utterly silly bad ~~Russian~~ Ukrainian accent in goofy uniform. That's the kind of effort I appreciate in a woman who's trying to kill me.

I apologize in advance for how incredibly rambling and pointless this post is. I keep waking up at 5.30am no matter when I go to bed, and I am just trying to get my head together before I actually try to write this paper. It's not that I mind so much; I prefer to get up early, because when I sleep in, I feel like I've missed the best part of the day.

Also, the Schwedenplatz Eissalon is roughly the most delicious thing in the entire damned world. Really. Not kidding even slight. Their banana flavor is like some sort of terrifying Ur-banana: more banana than any real banana will ever be, and yet somehow still utterly right.