Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

^why you gotta floss, folks

I made my uneasy peace with Temple of Doom a long time ago; it's in many ways a better film than the first film. And politically I prefer Capshaw's airhead '30s-era loony tune to teasing a good actress like Karen Allen with a hint of strength before stripping it reel by reel.

Surprisingly, if anything I've made less peace with Temple of Doom over the last decade. But it's still the one I'll defend against the other three Spielberg himself directed, at least.

I don't hate it as much as I did at first, but it still pretty much sucks.

https://i.imgur.com/ebhJLnI.gif

I don't hate it as much as I did at first, but it still pretty much sucks.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, June 29, 2023 3:05 PM (twenty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

RIP Morbs.

I had similar reactions to The Goonies and Popeye.

Oh, I'd sooner sit strapped to a chair watching Last Crusade (which I hate) and Crystal Skull (which I don't) for six months on end than submit myself to five minutes of The Goonies again

I like The Goonies, sorry. Mine is a high and lonely destiny.

xxpost personally i gotta disagree on that

Temple was a fave as a kid for memorable “bits” like “chilllled monkey brrrains” & KALIMAAAAA heart grabbing & minecart rollercoaster

But now watching it now again recently the vibes are SO dark and grimdark in so many unnecessary ways and even at the time really unsupportable racism … it just feels so far away from what the first movie brought & was not a pleasant experience at all

First movie to me is better on almost every level, script, pacing, cinematography action & performance

The only thing enjoyable or qualitatively good for me now is the Short-Round/Indy relationship & genuinely heartfelt interaction which hold up beautifully & add a lot to both characters

Yeah, as with The Goonies your reaction may be at least in part a function of where you were in your life at the time. I was almost 19 when Temple of Doom came out.

yeah Mr Veg was about the same age, 19 or 20 and he has never liked it

I was 10.

But now watching it now again recently the vibes are SO dark and grimdark in so many unnecessary ways and even at the time really unsupportable racism … it just feels so far away from what the first movie brought & was not a pleasant experience at all

You're right -- I saw it again in January and thought, wow, THIS was a blockbuster in 1984? It probably didn't need Molo Ram wresting hearts out of chests and Short Round getting whipped.

There was a lot of stuff going on at the time (which the Red Letter video gets into a bit). On one hand you had George's divorce, which he claims partially accounted for the "darker" tone. Then there was Spielberg not really giving a shit; he admitted he didn't care for the story very much, and (very out of character for him) apparently didn't storyboard every inch of his film for once. But also, for whatever reason, Spielberg had really been pushing the violence in his movies. Melting faces in "Raiders," the horrors of "Poltergeist" (which he at least wrote but probably at least partially directed), shepherding the more grisly elements of "Gremlins" through the studio, "Temple of Doom" ...

sequence where indy/SR watch from behind convenient ledge as some exquisite boy undergoes a textbook issue-free evisceration/lava-immersion so that we understand how the process is supposed to work for later is so impressively sick that the heart moneyshot actually takes its place as only one image among equals-- drumming, screaming, erotic tempo of editing, climactic fireball etc.-- in certain ways this kind of thing is peak spielberg.

The reaction shots of the mesmerized Kali worshipers too.

When my sis and I saw Doom again on VHS with my abuela in the late '90s, she didn't ask us to turn it off but she did mutter, loudly, in Spanish, "Esto es diabólico!"

It sounds like it’s a good thing I haven’t seen Temple Of Doom since like 1990. Yikes

No, I absolutely recommend watching it again.

My biggest gripe with Last Crusade, in the end, is that it's just plain boring compared to Temple and the good parts of Raiders. It belongs, with Always and Hook, to the most dully cautious phase of Spielberg's entire career.

Watched it a couple months back and it largely holds up, in terms of filmmaking craft.

During the editing between drumming and sweating and swaying and heart ripping, there are a couple palpably hot cuts to a terrified Kate capshaw, Spielberg was feeling it obv.

It's definitely not a "fun" film and I think the undercurrents of religious fear play a bit better in ROTLA, it remembers that the bible is a horror story a lot of the time.

Even more than the (perfect) first movie, "Temple of Doom" is such a weird conflation of B-movie tropes, constantly veering from cartoonish violence to horrific violence, sometimes even in the same scene. You can tell Spielberg was practically giddy with the possibilities of gags and set pieces and ott sequences. "Last Crusade" definitely feels more like the retread that "Temple" wasn't, though it has its moments.

i have fond kid-memories of last crusade but it is a movie where indy goes to nuremberg and stands face-to-face with hitler and nobody's abuela bats an eye

Temple of Doom might've been the opposite of Poltergeist: so safe it might've been directed by Tobe Hooper.

Yeah I'm glad I rewatched ToD but it only confirmed my view upthread. The minecart chase is inSANELY long which was more just surprising.

I was down on Raiders for a few years and felt it was overrated for more trivial reasons until recent rewatch made me 180 back on that.

Last crusade is a safe film, albeit entertaining and pretty bloodless (literally!), I mean the first two were grisly as hell (spikes thru heads and gunshots to the face and meltings and propellor chopping) but Indy 3 avoids it almost completely.

Indy 3 has better lines ("Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!" and "I find that if I just sit down the problem resolves itself").

I SHUDDENLY REMEMBERED MY SHCHARLAMAGNE

ROTLA feels like an elevated story taking place in a place informed crucially by the real world (just the character interactions and asides and beats give it extra verisimilitude, very much in the immediate wake of nu Hollywood in that sense) which makes the fantastical elements hit harder. ToD is strict pulp (not a complaint per se), LC is a big budget summer Indiana Jones on a McDonald's cup kinda movie (also not totally a complaint exactly...)

Also: "She talks in her sleep" said by Sean Connery elicited a gasp from my theatre audience and a nervous look to my prudish mom from me.

lol dlh :)

Oh my

While filming the whipping scene, the crew played a practical joke on Harrison Ford. While he was chained to a large stone, Barbra Streisand appeared, dressed in a leather dominatrix outfit. She proceeded to whip him, saying "That's for Hanover Street (1979), the worst movie I ever saw." She continued whipping him for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), and making all of that money. Carrie Fisher then threw herself in front of Ford to protect him, and Irvin Kershner chided director Steven Spielberg. "Is this how you run your movies?" This entire sequence was filmed.

https://media.tenor.com/8l2hniWNEHoAAAAd/indiana-jones-last-crusade.gif

Last crusade is a safe film, albeit entertaining and pretty bloodless (literally!)

there are a lot of cruel jokes about killing but there is no blood-- omar otm that it points forward to our current national art form

their double-act (son, i'm sorry-- they got us) is a lot of expert fun and consistently better than the apparatus around it

yet tbf to that apparatus my fave lol in the movie is I'M SORRY DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH? OR EVEN ANCIENT GREEK

last crusade is good

these are pretty easy to rank
raiders
crusade
temple
dan aykroyd's vodka

"Indy...the PEN is...mighty-ah...than the SWORD!"

I still think the CG in Last Crusade (which I saw in 70mm a number of years ago) and Empire of the Sun look just pretty nice all these years later.

Shame that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is such dogshit. Easily Spielberg’s worst, along with The Lost World (rumor has it that Joe Dante supervised post-production like George Lucas did on the first Jurassic Park due to filming Amistad back-to-back).

I just hate Janusz Kaminski’s overblown photography, too. He just doesn’t gel with Spielberg the way Allen Daviau and Dean Cundey did.

Raiders has the best action, Crusade has the best gags, ‘No Ticket’, ‘Our situation has not improved’, ‘He chose poorly’ etc.

The last time I watched "Last Crusade" I was actually struck by the general shoddiness of the FX, which I'm sure took a lot of work but suffered from straddling the shift from practical to computers (which of course he did seamlessly just a few years later with "Jurassic Park").

Last Crusade is such a sad reminder that River Phoenix might face become the biggest actor in the world. I still wonder what could have happened if he’d made Interview with the Vampire and then John Boorman’s still-unmade Broken Dreams in 1994

Really? I think the brief CGI looks pretty great. The digital matte paintings in HOOK are still very nice as well (along with The Rocketeer, the first 2 films to have them)

Janusz Kaminski’s overblown photography ... just doesn’t gel with Spielberg the way Allen Daviau and Dean Cundey did.

A.I. + War of the Worlds + Munich + West Side Story alone = this is objectively madness

Was just reading about the (credited) screenwriter of "Last Crusade:"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Boam

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third film in the popular Indiana Jones series, went through a flimsy scripting process before Boam was hired to write a draft. As early as 1984, George Lucas was playing with the concept of having the fictional archeologist-adventurer encounter the fabled Holy Grail, the cup said to have been used by Jesus Christ during the Last Supper. Director Steven Spielberg rejected Lucas's script outlines, disliking the Grail idea. Screenwriter Diane Thomas wrote a haunted house story for Indiana Jones, but Spielberg said that after producing Poltergeist, he didn't want to do a similar film. Lucas hired Chris Columbus to write a draft for the film, and he submitted Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Sun Wu Kung, a story with evil spirits, ghosts, and demons. Again, Spielberg rejected the story as not believable enough. Lucas convinced him to go back to the Holy Grail idea, and Menno Meyjes was hired to develop another screenplay. The new script focused on the Arthurian legend aspect of the Holy Grail. Although the script was not to the liking of Lucas and Spielberg, it had elements that eventually became part of the finished film: the Holy Grail, and the introduction of Indiana Jones' father, Henry Jones Sr.

Spielberg suggested that Boam write the next draft, and Lucas agreed to it. Boam felt some nervousness going into the process. He joked that "the battlefield was littered with writers before I came on to the scene. There were four or five before me. Each writer had their script next to them covered with blood." Boam said that when Spielberg called to offer him the job, Spielberg said "something like, 'You wanna get real rich?' and I said, 'Yeah, why?' and he said, 'I think you should do the next Indiana Jones movie.'" Boam is reported to have replied to Spielberg's offer by saying, "I just don't know why you didn't come to me before." Boam spent two weeks filled with eight-hour days working with Lucas to develop the story. The two blocked out all other commitments to create the story, building it "beat by beat". Lucas already knew many of the set pieces that were to be in the movie. During the two-week story conference, Boam worked to incorporate it all into the new narrative. "Jeff was very collaborative," Lucas said, adding, "He'd try to include both Steven's ideas and my ideas, and tried to get what we wanted done."

Spielberg liked the story outline presented by Lucas and Boam, but wanted a first draft before making a decision to move forward. He was planning direct the film Rain Man, but an Indiana Jones project would take precedence. Boam signed a contract on April 14, 1987. He wrote his first draft that summer, and turned it in on September 15, with another revision on September 30. It was at that time that Spielberg made a commitment to direct the Indiana Jones film over Rain Man, based on reading one of Boam's unfinished drafts. Spielberg said, "We licked it with Boam". Spielberg brought actor Sean Connery in to portray Henry Jones Sr., and Connery provided substantial input into the character, who Lucas originally conceived as an eccentric professor—"an Obi-Wan Kenobi type." Boam wanted to expand the father character, making him more central to the plot. He said that in Meyjes' original script, "the father was sort of a MacGuffin ... they didn't find the father until the very end. I said to George, 'It doesn't make sense to find the father at the end. Why don't they find him in the middle?'" He wanted the father-son relationship to be the main point, rather than the Grail. With the input of Spielberg and Connery, Boam altered the senior Jones from "a somewhat crotchety old character" to a man with more "vitality". Connery wanted the father to have a prior sexual relationship to the same female archeologist that Indiana Jones sleeps with. Boam incorporated this into the script, with Indiana's reaction to learning that he and his father slept with the same woman defused through humor. Boam said, "He's a bit humbled and surprised that his dad would be able to attract this young attractive woman ... but he isn't appalled by it."

Kaminski’s work fits A.I.

But compare Lost World to the original Jurassic Park or The Pist/Bridge of Spies/The Fabelmans to Empire of the Sun or even Always. There is no question that Zigmond, Salomon, Daviau, etc. were much better at painting with light and controlling mood better than Kaminski. He’s very fast, and that’s why Spielberg likes him, but I just don’t like most of his output

"Connery wanted the father to have a prior sexual relationship to the same female archeologist that Indiana Jones sleeps with"
lol

I'm watching these with my kids and they enjoyed Doom more than Raiders - more slapstick I guess

Doom starts at 100MPH and never lets go. It’s a phenomenal work

Interesting to note that it’s the 2nd film David Fincher worked on. He shot matte paintings for it after filming some of the miniatures used in the opening of John Korty/Lucasfilm’s unbelievably great Twice Upon a Time (1983)

Last Crusade has the horrible greenscreen shot of the nazi waving his fist as the zeppelin takes off - I remember us kids snickering at that when we first saw it at the cinema. I don’t remember any weird FX outside of that.

I can accept that LC is too safe and not as good as Raiders, but I love it completely and am unable to criticise.

The temple parts of Temple are draggy in my memory. Indian friends at high school also disowned it (quite rightly) when we barely teens.