Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

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.

I’ve never heard of twice upon a time!

Hey, YOU try compositing shots on a Commodore Amiga

Twice Upon a Time and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters are the two best films with George Lucas’ name on them. He wrote some checks and let the geniuses make their films

So much madness here. ROTL is a streamlined, exciting adventure film while TOD is fun, very grimdark and Capshaw feels completely anachronistic somehow. LC is fine but - yeah - very much a safe, McDonald's cup Indy film. less said about KoCS the better. Dunno if I'll just wait for the new one to hit streaming. Looks ugly.

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.

This is what instantly came to mind too, but it's one quick shot and everything else looks fantastic.

LC might be bloodless but Indy certainly murders some nazis (I remember some unsurvivable motorcycle crashes in the chase scene after the castle, lots of tank and plane pilots exploding, probably a bunch more).

I definitely saw it at the right time as a kid (literally got the VHS as part of a fast-food promotion iirc), but every line is burned into my brain and I've never not enjoyed rewatching it. I really do think it's the best one, idc.

I have not seen Last Crusade since its first run. I've watched Raiders maybe half a dozen times.

Indiana Jones and the Mystery of Alison Doody’s Career Choices

The Chris Columbus Indy 3 draft can be found online. Some really creative action set piece ideas, but it’s mostly junk that they rightly discarded

Doody was in RRR, it's Doodymentum!

i haaated crystal skull when it came out but I definitely enjoyed it more this time around

like it’s not ~great~
the whole jungle swordfight + monkeybusiness section slows the whole thing down to an intolerable crawl
and mutt’s brando is such a wrongheaded idea because with all the greaser haircombing he mostly reads as a bad fonzie cosplay at best … it would have been better for him to be ~trying~ to give greaser but failing, so that laboeuf could bring more natural awkwardness & idk humanity to him
but with the character as half poser-greaser AND half irl greaser but neither here nor there it just becomes dumb & murky
and I hate the ending with the stupid alien gravitron carnival ride

but … a lot of it actually works, weirdly.
I liked the thread of following the iterations of the Crystal Skull, the adventure stuff played really well for me this time round

i like David Edelstein’s take here:

https://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/730/indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull

ie Indy finally achieving a family of his own without family/adventure being an either/or proposition
it’s quite affecting through that lens, and matches up with Spielberg’s own re-examinations of family in his later period, personally & directorially

xps But for real, if anyone comes at this series with the notion that any one of these films is in any way serious … sorry, not on that train

They're not serious but they can have serious things in them. The genius of the first film is that it takes an adventure serial approach to what would now be a History Channel question - "what would happen if the Nazis found the Ark of the Covenant?" and answers IT WOULD MELT THEIR FUCKING FACES OFF. And the thing is, the Antikythera Machine is pretty cool, it's clockwork a thousand years before any other that we've found, it doesn't need to be turned into an alethiometer. I just think of those as very different vibes.

Anyway, the film.

The first section (pre-credits, I think?) is 15-20 minutes of Indy and Toby Jones and Mikkelsen in 1945, mostly on a train where the Nazis are trying to flee with various relics, including the Spear of Destiny (no relation). This is just great, to be honest, they've de-aged the fuck out of Ford and Mikkelsen and it's obviously not him leaping over traincars, but it's still very much what I came to see. I'm setting up a petition for the next film to be entirely like this

Then it's the 60s, and he's a crotchety alcoholic, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Toby Jones's kid, ropes him into trying to find the half of the Antikythera that they told everyone they lost at the end of the intro, but he's got it, and then the Nazis turn up for it, and then it's a series of setpieces and character moments.

Two weird echoes of Star Wars actually: PWB's whole schtick is that she's stealing it to auction - at one point she declares that she's only in this for cash, which, you know, ballsy move to do that in a film that also has Harrison Ford in it. And the story with Marian is that they're divorced at the start - one of his character moments is saying that if he could go back, he'd tell Mutt La Beouf not to go off to war, that his parents would never recover from his death and it'd tear them apart. Kylo Ren doesn't die but it's a very similar dynamic.

After all of that, after the trip to 212 BC, after PWB yells at him to go back to the present and not just die in the past, he just, like, gets a free Marian? He wakes up back in the present, and she comes by because she "heard he was back", and PWB and Sallah (who's a fucking taxi-driver!) shoo all of Sallah's grandkids out, and they do the "where doesn't it hurt?" routine that was cute 40 years ago. We need a word beyond "wasted" to describe Karen Allen's role here.

And yeah good news there's a black female character in an Indy film bad news she's a total patsy CIA agent who gets fooled and then killed by the Nazis - and not a frumpy Amanda Waller sort, she's hip, she's down, she's... probably been infiltrating the Black Panthers?

Everything just goes downhill in Kingdom so quickly after the model town test nuke scene. It’s a sin to waste Karen Allen like that

Indiana Jones and the Buttdial of Destiny

Like I have genuine respect for George Lucas more so these days for what he attempted in the prequel trilogy, he wasn't trying to recreate the magic of the first Star wars trilogy, he was trying to do something else entirely different and it was an eminently respectable endeavor. And in retrospect definitely a pure expression than the very mercenary and empty storytelling of the sequels.

a) I agree with you against you on The Last Jedi, which is a proper example of a film maker saying "Yeah, this is all very cool, but I've got some thoughts".
b) It's possible to overstate the extent to which Lucas was just ploughing his own furrow, though - we've been watching through them and we went from Empire one week to Attack of the Clones the next, and AotC is full of stuff that reads like attempts to play to what people* think they remember shaped by the fan memory funnel of the intervening decades. So Yoda goes from a handful of backwards-syntax lines in Empire to pretty much every line in the prequels, and C3PO's fussy butler body horror and frustrated attempt to tell the heroes that oh shit there's Troopers here gets turned into bad slapstick and worse puns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou53FKku9kQ

To be clear, there are lots of exciting new Lucas-made bad ideas in the prequels, and the castings of Anakin kill a lot of what he might've been trying for. And Lucas is of course terrible at romantic dialogue - the guy who wrote the best line on that front in the original Star wars is... sadly present in body only in Dial of Destiny.

*people is possibly just Lucas here!

I recently learned that an acquaintance of mine from college made it to the final three for young adult Anakin!

wow!

I don’t know if it got posted in here, but RLM had a very nice conversation about Temple of Doom and why it differed from the other films. George Lucas getting divorced and Spielberg being _real_ distracted by his lead actress had a significant impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAPOojRLY2U

Jesus, I hate them so much

definitely saw it at the right time as a kid (literally got the VHS as part of a fast-food promotion iirc),

we all did

I cannot and will not watch the Red Letter Media dickheads

Why? I've never minded them.

Anyway, just saw this. Based on that snippet, Chaw woke up on the wrong side of the bed. That said Andrew's got some very good points here -- to echo one of them, Shaunette Renée Wilson gone done dirty by this film -- but it beats the hell out of Crystal Skull as a ending to the story-as-such, among many other points.

Last Crusade has a LOT of shoddy effects moments, BTW. (Rewatched all four films a few months back, in the case of LC and Crystal for the second time ever each in case I felt any differently about them...and I did not. And basically none of the sequels has the shoot-the-moon ease of the first film, it just can't be recaptured.)

so is this going to be about Atlantis or what. maybe they can do Spear of Destiny w the Boys From Brazil

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, March 15, 2016 11:14 AM (seven years ago)

A pretty close call there!

Doody was in RRR, it's Doodymentum!

No way, that movie killed Ray Stevenson's career

Doodissance

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis wasn't bad. Would have made a pretty good movie.

So then, who wants to stan for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles?

I was thinking about going back and checking some of those out again. And hey, Ford appears in one of them.

I think Carrie Fisher wrote an episode too - I recall an interview where she was complaining about Lucas simply ignoring everything.

As a bookend to the story of young Indy fightin' crime and likin' jazz with his friends Elliott Ness and Ernest Hemingway!

https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Young_Indiana_Jones_and_the_Mystery_of_the_Blues

(xp)

i loved Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis