Indiana Jones LOVE thread

Haha! Having rewatched Raiders for the first time in a long while last night (thank you DVD box set as Xmas gift), I can see the truth of this.

That said, seeing it again was both a kick for realizing how much I had forgotten in the films -- I didn't even immediately remember the plane fight sequence until it actually started! -- and just a touch disappointing. More than once I was thinking about how some of the action scenes really could be better (like for instance when Indy and Marion get into the fight in the Cairo streets -- I was noticing how Karen Allen had been directed to apparently only slightly pound a bad guy on the head in the side of the shot, where these days I'd be expecting a little more in the way of Michelle Yeoh style asskicking). Also, John Williams' gift and limitations as a composer were pretty obvious; aside from the Raiders march and the Ark theme nearly everything musically just made me think of Star Wars.

Minor complaints, though, it's still a romp and a half, nothing about the film feels wasted, it uses economy to excellent effect, and even more successfully really pulls off suspension of disbelief well (when I first saw it in 1981 I wouldn't have known that the idea of 1936 Nazis having an openly armed force in British-controlled Egypt or a secret base on a Greek island was utterly ridiculous, but even though I do know it's not a worry because that's what Nazis do in the popular mind, have openly armed strike forces everywhere and plenty of secret bases).

Fun geek revelations -- the midget servant (who up until last night I just thought was meant to be a kid) who brings the poisoned dates to Indy and Sallah while they're waiting for the translation of the amulet is played by Kiran Shah, who was Elijah Wood's stand-in in Lord of the Rings which of course also starred John Rhys-Davies who played Sallah etc. Also, the guide who helps Indy into the temple at the start of film ("Throw me the idol, I give you the whip!" etc.) is Alfred Molina! As soon as I saw him on-screen I thought 'wait a minute...' and then his name popped up in the opening credits a couple of seconds later.

Oh and for all that they've changed the name on the packaging (to Indiana Jones and the Raiders etc.) the actual title of the film remained the same in the opening credits. Good thing too.

Very much so -- one thing that's great about the Ark is that its powers are implied or uncertain most of the time. People know what it IS but everyone's guessing about what it can DO, and that makes the unexpectedness of the ending all the more unsettling. That and it's flat out gruesome as well -- but one of the most effective things about the death of Belloq is that while we see him looking in horror at something within the Ark after the angels change to skeletons, we never see exactly what it is (and the only view of what is in the Ark a bit earlier is equally peculiar, seeming to show clouds and smoke rising up from impossible depths).

Hm, a lot of this is making me think of the unknown thing in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction.

The woman who played Elsa Schneider was asked to play Eowyn in LotR, and she would have been WAY BETTER than whoever ended up doing it.

Hey, you're mean (one reason I really like Miranda Otto in the role is that she's not a conventional Hollywood beauty as such -- she's definitely attractive but not a blonde bombshell like the actress you mention).

what are your thoughts on temple of doom? on re-viewing some years ago I was kind of shocked by it--

but the opening scene is still perfect.

But I'm sure I'll break out Temple of Doom here soon enough and I freely agree the opening scene roolz down to the weird Dan Ackroyd cameo. Last Crusade...maybe when I'm REALLY bored and a bit drunk one night, that could work.

xpost I like the way you both think.

(although the dad stuff is a bit rough)

and temple of doom is sort of a colonialist nightmare

(I was thinking specifically of the scene when the british army shows up and saves our heroes from the savage brain-eating indians!)

I asked HSA's mum about the movie, because she is an archeologist, and I wanted her to say that it was all rubbish, and archeology wasn't like that at all, that it was all digging around in the mud for ages and never finding anything but dirts and bits of pottery like on Time Team. But then she got a glint in her eye, and said that, well, actually, archeology *could be* like Indiana Jones, and she'd had several rather exciting and scary moments digging in the Middle East that were a bit Indiana Jones.

Well, maybe I was a bit harsh, I did like Eowyn more in RotK. It would be nice to see Alison Doody in something again though.

* A huge flaw with Temple is that the script comes across as fits and starts rather than a flowing story while the shoehorning of It Happened One Night-style humor...except nowhere near as good...into an adventure just grinds things to a halt. The problem really is one of suffering by comparison as well, though -- Raiders, again, has no fat and easily moves from one locale to another, with exposition noted and then dispatched with as quickly as possible. In contrast stuff like the 'wacky' Indy and Short Round play cards while all the animals freak out Willie hoho (bit with the snake was nice though) and the 'it's just like Moonlighting/no they both ripped off something else' bedroom scenes just made me think "END! GET TO SOMETHING ELSE!" Maybe Temple's screenwriters -- the same team that did both American Graffiti and Howard the Duck, weird ass contrast there -- felt that they had to have both the locale and backstory explained a bit more to an audience presumably unfamiliar with Indian history and religion, but where the dinner scene in Temple has a really forced way in explaining that backstory around the monkey brains and eye soup and all that, something like the interpretation-of-the-amulet scene in Raiders has just enough breathless wonder. (A warning sign in retrospect was on the documentary when both Lucas and Spielberg noted that they had wanted to get in some set pieces into Raiders but couldn't -- a water/raft scene and a mine chase scene, for instance -- and so the script was in part built around that. It's a very James Bond movie way of conceiving of a script, at least during Roger Moore's heyday, and like seventies Bond the set pieces take precedence over story. Which leads me to:)

* No moment in Temple has any of the same sense of discovery, awe or even chills that Raiders has. Lucas and Spielberg and others keep talking about how Temple is a dark film, but it isn't -- Nickalicious was right upthread on that point. There's grim things, yes, but as filmed and presented there's very little truly chilling or unnerving. A couple of times things come close -- for instance, Ford does a great job conveying, understatedly, a sudden interest and excitement when he first learns about the theft of the sacred stone. And Mola Ram's a great villain who isn't on the screen often enough, in fact I think he's almost too good for the famous heart-removing scene -- that famous pose of him holding the flaming heart which was in the movie poster is iconography let down by the surrounding scene. But contrast the more elaborate set of the temple and how it's handled -- and one huge problem of that set it that it never stops SEEMING like a set -- with the mysterious shadows and ominous music of the Well of Souls in Raiders, and the exquisite way the Ark is slowly revealed. John Williams's pretty pedestrian 'tribal' music and the big muscle guys with the Shankara Stones just all seems more like something fit for the Allan Quatermain knockoffs that Golan/Globus did the following two years. And there's nothing as flat out weird and uncomfortable as the sudden edit between the scene of the Ark burning off the Nazi insignia to the silent ship bedroom, or the first sudden recurrence of the Ark 'pulse' in the climactic Raiders sequence.

* Kate Capshaw came off pretty darn well in her documentary interview and I had more knowledge and respect for her as a person, and a better understanding of what she saw as unfair criticism of the character she played (as opposed to the acting, I'll note!). All well and good -- but the character and how she played her still sucks, and again it's mostly by comparison. The relationship between Indy and Marion in Raiders had history, there was subtext, Marion clearly had a brain and used it, took no shit, etc. Karen Allen played a character in an homage to swashbucklers that wasn't meant to be something with depth in the first place and made her seem REAL with her interjections, irreverence and more -- and DAMN if the bedroom scene on the boat isn't hot. Willie is no Marion, and that perhaps was perfectly intentional but there wasn't anything to CARE about her, and most of the time she ended up being disgusted with her surroundings, screaming or escaping. Big whoop. Cripes, the character even ruins a brilliantly tense moment on the bridge scene -- Indy quickly thinks, makes a decision, gets ready, tells Short Round to get ready (but doesn't let the audience in on it, good call there), Short Round tells Willie and then the whole thing becomes overplayed comedy again. GARG. That the film recovers so quickly with the perfect scenery chewing of the "Prepare to meet Kali!" bit is to its credit but oh how much better it would have been without Willie's unneeded diversion.

* Oh and about Short Round...well, whatever. He's no Sallah. Dear lord the bad jokes they gave him though (the "No time for love, Dr. Jones!" bit was great but the "Feel like stepping on fortune cookies" yeah yeah FUCK YOU).

In sum, Raiders was a shoot-the-moon 'let's try it and make it work' idea, Temple was a 'great! the franchise is established! now we don't need to make everything work completely!' followup. Bah.

And I will also say that seeing the screen tests of Tom Selleck as Indy and Sean Young as Marion -- and hearing that Danny de Vito was almost cast as Sallah -- gave me the FEAR.

And actually it turned out the Army troops were Indian troops but they were still led by Lord Featheringstonehaugh III or whatever.

---

Looks like
Harrison Ford can finally take the fedora out of mothballs.

The Hollywood megastar told a German magazine on Wednesday that after rewrites too numerous to count, he and director
Steven Spielberg are finally satisfied with the script for the forever-in-the-works fourth installment of the whip-wielding, tomb-raiding adventurer.

"Steven Spielberg and I now have a script in hand that we both like. I believe that we can start with the filming soon," Ford was quoted as saying in an interview with Fit for Fun, a German lifestyle and entertainment magazine.

The 63-year-old actor, who's been making the publicity rounds this month for Firewall--his first certifiable action thriller since 1997's Air Force One--demurred, however, on a start date.

That depends on the busy schedules of the Indiana Jones triumvirate of Ford, Spielberg and producer
George Lucas. But Ford indicated he was ready to get back into the swing of things, adding that he needed "to do a little practicing with the whip" to avoid injuries.

Ford's reps did not comment further, and a Lucasfilm spokesperson said Wednesday that Lucas was not available to comment on the status of Indy 4. But appearing at last week's Empire Awards in London, his producing partner, Rick McCallum, said Lucas had made his final tweaks to the script by Jeff Nathanson (Rush Hour and Catch Me If You Can) and handed it off to his two pals for final tweaking.

"[George has] just finished the Indiana Jones script, and Steven's having that rewritten and a few things done," McCallum said, according to published reports.

Spielberg's publicist, Marvin Levy, confirmed as much to E! Online.

"[The script] certainly seems to be [in the can], but I don't think we're at that point where we have a firm start date," Levy said. "But this is certainly the closest where we've been in this whole development process."

Levy also denied an earlier report that Spielberg was considering taking a year off after doing War of the Worlds and Munich back to back. He said the two-time Oscar winner is working not only on getting Indy 4 off the ground, but also Lincoln, his upcoming biopic on Abraham Lincoln that will reunite him with his Schindler's List star,
Liam Neeson.

"I think it's much more likely that he will do an Indy movie before he does Lincoln. The Lincoln script is not as far in the development stage and...frankly, Steven may not want to do another serious movie after doing a Munich," Levy said.

He noted it's possible Spielberg "would be starting something before 2007."

It's been a slow, tortuous march to production since the project was officially announced in January 2002. The trio brought in Oscar-nominated writer-director
Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) to take a crack at writing a story about the aging archaeologist, but Lucas vetoed the draft, putting Indy 4 on hold indefinitely until Nathanson found an angle that pleased the principals.

By the time Indy 4 does get rolling--this year or next--Ford will have turned 64 and will probably be 65 by the time Paramount releases the movie in theaters. The actor is next set to play Colonel Everton Conger, the man who tracked down Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in Manhunt, which starts filming next month.

Lessee...the last movie was set in '39, I think, and came out about 15 years ago so the new one to account for Harrison Ford's leather-muppet grill will have to be early to mid fifties. So Nazis are out, unless they do a South American exile thing ala Mengele - but there's no superstitious biblical artifact to mess with there. Spear of Longinus, maybe? Been done to death a little, hasn't it. Maybe we'll sub Stalin for Hitler and throw in some russian folklore?

Sorry. It's early for me.

-- ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, (,,,,,,,,...), Today 12:04 PM. (later)

this is so what i think is going to happen

Yeah, there was total fuss.

Welp.

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/disney-acquires-indiana-jones-rights-from-paramount-1200927216/

How long til this gets handed over to J.J. Abrams?

This is much worst news than Star Wars IMO.

agreed, either they keep making them w/ harrison ford which plz no or they start making them w/o harrison ford which god fucking no.

Oh, come on, isn't the answer obvious?
http://img2-2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080521/shia_l.jpg

agreed, either they keep making them w/ harrison ford which plz no or they start making them w/o harrison ford which god fucking no.

― balls, Saturday, December 7, 2013 2:24 AM (1 hour ago)

Well if they were to come up with a really really good screenplay for one more film then obviously I wouldn't be complaining, but how likely is that to happen. Indiana Jones without Ford and Spielberg would not be Indiana Jones.

If they do spin-off films with his kid that wouldn't really bother me.

Me neither, cause then I'd have absolutely zero reason to see them.

christ this reminds me i saw Temple.. at a festival in summer with a VERY loud sound system and fuck me some bits of it are as good as terrifying.