Indiana Jones LOVE thread

* 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.

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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

March 17, 2006 - We've heard a lot of things about the Indiana Jones IV script lately. Lucas suggested that a draft by Jeff Nathanson (Rush Hour, Catch Me if You Can) had been approved and was ready to shoot, while director Steven Spielberg said he was having War of the Worlds collaborator David Koepp work on it some more.

The latest from star Harrison Ford, however, is that Spielberg does have a script he is satisfied with. "Steven Spielberg and I now have a script in hand that we both like. I believe that we can start with the filming soon," the actor told German magazine Fit for Fun, according to E! Online.

Spielberg's publicist Marvin Levy also told 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. But this is certainly the closest where we've been in this whole development process."

Lucas spoke about Indy IV again this week, this time with Time magazine. "I've been working on Indy 4 for ten years. So I've been more involved, so no matter how you count it on this one I'll be more involved than I'll have ever been on the other three put together. It's taken forever to get a script of it. That's my part of it."

Lucas also gave a caution, apparently aimed at the same sort of fan base that had conjured up their own ideas of what the Star Wars prequels would be like and then came away disappointed. "You know the problem there, which is not a problem, is that we don't have to make that movie. All we can do is hurt ourselves, all it's going to do is get criticized. I mean it's basically Phantom Menace we're making. No matter how you do it, no matter what you do, it won't be what the other ones were in terms of the impact or the way people remember them."

Lucas also mentioned that Spielberg was planning to use his own tried-and-true film techniques while making Indy IV, instead of Lucas's cutting-edge digital technology.

"He'll win. He's the director. The great thing about working with Steven is that we don't have agendas. We want to make the best movie possible, I want him to be happy. If he wants to shoot it on film and cut it on a Movieola... Hey, he's got a great editor. Michael Kahn can cut faster on a Movieola than anybody can cut on an Avid. And I don't really care."

So where do things stand now? A high-level production source has confirmed for IGN FilmForce that, as was previously reported , Spielberg is indeed taking a year off, despite all the recent progress on the Indy IV front. Script revisions will continue, as will development on the Oscar winner's long-planned Abraham Lincoln project. Hang in there, Indy fans!

And now Lucas, of course, has his eye on another American classic: Indiana Jones. The fourth chapter in the film series, with Lucas producing and close pal Steven Spielberg directing, begins shooting in Los Angeles this June. Then it's on to several top-secret global destinations. Lucas teases that one will include a waterfall.

Jokes have been made about how the franchise will keep 64-year-old star Harrison Ford up and running, but Lucas doesn't see that as a problem.

"He's not running in any of the movies," Lucas says. "He's either on a horse or driving a car or a motorcycle. And he'll play his age in this movie with what's appropriate. The chases are more suspenseful than speedy. Like the rolling ball in the first film — it's not that he's running that fast, it's that there's a giant ball coming at him. And he will get beat up, which is a tradition for us."

Lucas, who also is in pre-production on a "bare-bones, action-heavy" Star Wars live-action TV series, says there'll still be plenty of action in "Indy 4," the official title of which he hopes to keep under wraps until the first trailer hits theaters around Thanksgiving.

Sean Connery has yet to sign on as Indiana's father, Dr. Henry Jones, but Lucas says, "We're still trying."

It wasn't his idea to cast Cate Blanchett as Ford's new leading lady, he says. "That's who my director wanted, and I always bow to the wishes of my director," Lucas says of Spielberg. "I approved it because she seemed like a good idea. When I met her at the Academy Awards, I told her, 'Hey, you work for me now!' "