So much of the Coen Bros oeuvre is pretty much a heist film, but what if that’s a bad idea and we just spend an hour and a half thinking about the consequences that are coming, with an outro of folks contemplating that things didn’t have to work out this way but hindsight offers no comforts and none of the lessons learned are learned by the folks who could have done things differently, anyways.
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Is it bad that I still think Temple Of Doom is the best one?
I know it’s the most racist, but I always just find it the more fun than the rest of the series
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The opening in Shanghai is kinda fun. The whole scramble for the antidote and diamond, the chase through the streets.
I’ll hand it to 'em, though - Mola Ram was a pretty fun villain, that guy was clearly eating that role up.
And by my count there was only one guy in black/brown face, which is a lot less than Raiders! That’s still not good, and I think the other shit outweighs any gain from that, but I’m grasping here.
Oh also laughed when you can clearly hear before you can see Dan Aykroyd pop up doing a terrible accent.
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I don’t think the issue with Temple of Doom is the racism per se, it’s more the contrariness. Like, if you go back and read contemporary reviews of Raiders, what stands out is the way critics were blown away that you could even make a pastiche adventure movie that well – compared to the actual Flash Gordon adaptation that Lucas wanted before he got stuck doing Star Wars instead, or compared with any other family oriented action movies (almost a nonexistent category), it’s just so tight and accessible and fun. People were like, where’s the camp, is this a throwback, it’s just this good? And then Temple of Doom was pretty tacky and offputting and gross on purpose after all that, it’s like, hang on, didn’t you just perfect this?
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Setting aside the racism (no indiana jones movie survives even the least racial scrutiny), temple feels too much like a theme park ride for me to get any enjoyment out of it. It is this weird combination of “look at how gross and outre the movie is” surface detail and “put something on to distract the toddlers” substance.
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One more thing I will hand to the movie is that Shorty is probably the best “kid sidekick” in a movie from that era (I’m declaring this with zero expertise, Quan is just better in this than he was in The Goonies, and a lot better than the various kids tacked onto the Mad Max sequels).
I find most kid sidekicks insufferable but he’s pretty fun.
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Having already written thousands of words in this topic about Indiana Jones, the only two things I have to add now are 1) Temple is good because it raised the stakes of Raiders being so perfectly story boarded and shot that it works equally well as a black and white silent movie, by making the dialogue so bad you are essentially being dared to just watch the whole thing on mute
2) I’m grateful for the new one for finally definitively ending the debate about which one is the worst
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I honestly don’t know how anyone thinks Dial of Destiny is worse than Crystal Skull… I am like permanently negative on 2000s production design and neutral-to-positive on PWB though
PWB was fine, I’ve already said my piece about crystal skull but Dial of Destiny is just so miserable to look at and weirdly paced, it just seems to fail at doing anything the series is good at doing … You need that Spielberg juice and no director working today has it
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Yeah at least the action sequences in Crystal Skull have a fun rhythm, are creative, aren’t completely predictable, and are (this cannot be stressed enough) shot well enough to tell what is happening and display the grandeur of stunt and production budget like you’re supposed to do in a damn Indy movie.
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this does not square with my memories of that movie but I only remember that charisma vacuum, shia labeouf, fencing with cgi monkeys in a cgi jungle on a cgi jeep? Is that a scene in the movie? I feel like that was most of the movie that wasn’t dan aykroyd’s racist crystal skull theories or indiana jones fridging himself
edit: and cate blanchett’s atrocious war crime of an accent
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I think the jeep sequence isn’t actually as reliant on CG as is commonly thought. The monkeys are. But there is the cool chase through the school campus, the jeep sequence, a tense puzzle platformer sequence with ants, the stuff in the warehouse where they keep the ark. It’s largely practical supplemented with CG. I think what shapes the impression that it was some kind of Star Wars prequel situation is that the most prominent images are bad obvious CG: the gopher in the beginning, the nuke fridge (a fun idea imo), the monkies, and the aliens.
Shia is not good in it, you remember that right.
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I looked up the scene again and you’re right, the jeeps and the actors were real. Well, the jeeps were real for most of the sequence. I couldn’t get over the studio lighting and how there was clearly not even simulated wind (cate blanchett’s helmet-like wig didn’t move at all during the whole sequence). What I remembered as bad CG was just terrible compositing combined with fairly okay CG. It looked half-assed, like a tv movie.
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Flow is “this could be a video game” → ah, the animators do game stuff. real weightless stuff, no momentum, flex, or bounce on anything. and the heavy diffuse lighting makes my eyes glaze over. the trees & clouds look great, the water seems only to react to some physics (no ground effect from birds gliding over the surface)
the story? oh, a cat learns to swim (?) and makes friends (??), and climate change is as disruptive and inevitable as death
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Yeah. It’s still pathetic. Such is the state of big studio movies these days that I’m looking at Indiana Jones 4 and thinking “…we used to make movies!” But seriously, I don’t think that movie is bad in the exact way it was talked about for so long. And what u_u said
I haven’t watched the new indiana jones movie so I can’t say how bad it is (I assume it will kill me if I try to watch it)
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i want you to do it just so you can realize how right me and vodselbt are but i also don’t really think its fair to subject anyone to it. in my mind it is the worst example of how the disney meat grinder destroys all of the precious IP it ingests
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Watched Mel Brooks’ “to be or not to be”. A remake of a 1942 film - they added a gay character, so Mel gets a pass for dropping the f slur (which got muted for TV). Also starring a young Christopher Lloyd.
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I’ll do it, I’ll watch it (I just finished Last Crusade, it’s alright/pretty good - I don’t think I really needed a whole “here’s the how and why of all of Indiana Jones’s weird idiosyncrasies” with the opener, but I guess it’s like 15 minutes versus Solo squeezing a whole movie out of it (I think Solo is OK for what it is - it’s really dumb unnecessary content slop but it does that OK enough, and you get that really funny stinger where Darth Maul turns on his lightsaber on a Zoom call so you know for sure it’s him)).
I haven’t seen Crystal Skull since I was in theaters but I gotta…I gotta imagine the best thing to still come out of that was that Good Morning America interview where a very surly Harrison Ford slumps off his stool and snatches a bullwhip from a struggling Diane Sawyer and effortlessly whips the shit out of a bunch of targets they set up.
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Shut your eyes and don’t look at it no matter what happens.
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