indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull may be worth a matinee, but really should be a rental.

back when temple of doom came out, i had a poster-sized ad for the flick from the NYT up on my bedroom wall. (chill out, i was in eighth grade.) it was a shot of harrison ford in his archaeologist getup, shot from below, whip in one hand, fedora on head. “if adventure has a name, it’s indiana jones.” handsome, rough-and-ready, iconic.

this one? hmm. you could have a similar photo, only now it would read “if unfortunate sequel has a name, it’s indiana jones.”

i’m not going to bring out the geritol arguments, because old folks should be able to do whatever they want (or that their old bones will allow). but - likely due to the stars’ age - there were no rollicking escape sequences (the mad dash out of the caves from raiders, the casino shoot-em-up - or the mine shaft/roller coaster ride - from temple of doom, the “it should be in a museum!” boy scout chase with the late river phoenix from the last crusade).

what’s worse, the jokes were tired and more worn out than jones’ shoes (i’d say his fedora, but the one in crystal skull looked hat-box new), and the absence of denholm elliott was acutely felt. john hurt and cate blanchett were largely disposable - hurt’s talents underused and blanchett’s character, irina spalko, could have been played by anyone who could muster up a boris-and-natascha fake russian accent. and perhaps what made the flick drag the most, the character of george “mac” mchale, a poor stand-in for elliott’s marcus brody, brought along a cluttered backstory (apparently indy did some time in the oss) and forgettable, unnecessary plot devices that made the villains look stupider than necessary.

other than tying up the “whatever happened to marion ravenwood?” thread from raiders (you should be able to guess why shia labeouf plays a greaser who calls himself “mutt”), it’s a movie that never should have been made. the first three flicks came out in the 80s, within 9 years of each other, and this one, nearly twenty years down the road… uff. better to have done a labeouf-centered sequel with ford and allen as minor characters. but we’ve been spared that, i think, as in the final scene, ford snags his fedora out of labeouf’s hands before he can settle it on his ducktailed head.

dennis hopper is doing financial investment ads.

but now for something completely different. last night i went to the opening ceremonies of the 10th dc independent film festival.^1a there was definitely something amiss with primped, polished women talking about how important it was to buck the system, follow your dream, and ignore those who told you you couldn’t do something.

and then there was alex cox.

tall, lanky, leatherfaced, orange-parka clad alex cox. who bends in ways that would make a gumby proud. who said (wittingly? unwittingly?) that digital media let you “control the means of production”¹ and waxed on (and eventually off) about the evils of american copyright law.² all this after the u.s. premiere screening of searchers 2.0 (careful, that site has music), which showcases the lyrical strength of film trivia and the weakness of production values when you don’t have studio backing.

but before alex cox, yes, even before the hysterical (and likely intended to be some sort of social commentary) animated short dust off and cowboy up by laurence arcadias,³ there was david amram.

“who,” you ask, “is david amram?”

quite possibly the freakiest (and i say that in the nicest way possible) 77 year old washingtonian i’ve ever heard speak. he scored splendor in the grass and the original manchurian candidate, worked with ginsberg and kerouac and thelonius monk. and after a hep show’n'tell of woodwinds from around the world, he performed pull my daisy (the video at this link quite fittingly filmed at the 2007 lord buckley birthday bash, but the sound is nearly inaudible), doing the intro and exit scats and managing to work in a reference to philip seymour hoffman as truman capote and other totally random bits.

david amram was awesome.
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^1a i only paid for the movie, but after making a general nuisance of myself - while honestly only trying to figure out where to go - was instructed to go up to the VIP reception (i think they sent everyone up there, as the jack morton auditorium doesn’t really hold that many people anyway) and wound up watching the entire opening ceremonies with james and justin (who tells me “amram” was both moses’ father’s name and a missile developed by israeli scientists).

¹ one of the characters in searchers 2.0, the daughter of the main character, apparently read only two books, repeatedly: no logo - which appeared yesterday on stuff white people like, and atlas shrugged. funny!

² my only gripe with this was that the 95 years + the life of the author is disney’s brainchild, not jack valenti’s. at least, that’s what i learned in my IP overview course. but i could be wrong.

³ arcadias is female. i’m pretty sure.

scroll down to the hatches if you don’t want to read about my political unawareness.

a drawback of big news happening over the holidays when you’re stressed and working and not really paying attention to anything:

you find out benazir bhutto was assassinated the day after it happened, by chancing upon a beat-up copy of the friday washington post in the lunch room.

“it was all over NPR yesterday!” said one of my staff attorneys.

“i’ve spent the last two days listening to alice et june in the car. besides, i tend to listen to WTOP on the way in to work anyway. news, traffic and weather on the eights. but the news is mostly sports.”

“it’s all over tv!”

“television? oh, yeah. stopped watching when the writers’ strike began and the daily show and colbert report went into reruns. i suppose i would’ve found out about it there, but, well…”

“you don’t read the paper online?”

“yeah… before i started spending 12 hours a day reading other people’s e-mail for a living.”

“oh, well, then.”

well, then, indeed. unless it’s being piped directly into my brain (i.e., in front of me, while i’m awake and not in a click-coding daze) there’s a good chance i’m oblivious to it. in this case it’s rather disturbing because i always found benazir fascinating, and the fact of her had achieved a sort of cult/icon status in my worldview. that she was assassinated does not surprise me; it’s the fact that she’s dead, jim, that i can’t get my head around. odd disconnect there.

i’m not even paying attention to the upcoming primaries. can’t bring myself to care, really, political junkie that i once was. hillary looks smug; obama cadaverous. the candidates i like (kucinich and dodd) don’t have a snowball’s chance in a blast furnace. and if you think i’m going to pay any attention to the freak show that is the republican race, well, then, you don’t know me very well.

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i did really really like sweeney todd, though.

oh! and on the topic of sweeney todd, neil gaiman mentioned on his blog,

I even loved Johnny Depp’s early-Bowie-when-he-was-still-doing-Anthony-Newley singing style.

(if you’re not sure about this, listen to bowie’s please mister gravedigger; gaiman suggests the laughing gnome.) reconsidering the movie in this light, i realized that what i found most disconcerting is how much depp-as-mister-t looks like christopher walken. talk about creepy.

sometimes it was a bit hard to remember i was watching sweeney todd rather than edward scissorhands. and helena bonham carter basically reprised her fight club role. alan rickman was delightfully vile (and yet perversely sympathetic at the end) as judge turpin. all in all, great fun to watch, especially the staging of “the worst pies in london” and “a little priest.”

gotta wonder about a director who gleefully shoves his wife into a giant oven, though.

the strangest thing? watching a tim burton movie not scored by danny elfman. and, whoa - it’s been 17 years since edward scissorhands?

(so the kid taking the tickets at the theater said eastern promises was really good, but we saw resident evil: extinction anyway.)

i’m going to spoil things indiscriminately. consider yourself warned.

the wisecracking black guy who shows up early in the flick might as well be wearing a red shirt. but we all knew that, right? it’s always the brothers who get it. well, the brothers and alan tudyk, but he’s not in this movie. if he were, he’d be toast.

milla’s hotter than ali larter¹ by far. a-cups with perky nipples no matter what she’s wearing. i wasn’t really grooving on the female not-quite-turf-battle (didn’t we see that in apocalypse?), but they brought back oded fehr. (gotta love it when israelis play latinos, and you can’t quite figure out why the accent is wrong. plus he’s got this weird enormous earlobe thing going. sexy? creepy? too much like clem?² jury’s still out on that.)

and while there are tremendous overtones of beyond thunderdome (not so much with the two men enter,³ but with the vehicular caravan scenes across the desert⁴ - although sadly lacking the goofy guys in feathers and bits of football gear), i really thought it did a superb job of evoking that most excellent of postapocalyptic survivor quest movies, damnation alley.⁵ but with mutant crows instead of cockroaches.

parts of it are very, very, videogamey - entire sequences of people walking down dank corridors with flickering lights, holding a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. several characters do it, but milla does it best. which stands to reason. and the bad guys are all european. which also stands to reason. (yes, so’s milla, but she kicks major ass and looks good in shorts and garters and a modified australian cattle duster and her makeup is always perfect, which gets distracting when she’s turning zillions of zombified crows into pollo a la brasa.)

it ends on a very matrix-like note, after milla doesn’t entirely kick some mutant scientist ass. ah, the hubris of the umbrella corporation and its god-complexed baddies. gagillions of milla clones. this could mean a million-milla fight scene in the next installment.⁶

[total aside: there was a trailer for a sam raimi-produced POS about vampires above the arctic circle. mon dieu, how will humans ever survive the whole month of darkness? get a clue, people. move south.]

final analysis: not the feel-good movie of the year (unless you’re a skinny white chick with occasional daydreams of kicking some serious ass), but definitely worth the matinee. dude. $8.50 for a matinee? what’s up with that?

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¹ and who names a major character in a movie claire in this post-breakfast-club world for chrissake? i kept waiting for her to stick a tube of lipstick in her cleavage and explain sushi to a grossed-out judd nelson. “you eat that, but you won’t accept a guy’s tongue in your mouth?”

² a cookie for you if you knew i was talking about this guy. and no, not captain peroxide. his earlobes are just fine. nibblicious, in fact.

³ that had to have been the tagline for a mid-80s porno. if it wasn’t, the valley should be very, very ashamed.

⁴ not to be confused with the interminable scenes of camel caravans crossing the desert in lawrence of arabia. i ran that in college. all seven reels. i tell you, at least three reels were nothing but camels. crossing the desert. here we are. crossing the desert. just some camels. crossing the desert.

⁵ i should get major props for remembering that one. pulling that from way back in the jan-michael vincent crush days of prepubescence.

⁶ okay, so, like, an army of neos vs. an army of alices. how cool would that be? i would so want to watch alice squish neo’s pasty white ass. it would hafta be better than alien v. predator: requiem. another POS trailer, and a near guarantee that putting a colon in an action movie title won’t make it suck any less. but back to all those alices and neos. ah, it would probably be all cgi and shit, and wind up sucking ass like the formation scenes in attack of the clones. which i couldn’t figure out - why would ILM, those gods of f/x, put out something like that? the similar scenes in i, robot, OTOH, were near pitch-perfect, but maybe that’s ‘cuz the robot was played by alan tudyk. damn, i don’t remember… did he buy it in that film, too?

opening today:

resident evil: extinction, and eastern promises.

viggo or milla? milla or viggo? viggilla? milliggo? milligo viggilla! you know, that lip-synching pop band from the mid 80s? the one with such hits as “girl you know it’s true… oooh oooh oooh, gonna kill you” and “blame it on the rain (because without it, you wouldn’t need the umbrella corporation).”

damn you, alejna. you’ve infected my brain.

3:10 to yuma. have i ever mentioned i want to keep christian bale in the basement? what? that’s creepy, you say? yeah, it is. but after seeing rescue dawn and 3:10 to yuma, yeah, i want him in the basement. slightly malnourished, slightly greasy looking. (american psycho and the machinist freak me out too much to want him at either extreme.) it’s really not that creepy. there’s a couch down there. and a bathroom. oh, and the washer & dryer, so he could do his laundry.

but seriously, the bale/crowe remake is excellent. (and for reasons far beyond just bale, in case you’re wondering. ben foster took the rather trite role of gay sociopath and made it truly creepy. alan tudyk i will watch in anything, although i’m getting tired of his penchant for taking snuff roles. cut it out already, willya? and logan lerman, who is all of fifteen and unfortunately looks like an ashton kutcher clone, did a more-than-adequate job of playing his own age.) i may have to see it in the theater again, and i can’t remember the last time i said that about a movie. it may have been something with gary oldman in it. but my gary oldman fixation? that’s soooo 90s. new century. new cinematic obsession.

iron man. just caught the trailer for it. robert downey jr., another one i’ll watch in almost anything, and unlike christian bale, he hasn’t starred in the creepiest of bret easton ellis’ books-turned-movies. it appears to have potential (more than underdog, anyway, which i may have to see just because i also saw kangaroo jack. if the logic of that is opaque to you, obviously you’ve never met me), and it was directed by jon favreau.

on the wagon, off the wagon, nailed to the side of the wagon… robert downey jr., you had me at “girls, schmirls!” or maybe it was at “violent ground acquisition games such as football is in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.” anyway. either way. since the mid-80s, and despite the dalliance with molly ringwald. and in a move that struck me as incredibly funny, iron man can fly (gimme a break, i never read the comics). (go read soon i will be invincible.)

all of which bring me to (and by “all of which,” i mean my aside about gary oldman, who was in the fifth element with the lovely star of…)

resident evil: extinction. 10 days to go. and while my theory that i could watch anything with milla kicking ass in it was horribly disabused by ultraviolet, i thoroughly enjoyed the first two resident evil movies. so i’m hopeful for this one. (and damn this imdb overuse! there’s a short that’s a trailer for a remake of gore vidal’s caligula out there! with milla! and i haven’t seen it!)

nuff ‘o that. i’ve mentioned a few movies and a few books. go about your day. i need to get to work.

i can see why stardust is getting compared to the princess bride, but it really shouldn’t be. about the only thing the two movies have in common is a blonde in a long dress.

and what on earth was the director/editor/producers thinking by putting a rock power ballad over the closing credits? it was as though journey and boston had an illegitimate love child with diarrhea, and then sting/rod stewart/bryan adams took the dirty diaper and wiped it all over the movie.

feh. unfortunately, you’ve got to sit through the closing credits to get the final jape. but everything up to the closing credits is, well, heavenly.

just watched crimson rivers 2: angels of the apocalypse at the suggestion of a friend. a one word review:

derivative.

more words:

take any of the indiana jones movies, cross with the death-filled apocalyptic film of your choice, and you’ve got crimson rivers 2.

which isn’t to say it isn’t entertaining. just that it’s highly predictable, which i found surprising in a screenplay by luc besson. but it does have jean reno, and i’ll watch pretty much anything with reno in it, at least once. or with jean-hughes anglade, who isn’t in crimson rivers but is one of my favorite male french actors.

it also has christopher lee as a french-speaking german government minister. so i suppose that’s worth something. a centime? a pfennig? no, wait… the movie was released in 2004. so perhaps a eurocent. but not much more.

fairly entertaining, some bad translations if you’re reading the subtitles (and quite a bit of banter is lost in the translation), but i’m not angrily agitating to get those 100 minutes back (87 if you watch the swiss version… i wonder what they cut?). i can think of worse things to watch on a saturday afternoon.

like the black hole.