indiana jones, take 4
Last night I went to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
I went with my brother. When we were making our way through the lobby on our way out, I asked him what he thought, and he said, "Hated it!" in a dead-on Antoine & Blaine from In Living Color impersonation. That might have been the most entertaining moment I experienced at the movies last night.
In the movie's defense: I totally didn't see my brother's joke coming (which made it twenty times funnier), and the movie had ridiculous expectations to live up to. But still, even taking into account how almost impossible it would be to recapture the greatness that was Raiders of the Lost Ark, I still was really disappointed with the movie.
I thought the actors were all good, and I loved that Marion was back, but the movie was just so. incredibly. slow. I found myself checking my watch in the second half, which I almost never do. The opening sequence was probably three times longer than it had to be, and it seemed like every scene, every chase, every exchange of dialog, lasted a minute or two longer than it needed to. And I am someone who can deal with slow movies! Who LOVES them, when the pace serves a purpose; movies like Lost in Translation or Ang Lee's Sense & Sensibility, or any movie where the director uses quiet moments as crucial storytelling elements. But movies like Indiana Jones really need to MOVE in order for me to be entertained by them. I think overall the movie suffered because the last one I saw before it in the theater was Iron Man, which was one of the best-paced action movies I've seen in a long time.
I could see that they'd thought out a lot of the elements in the movie - 1950s anti-communist hysteria, the alien element key to the B-movies of that era, the emergence of youth culture, etc. All fine. But I would have gladly sacrificed any/all of those elements for a faster-paced movie (and I would have put the alien thing up there as the first thing to jettison). I was inclined to jump onto the alien thing immediately as the movie's fatal flaw for me, but after I thought about it for a bit, I realized that I probably would have been able to accept it if I'd been more invested in the movie.
Oh, and also, I thought Harrison Ford and Shia LeBeouf had a nice rapport all the way through. And I didn't like the idea that Indy left Marion a week before the wedding - it just seemed like such a rotten thing to do, and why did they need to go with that plot element? Why not have it simply be that they got into a big argument, stormed off, the war happened, they lost track of each other, etc? I don't know. Maybe it's just me.
I went with my brother. When we were making our way through the lobby on our way out, I asked him what he thought, and he said, "Hated it!" in a dead-on Antoine & Blaine from In Living Color impersonation. That might have been the most entertaining moment I experienced at the movies last night.
In the movie's defense: I totally didn't see my brother's joke coming (which made it twenty times funnier), and the movie had ridiculous expectations to live up to. But still, even taking into account how almost impossible it would be to recapture the greatness that was Raiders of the Lost Ark, I still was really disappointed with the movie.
I thought the actors were all good, and I loved that Marion was back, but the movie was just so. incredibly. slow. I found myself checking my watch in the second half, which I almost never do. The opening sequence was probably three times longer than it had to be, and it seemed like every scene, every chase, every exchange of dialog, lasted a minute or two longer than it needed to. And I am someone who can deal with slow movies! Who LOVES them, when the pace serves a purpose; movies like Lost in Translation or Ang Lee's Sense & Sensibility, or any movie where the director uses quiet moments as crucial storytelling elements. But movies like Indiana Jones really need to MOVE in order for me to be entertained by them. I think overall the movie suffered because the last one I saw before it in the theater was Iron Man, which was one of the best-paced action movies I've seen in a long time.
I could see that they'd thought out a lot of the elements in the movie - 1950s anti-communist hysteria, the alien element key to the B-movies of that era, the emergence of youth culture, etc. All fine. But I would have gladly sacrificed any/all of those elements for a faster-paced movie (and I would have put the alien thing up there as the first thing to jettison). I was inclined to jump onto the alien thing immediately as the movie's fatal flaw for me, but after I thought about it for a bit, I realized that I probably would have been able to accept it if I'd been more invested in the movie.
Oh, and also, I thought Harrison Ford and Shia LeBeouf had a nice rapport all the way through. And I didn't like the idea that Indy left Marion a week before the wedding - it just seemed like such a rotten thing to do, and why did they need to go with that plot element? Why not have it simply be that they got into a big argument, stormed off, the war happened, they lost track of each other, etc? I don't know. Maybe it's just me.