You Still Can't Go Home Again--Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

      I can't pretend that I approached the new Indiana Jones movie with anything like high hopes. George Lucas's repeated, failed attempts to recapture the lightning of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a bottle, coupled with Steven Spielberg's frustrating "more is more" approach to filmmaking, left me walking into the theater with nothing more than the fervent wish, "Please, please don't let this suck."
      It does not suck. But neither are you likely to leave the theater with that same feeling I had as a teenager, walking out of Raiders for the first time, thinking, "Man, I have got to see that again!" It might be wrong to let nostalgia for my early movie-going years--a time when Star Wars IV and V, Raiders, Blade Runner and Terminator burst upon my nascent cinematic sensibilities in rapid succession--color my evaluation of the new Indiana Jones, but let's face it, nostalgia is exactly what this franchise is all about. Raiders embodied Lucas's and Spielberg's nostalgia for the Saturday matinées, the serials that left the swashbuckling hero in an impossible situation each week, only to show his improbable escape into yet more trouble the next. In the 80's those kind of movies didn't exist anymore--couldn't exist anymore--except in their memories, so they re-imagined them for another generation. In much the same way, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull embodies our nostalgia for Raiders. Movies like Raiders don't exist anymore either, except as parodies of themselves (where Raiders winked, today's actioners leer), but Spielberg and Lucas are savvy enough to know that those of us who remember Raiders with the same fondness they remember the old serials are willing to give Indy a special pass.
      Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a plot of sorts, much in the same way that porn movies do, as a vehicle to move from one action setpiece to the next. Evil Commies have replaced the evil Nazis of the previous movies (affording Ford the chance to growl, "Russians," in exactly the same disgusted tone he once growled, "Nazis"), led by the sinister, sword-wielding Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who sports the wickedest Prince Valiant hairdo ever seen outside the funny papers. Spalko wants Indy to lead her to the MacGuffin, which this time around is a mystical crystal skull that she and the Russkies will somehow turn into the ultimate weapon in a new kind of "psychic warfare." Along the way Indy hooks up with Mutt (Shia Lebeouf), a motorcycle-riding, switchblade-wielding greaser who's looking for his missing mentor, Professor "Ox" Oxley (John Hurt), who disappeared while searching for the skull and the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. And, oh yeah, Mutt's mom turns out to be Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's spunky love interest from Raiders. And I haven't even mentioned George "Mac" McHale (Ray Winstone), who we're told is a great spy buddy of Indy's from their war days, and who may or may not be working with the Russians or the CIA, or both, or neither.
      None of this matters, of course, any more than the arrival of the pizza boy in the aforementioned porno matters; we're mentally fast-fowarding to the sex scenes action scenes. Action is something that Spielberg knows well how to orchestrate, and action is what he gives us; we get a rocket sled, a digital counter ticking down from ten, a motorcycle chase through an Ivy League campus, a swordfight across the gap between two speeding jeeps, poison darts, angry natives, voracious man-eating ants, monkeys, shout-outs to Tarzan and Marlon Brando, inter-dimensional beings, and not one, but three rides over a waterfall in an amphibious vehicle. Oh, and a thermonuclear blast. This is a partial list.
      All of this rolls along pleasantly enough--Spielberg is too skilled a craftsman ever to let the patched-together story collapse completely under the weight of all the CGI gee-whizzery. There are even a few real-live stunts with real-live stuntpeople, perhaps for old times' sake. But there's no magic here. The chemistry of Marion and Indy's love/hate relationship has been lost, replaced with loud, unfunny bickering that's so annoying, even one of their Russian captors begs them, "For God's sake, please shut the hell up!" The constant nods to icons of the franchise--the hat, the whip, the fear of snakes--simply remind us how much we prefer the original to what we're watching now. Winstone and Hurt are given almost nothing to do, and everyone else seems to be very professionally going through the motions, killing some time until they're told to go stand in front of the green screen again. I don't really blame Lucas and Spielberg for being unable to recreate the magic of Raiders in the face of so much audience nostalgia; it's an impossible task. I just wish they'd stop trying.

Stripping for the Artistically Handicapped

      There's a fun website called Bitstrips.com which allows the artistically handicapped among us to create our own comic strips, using an easy-to-figure-out point and click interface. I only discovered this yesterday, so my first attempt is, shall we say, a bit rough. But it's a lot of fun to play with, and some of the inherent limitations actually force you to be creative; you have to develop the eye of a caricaturist for which details in a simple figure imbue it with life and action and (hopefully) humor.

WalMart Purchasing Department Harbors At Least One Rebellious Soul

      For the first time ever, and much to my own surprise, today I found myself purchasing one of those 2-in-1 Double Feature DVD packages from WalMart's bargain bin. You know the ones--Steven Seagal in Exit Wounds and Half Past Dead, or Honey I Shrunk the Kids boxed with Honey I Must Fulfill My Contractual Obligation.
      But somewhere in the bowels of a cubicle dungeon, deep in the dark heart of Bentonville AR, at least one huddled mass must be yearning to breathe free. He or she--giggling maniacally all the time, I'm sure--somehow managed to ensure that WalMart's bargain double feature inventory includes A Darren Aronofsky Collection: Requiem for a Dream and π. Neither of which did I previously own. For just 9 bucks! That's...um...less than 5 bucks each!
      Fight the power, my ghostly friend, fight the power.

My (Not Quite) Fifteen Minutes of Fame

      When I lived in Pittsburgh, WYEP 91.3FM was my radio station of choice. A community-sponsored station, YEP has always featured a great, eclectic playlist--as I write this, they're playing the latest from Drive-by Truckers. Before that was Jackson Browne, Del Amitri, Counting Crows, Okkervil River, and Marc Cohn. Even after moving away, I've kept up my membership and continue to listen to YEP on their internet stream. I've found a lot of great new artists that way.
      One of YEP's regular features is called "My Fifteen Minutes." The morning DJ, Cindy Howes, solicits three-song playlists from listeners--with or without a unifying theme--and plays them during her morning show. Once a week, on Friday, she'll choose one listener to be a guest DJ to introduce and chat about his playlist. A while back I sent her a playlist with the theme of "first tracks that blew me away," which included "Litany (Life Goes On)" by Guadalcanal Diary, "East of Eden" by Lone Justice, and "Set Out Running," by Neko Case. Last week Howes called me for a brief phone interview, and on Friday, at 7:15AM, I had my (not quite) fifteen minutes of fame as a guest DJ. I usually hate hearing my own voice recorded, but I was relieved to discover that I didn't say anything too inane or otherwise sound like an idiot. I was briefly nonplussed by the fact that the 20-something Howes had to ask me how to pronounce "Guadalcanal" (do they not teach WWII history in school anymore?), and unfortunately YEP didn't have access to the out of print "Litany"; we decided to replace it with "Watusi Rodeo," even though it's not a first track.
      Unfortunately, I screwed up my program that records internet streams, and although YEP has several podcasts of their various shows, "My Fifteen Minutes" isn't one of them. So my fifteen minutes have been lost to the ether. But it was still fun to pick songs for my favorite radio station and get to talk about them on-air. Now if only the Triangle had decent community radio, I could contemplate another career change--to DJ.

Who Will Watch The "Watchmen"?

      Back in the late 80's, mostly in grad school I guess, I became enamored of a few absurdist comic books and strips like "The Flaming Carrot," "Zippy the Pinhead," and--to a lesser degree--"Cerebus the Aardvark." They appealed to my love of the offbeat and the iconoclastic, and in a conservative place like Waco, Texas, allowed me to maintain a highly inaccurate self-image as an ahead-of-the-curve hipster, too cool to be held back by my temporary dalliance in such a cultural backwater. The very fact that these comics were actually available in a Waco comic book store should have clued me in to the highly relative nature of my hipness, but that observation escaped me at the time.
      At any rate, my periodic searches for back issues of Flaming Carrot eventually led me to the works of Alan Moore, including "V for Vendetta" (see the cool, cloak-rippling action image to the right) and then "Watchmen" (1986-87). Along with writers like Frank Miller ("The Dark Knight Returns") and Art Spiegelman ("Maus"), Moore helped legitimize comic books as a forum for serious issues and launched an era of comics during which--for better or worse--most of the tired old superheroes were re-invented as brooding, conflicted neurotics, struggling to reconcile their physical superiority with their sometimes dubious moral codes.
      "Watchmen" is interesting partially because with a single exception, none of the main characters has any superhuman powers at all. They dress up and fight crime in an alternate version of the 1980's in which the U.S. rapidly approaches all-out war with the Soviet Union, but they're not superheroes, merely "costumed adventurers," or as other characters bluntly point out, vigilantes. At least two of them, "Rohrschach" and "The Comedian," can easily be viewed as sociopaths. They make the citizenry nervous enough to enact laws specifically aimed at curbing the activities of costumed adventurers, and throughout the twelve chapters a recurring graffiti tag appears, "Who watches the Watchmen?"--a quote from one of Juvenal's Satires.
      The quote got me thinking--who will watch Watchmen when director Zack Snyder (300, Dawn of the Dead) finally brings it to the big screen in 2009? I recently re-read "Watchmen" in its omnibus edition, complete with a cover blurb from Time magazine declaring it one of the top 100 novels since 1928 (Since a very cursory look at novels from 1987 alone quickly produces three that are better--Beloved, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Black Dahlia--that declaration sounds pretty ridiculous). It has many strengths, but will they translate to film? Overlapping dialogues help move the action along and counterpoint different plot elements; inter-textual material between the chapters in the form of diary entries, book excerpts, newspaper clippings and such offer important exposition without resorting to endless static panels of talking heads; a meta-fictional subplot in which a boy reads a comic book obliquely parallels the story arc of a main character. All of these integral elements work very well on the page, but can Snyder find a way to incorporate them into a 90-minute comic book blockbuster? Will he even try?
      Obviously the fanboys will turn out no matter what he produces; "Watchmen" enjoys legendary status in the world of comics and graphic novels, and the blogosphere has been following every tiniest development in the movie's production with bated breath since it was first green-lighted. But after the opening weekend, will anybody else be interested in a superhero movie with no superheroes? The primary demographic for the movie probably has only the vaguest notion about the cold-war nuclear fears that lie behind the original. However, in today's political climate, a story that hangs on one character's drastic, Machiavellian, and unilateral solution to avoiding World War III should provide a filmmaker plenty of grist for his creative mill and a chance to widen Watchmen's appeal beyond its fanboy fanbase. If he doesn't spend too much time reading the fansites, that is.

OMG! That Was So Cool!--Sea Monsters in 3D

      My wife's six year old nephew and his family have been in town this week, so we've been looking for interesting entertainment options for them in the Triangle. Today we decided to take in Sea Monsters: a Prehistoric Adventure in 3D at the IMAX theater in Raleigh. The last time I saw a 3D movie was about twenty-five years ago, trying to balance on my nose a pair of those cardboard red/blue glasses that they used to use to create the 3D effects. That was also a sea monster movie--Jaws 3--and it was wretched, wretched.
      Well 3D has come a long way, baby. Obviously aimed at a young audience, and despite a few moments of dubious theorizing and over-dramatization a la the Discovery Channel, "Sea Monsters in 3D" was nevertheless enthralling from beginning to end. Mostly computer animated with a few live-action scenes of actors playing paleontologists and amateur fossil hunters, "Sea Monsters" dramatizes the lives of a few of the sexier species of prehistoric marine life. The visual effects are truly impressive, to the point that objects seem to actually pass behind you as they cross your field of vision. The theater was filled with school groups, and every menacing approach of a toothy leviathan elicited delighted screams of terror from the crowd. They would also wave their hands in the air in a futile attempt to grab the floating objects that did in fact seem within the viewers' grasp.
      I'm not sure who enjoyed it more--my nephew or me.

Sound and Fury--Polanski's Macbeth (1971) DVD

      I had never before seen Roman Polanski's Macbeth, but a film group discussion and the presence of Jon Finch in the lead prompted me to get it from Netflix. A quick glance around the internet turns up reviews that make much of the fact that this is the first film Polanski made after the Manson murders and his wife's death. I'm generally leery of biographical criticism, preferring to let the "text" speak for itself, but there's no denying that Polanski's Macbeth is by far the bleakest version I've ever seen (and I've seen "Throne of Blood"!).
      At first, I liked it. The cinematography is dark and claustrophobic; the sun is almost never seen. When it is, it appears as a faint, distant stain behind the clouds, or as a bit of blue sky, but always outside the dark gates of Macbeth's keep. I've always liked Jon Finch in Shakespeare (he did two really great Henry IV's for the BBC), and he's very good again here. Polanski's Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis), however, is a disappointing nonentity--she says all of her important lines, but this Macbeth needs little convincing, and she comes off as being weaker than he, which doesn't jibe with my reading of the play at all. If Macbeth is pure ambition from the beginning, then there's no tragedy.
      There's no doubt that this is the production of a talented filmmaker with the skill to transfer his vision to the screen. But Polanski's apparent vision of Macbeth reminds me of some of the complaints about the nihilism of "No Country For Old Men." MacDuff doesn't so much save Scotland as simply put a broken man out of his misery. When a filmmaker actually agrees with Macbeth that life is "a tale told by an idiot/full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," one can't help but wonder, "so why bother?"