As to Sugarland Express (which tends to polarize folks, some love it, some detest it) I’ve not seen it. That & Amistad and some of his Nightgallery type TV work are my only missing Spielbergs. I’m not an uber-fan of the man, but I like a lot of his films (Duel, Jaws, Catch Me if you Can, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, The Terminal, The middle chapter of A.I. (although I truly detest the opening and closing of that film), the first 95% of Minority Report, the first 95% of War of the Worlds, Munich, most of Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind….

I guess Empire of the Sun deserves a re-visit, same goes for that Columbo episode.

I guess I am a fan.

no problem at all mate. just bringing it to your attention (hopefully without sounding whiney).

Kurt is 100% wrong.

/fact

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Which is why I hesitate to watch Cloverfield again. I liked it quite a bit the first time, but have a feeling I’ll hate it the second time around. Which is why I’ll leave it be and keep the good taste in my mouth.

Last films watched (over past 7 days):

Eat, For this is My Body (screener for Twitch)
For A Few Dollars More
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Confusions of an Unmarried Couple (screener for RowThree)
Indian Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Theatre)
The ‘Burbs
The New World
Extras Season2 Ep1
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade
My Blueberry Nights (DVD)
Chungking Express
Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom

(not a small amount of viewing for a guy with 2 kids and a day job and a house to maintain…)

Its been on my shelf for a while now, and it comes with high praise, I’ve just not actually thrown it in the player yet.

Actually, the first one isn’t even that great either. I liked it the first time, then the second time (watching it with my mom) I realized it was just three teenagers swearing and screaming at each other for 75 minutes and nothing particularly scary for the final 20 minutes. It works once. I never want to watch it again.

It ain’t the “shot” that I liked. It’s the idea and the message of the final 10 seconds of the film. It defied the standard of what we all thought we were going to see, but Lucas/Spielberg wagged their finger with a “na ah ah ot so fast” at the last second and it elicited a smile and even a bit of a chortle from me. So yeah, that with a burst of Williams’ score made me happy for the very ending of the film and that’s what stuck.

Also, this segment is not what gives the film a pass (if I said that, it’s not exactly what I meant). What gives the film a pass (barely) is three fold: 1) the first half of the movie is terrific. 2) It’s Indiana Jones and that alone is a huge plus. 3) The final segment is the lasting impression I had and sometimes a final lasting impression as the credits roll strikes me as great and overshadows some of the last 30 minutes preceding it.

I also bought The Living and The Dead which looks really interesting.

To a limited degree that is how Raiders of the Lost Ark originated as a film. homages to cool escapes and derring do. It’s just that it happened to have some fine actors, and a good screenplay and thus the adventure-blockbuster bar has been set and barely ever touched since.

I believe the Mushroom Cloud sequence and how it stacks up against what the previous three films represents is a pretty spectacular image, not a sight gag. (and augmented/underscored by the subdivision home plastic and chrome previously). To each their own though.

And on the final shot in the film, I don’t believe the rest of the film earned it, thus that particular moment fell quite flat for me. If the film was inventive and fresh and interesting then that scene would have connected, instead. Nothing.

If Bond (albeit however clumsily) can constantly re-invent itself why not Indy? I think they tried and failed with this one, the screenplay and direction wasn’t as daring as Spielberg seemed to be in the late 1970s and early 1980s for this sort of thing.

Andrew also says the final shot makes him forgive the film enough to give it a pass… a single shot?!!! Is a film just an assemblage of shots that if one works we can congratulate the film? There is too much emphasis placed on cinematopgraphy, shots, etc… a film is dismembered and then if you can add up the right amount of ‘cool’ shots somehow you have a good film. Indy IV had no momentum, the shots did not serve anything, a shot without adequate context is just at most a pretty thing… the great importance of cinema is that images are juxtaposed and given some potential narrative significance.

The mushroom cloud represents the fact that Indy saving mystical artefacts from getting into the wrong hands have been trumped by Oppenheimer and co. Furthermore, the quaint plastic, chrome and Television of a nascent ‘suburbia’ which started in the 50s simply has no place for Indy. The FBI/McCarthyists have no place for Indy’s heroism, and the world at large strays from the mystical Judaeo/Christian/Hindu legends and into the technological marvels of the latter half of the 20th century. I thought this was a knock-out way to take Indy in a new and fresh direction. Of course, this is all turfed about the time where John Hurt shows up.

I guess the same could be said of Ironman’s tease in the Middle-East beginning (good) before devolving into the same-old, same-old (bad). I’d rather pay to see Ironman tearing up hell against the terrorists than see him fighting his business partner over intellectual property rights.