Indiana Jones Returns

Early Thursday afternoon, I went out and saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Overall, I thought it was a good movie, though not quite as good as the three that preceded it. In the days leading up to the films release, there were some reviewers who compared Shia LaBeouf's role in the film to that of the character Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. I disagree with that assessment.

Of all the Indiana Jones films, my favorite was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film's opening sequence (a performance of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," followed by a fight where a guy is stabbed with a shish kebab) is the best of any movie I have ever seen.

As I mentioned in my post about Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, I like to read alternate history novels. Mainly, I love imagining how things today might be if certain events in the past had turned out differently. Well just imagine if George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had conceived of Temple of Doom as a sitcom rather than an action-adventure blockbuster:



Heh.

Update:

From SciFi.com, here's another good reason to see Crystal Skull:

Among the 150 people who won't see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend: Russian Communist party members, who condemned the film as crude anti-Soviet propaganda that distorted history and called for it to be banned from Russian screens, the Reuters news service reported.