Things Best Said

Boy, it sure would be nice to have someone else pay for my travel, too…

I haven’t gone away or anything…just not much to write about lately.

I’d have to agree with most of what the New Yorker had to say about Indy 4…

“It isn’t bad—there are a few dazzling sequences, and a couple of good performances—but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action that made the earlier Indiana Jones movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly gone. Stretches of this picture are flat, fussy, and dull. (How many times can we enter those papier-mâché tombs?) Trying to regain the old rapture, you have to grasp at the few scenes that work—mainly in the beginning, when Steven Spielberg, setting the picture in 1957, captures the era’s mixture of blandness, latent revolt, and apocalypse, showing the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture alongside nuclear fears. The plot is incomprehensible gibberish about a crystal skull, the lost Amazonian city of Akator, and a brain-fried archeologist named Ox (John Hurt, who is anything but an ox). But there’s a dandy, immensely complicated chase sequence in the jungle that links together physical improbabilities with the rhythm and speed of Buster Keaton (though on a much grander scale). Cate Blanchett is terrific as a slit-eyed, over-precise K.G.B. agent, but Harrison Ford, doing Indy again at sixty-five, doesn’t appear happy. He’s tense and glaring, and he speaks his lines with more emphasis than is necessary, like a drunk trying to prove he’s sober.” - Written by David Denby

And, one last thing…

Since seeing the first teaser trailer of Indy 4 I was struck by how old Harrison looks on camera. It’s, of course, okay to get old. We’ll all be visited by the sag man at some point, but as Harrison gets older I notice how much more like Tom Brokaw he looks. Maybe it’s just me.

How did I miss this?