Indiana Jones

My experiment for blogging every day lasted a whopping 3 days. Two of the posts were each one paragraph. Clearly this new commitment to writing is not what it should be.
When I was not writing Scutch Speaks last night I was watching Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Over the past week, my wife and I watched the original trilogy with the kids in preparation for seeing the fourth movie in the theatre. Not sure that is going to happen now.

I have had a couple of people tell me that the latest installment isn't very good. There was also the guy who cuts my hair, who didn't directly criticize the movie, but instead, put one hand on his hip, rolled his eyes a bit and said, "there are aliens at the end".

What I am wondering now is if anyone bothered noticing that The Last Crusade was god awful. River Phoenix did a phenomenal impression as a young Indy in the first fifteen minutes then the movie fell into the abyss.

The role of Jones's love interest fell to Alison Doody, a then 23 year old improbably playing the role of a PhD., a feat which would have been difficult enough for someone who knew how to act. Ford spend the whole movie surrounded incongruously by nonstop action and two old men who act as if they don't know what is going on around them. It is played for pure humor, but when you consider what these movies were supposed to be, it really wasn't all that funny. Some lines were painful, the plot was ridiculous. . .I could go on and on.

My point is, are people comparing The King of the Crystal Skull to the original trilogy, or to how they experienced that trilogy when they were kids? As far as my hair stylist's (ok, I said it) comment goes, are aliens coming in really that much more far fetched than the appearance of a 500 year old human knight? A kid is obviously more conditioned to suspend disbelief. But I believe there is more to it than that. As a child, you are also less cognizant of when something sucks. Ask anyone who has ever sat through an episode of the Suite Life of Zach and Cody. I've seen hundreds of movies on all genres now. I'm simply more able to draw distinctions than I was 25 or even 15 years ago. When I was 18, I probably saw an Indiana Jones movie that looked and sounded like the two I'd seen before and liked, and was otherwise satisfied. Who knows what I was thinking then.

None of this is any more or less likely to make me go see Crystal Skull, but I thought it merited discussion.