Indiana Jones and the Blog-a-thon Nexus

The nexus was never an artifact (read: MacGuffin) that Indy was ever compelled to seek, but it should have been. Post your links at the comments section, or email them to me, and I'll put them up here. Laters skaters.

Update (28/05/08) - Thanks to everyone who took part in the blog-a-thon last week. It was a great laugh, and I received some wonderful feedback (not to mention my first ever hate-mail - yay) from people all over the world. Blog-a-thon Hotwash and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull review coming soon. Laters.

24/05/08 -

- Drake Lelane knows the score.

- The Mad Hatter reviews Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

- So does Dan.

- And Jason Bellamy.

23/05/2008 -

- Jim Emerson puts The Temple of Doom in its historical context.

- An introspective look at the films by Rob Humanick.

22/05/2008 (Enjoy the film, folks) -

- Paul C. at Screengrab lusts after The Temple of Doom.

- Bob Glickstein takes a look at musical motifs in Raiders.

- Bob, again, on all things Indy.

- Moviezzz likes to play dress-up.

- Sing along with Jason Bellamy.

- David Gaffen's masterly dissection at Edward Copeland on Film of a crucial action scene in Raiders.

- Andrew Bemis, a man after my own heart, appreciates gorgeous gore.

- Adam Ross on the SHIT box - and why not?

- Arbogast and The Search for the Lost Penis.

21/05/2008 -

- Phillip Johnston on Indiana Jones and the nature of heroism.

- Damian explores Indiana Jones's Bond heritage.

- Mystery Man on Film on the Road to Indy 4 (not really a part of the blog-a-thon, but there we go).

20/05/2008 -

- Dreamrot also loves Short Round. Two paeans to Short Round in one day: Lord, I love the internets.

- Aaron thinks Indy was no Hollywood Folly.

- Adam Ross prefers Short Round to Data, and we love him for it.

- Peet Gelderblom knows exactly what Georgie Boy likes...

- Before Indiana Jones, there was Muck Muckson and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

19/05/2008 -

- Odienator, Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich, kinky bloggers that they are, offer their appreciations of the whip.

18/05/2008 -

- Jonathan Lapper takes a look at Raiders' concept art.

- If Joseph Campanella were Romeo, then The Temple of Doom would be his Juliet.

17/05/2008 -

- Kevin and The Last Crusade sitting in a tree...

- Andrew Wyatt questions whether Indiana is a scoundrel, or a gentleman. Or both.

- Divers and Sundry likes Karen Allen.

16/05/2008 -

- Big Mike's body is a temple of doom.

- Jonathan Lapper questions the new film's relevance, and rocks the house with his new banner.

- J.D. appreciates the quiet moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

- How The Temple of Doom whipped Bob Glickstein's finances into shape...

Doctor Jones, we've heard a lot about you

It’s almost time. The long promised – and pimped – Indiana Jones Blog-a-Thon starts tomorrow, and will run for a week until 23rd May. I have already heard from a few people who have written some excellent pieces. If I were the punning kind, I’d say we have top men working on it. Top…Men. Whaddayaknow? I am the punning kind.

Here is how the whole thing will go:

- Put up a piece(not that piece) on your blog, and send me a link.

- Fine, I get it, you don’t want to email me for fear of catching a disease. That’s OK, too. There will be a nexus on top of the page for the week of the blog-a-thon. Add a comment to it with the link to your piece, and I’ll update the list accordingly.

- You have a life, which is why you don’t own a blog, but you wanted to write a few paragraphs on the ways Short Round is a better character than Data. Send it to me in Word format, and I’ll put it up on the main site with credit to you.

What can I say – this is all very exciting, and I am looking forward to the fun and frolics.

Important: Please note that I am in Turkey, and there is a 7-10 hours time difference with the States.

Summer Movie Preview Preview

Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven’t updated this blog for a while. In my defense, I have been extremely busy at work. Also, I was away for a while in April, which also precluded me from sharing my wit with the world. I wish there were a definite article that started with a w, so that the last part of that sentence could be perfectly alliterative. I think Hemingway had the same problem.

First thing’s first: The Indiana Jones blog-a-thon is coming up in a few weeks, and I have heard from a fair number of people that they are looking forward to the blog-a-thon more than they are looking forward to the film itself. That’s only a slight exaggeration. The next instalment of the Indy franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (aside: the Turkish translation is Indiana Jones ve Kristal Kurukafa Kralligi - ve is and in Turkish: see how unfortunate that translation is?), got off to a very shaky start. When it was first announced that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford had all agreed on a script, and they were definitely making a new film, scout’s honour, the world, or the part of it that gave a shit (read: 17 middle-aged nerds who still live with their parents, and can’t get over the fact that Starbuck is a chick in the new Battlestar Galactica – which, incidentally, is the most overrated piece of garbage on telly right now), collectively rolled its eyes as it realised that the elusive promise of a new instalment was much more fun than a rigid announcement (on the other hand, nothing can be more fun than MY rigid announcement, aye!). The buzz was fricking dire. As the months passed, and photos started to trickle from production, including an excellent one taken by Spielberg himself of Ford in his Indy get up between takes, the buzz started to build, and reached somewhat of a fever pitch just before the debut of the first trailer. Which, unfortunately, was pants, and interest started to vane once again. Right now, it’s almost back to its original abysmal level – at least among fans and the online blogging community (not to mention scoop sites). So much so that there has been some rather unsubtle damage control, which seems to have had the opposite effect. I call this the The Phantom Menace Levels of Disappointment Prevention Syndrome, or TPMLODPS for short.

All of which got me thinking about this summer’s crop of wank that’s about to be unspooled on us. Everyone seems to be chiming in with their opinions on this year’s big blockbusters, and I decided to take a bite of that shit sandwich myself and do my own summer preview – after all, this is the product we will have to live with until the awards season starts in mid-Autumn. We might as well enjoy it. And by we, I mean me, and the eight other people who live in my brain (the very people who are more excited about the blog-a-thon than Indy).

The summer movie season officially starts tomorrow with Iron Man – some have questioned if he hasn’t lost his mind, if he can’t see or isn’t blind. Apparently, nobody wants him, he just stares at the world. I hate myself. Right, got that out of the way, back to the subject at hand: Iron Man. Apparently, he’s planning his vengeance – kidding, kidding, don’t leave.

Iron Man is interesting for a number of reasons. The character might not necessarily be one of Marvel’s second-tier heroes like Ghost Rider or Daredevil (Blade is eighth-tier, by the way), but he is not necessarily in the same league as Spider-Man or The Hulk, either. I was talking to my great friend Phil the other day, and he said what most people with lives, who reside outside of the States (and quite a few in the US, too, I’d imagine), must be thinking: “Iron Who?” The character is just not that well known – which is why they seem to be selling it as “Forget about the fact that it’s based on a comic book, here is a story of a guy with a jet pack who blows shit up good.”

Which is doubly important when considering the talent that’s launching the film. I think Jon Favreau is a talented director with a keen eye for commercial fare, not to mention an enthusiastic cineaste (his Dinner for Five interview with, nay, paean to, Scorsese is overwhelming in its enthusiasm - I mean that as a compliment), but he ain’t Michael Bay or even Stephen Sommers, you know (with regards to making commercial flicks). And eclectic as it is, a cast fronted by Robert Downey, JR, and including Mrs Chris Martin (almost wrote Steve Martin), Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, and err, Shaun Toub, is not going to sell too many tickets on its own. But put all that together, throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato - Baby, you've got a stew going.

The buzz has been excellent on the film for months now – and the early reviews, almost unanimous in their praise (but let’s wait for the print critics, too) seem to indicate a comic book film in line with Dick Donner’s hallowed Superman, or Raimi’s equally excellent Spider-Man 2. Which I am all for. A comic book film is supposed to be fun, first and foremost. Even Batman Begins is a fun film, slightly more edgy, but still FUN, and still a comic book film (I will deal with Batman soon enough).

Come back tomorrow for the next part of my summer preview.

No Time for Subtlety, Dr Jones

The final one-sheet for this summer's eagerly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been released. Anything new and official from the Indy camp is good by definition. However, as with the teaser trailer (brilliantly dissected by Ted Pigeon here), the poster lacks that old-timey quaintness, which was promised by Spielberg et al in the recent Vanity Fair spread (and was captured perfectly in the teaser one-sheet). There is way too much happening in the poster - it's very crowded.

It is understandable, if not downright essential, that the poster be dominated by Indiana Jones's giant noggin, and his equally huge fedora. The hat is a crucial part of the character's iconography, more so than the wip, and in the image, its size occupies the same amount of space as Indy's face. That might seem like stating the obvious, but it goes to show that whenever we see the character in action, our mind is taking in the same amount of information with regards to the hat as to the head. In The Last Crusade, the curious boy-scout only becomes the character we know when he puts on the hat. In all the films, the motif of the character's losing his hat, and his subsequent attempts to retrieve it, are repeated, thus solidifying the inseparability of the head and the hat.

Drew Struzan has framed the poster with the silhouette of jungle flora and Aztec(?) relics, appropriate since the film takes place in the jungles of South America. This is also a better use of Struzan’s usual penchant for constricting his posters with thick borders – his work for the Star Wars prequels featured increasingly expanding black frames. It’s a valuable, if slightly simplistic, technique – one which calls the viewer’s attention to the centre of the frame. It also has the misfortune of constricting the image, making it look too cluttered, even before the addition of other elements. Since Struzan likes to cramp in a lot of detail, one of the greatest devices of his trade also becomes one of its worst enemies (the large snake on the top right hand of the frame points directly at Shia LaBeouf’s character. If it weren’t so obvious that he plays Indiana Jones’s son, I would be inclined to suspect some sort of treachery).

The not-quite centrality of the eponymous skull is also necessary in the theatrical poster. Struzan likes to scatter the various elements of his designs somewhat haphazardly, which must be born out of his rush-hour-in-Cairo-like nature of his compositions. There have been some rumblings that the revelation of the skull’s obviously alien origin is given away too early. Well, this is an Indiana Jones film. The title says the skull is crystal. I think people would have made the connection to some sort of other worldliness, and not Damien Hirst (yes, I know his piece was made out of diamonds, but still). Besides, the skull is a MacGuffin, just like Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stone or The Holy Grail – its nature is incidental to its purpose. One of the things that drives me wild about genre fans (and there’s a lot that drives me wild) is their obsession with explanations – they are suckers for literalism, which the better examples of genre fiction very deftly avoid.

The remaining figures in the poster are dispersed slapdash beneath Indiana Jones’s face, with Shia LaBoeuf and Cate Blanchett's characters’ taking prominence. They are both featured with the one accessory that seems to define them in the film (this based on production photos) – LaBoeuf’s character’s motorcycle, and Blanchett’s sabre (she seems to have adopted a pose similar to the one Obi Wan did in the Attack of the Clones' theatrical poster, also by Struzan). Underneath Blanchett, we see the floating heads of Karen Allen and Ray Winstone, the latter looking like a cross between Rembrandt and Dom DeLouise. My favourite part of the poster is Indy legging it from the angry tribesmen behind him – a nice visual homage to the beginning of the first film. I just hope there aren’t too many of those, visual or otherwise, in the film.*

Compared to the other three posters, this one feels way too crowded, even though it features around the same amount of characters, or elements, as its predecessors. It’s just that the composition has made it look clunky, and amateurish; kind of like those fan posters where everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in for no other reason than the überfan’s central philosophy of “more is more.”I still can't wait for the flick, mind you.

And just a reminder: I will be hosting an Indiana Jones blog-a-thon to coincide with the release of the film in May. Come one, come all...

*OK, OK, maybe just the one:

(Photo credits: USA Today, and Indyfan.com)

Kali Ma Shakti Debut: Indy Trailer to Arrive Today

The teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (one truly graceless title) debuts in a few hours at Yahoo Movies, and the film's official site. There’s a bootleg version floating about, which I have no intention of watching. The official site says the trailer will have an international launch at the cinemas, so hopefully I will also catch it on the big screen sometime this weekend.

Don’t forget – Cerebral Mastication is hosting an Indiana Jones Blog-a-thon to coincide with the release of the new movie. Click here for details.

Announcing the Indiana Jones Blog-a-thon May 16th - May 23rd

I mean, sure, we’re all beside ourselves with giddy excitement counting the hours till the Sex and the City movie opens, but before we are graced by that masterpiece-in-the-offing, the latest Indiana Jones film will hit theatres across the globe on May 22nd. Not a lot of people truly believed that a fourth film would ever get made, and the news coming from the production seem to indicate a direction that fewer still would have imagined the film would take (Karen Allen is back? And she looks hotter than she did in Animal House?). It’s been 19 years since the last film, and to put that in perspective, that is a longer gap than the one between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. None of the principals involved are the men they were 19 years ago. But, then again, it's not the years, it's the mileage. Isn’t it?

This blog-a-thon will celebrate all aspects of the Indiana Jones films. Feel free to write retrospectives or reviews. Maybe you think Tom Selleck would have made a better Indiana Jones? Go ahead, convince us. Or you could wax poetic about Richard Chamberlain’s Allan Quatermain films, or even The Jewel of the Nile. Or an essay on old-time Saturday morning serials. Even the TV series or the comic books are game. Anything to do with Indiana Jones: this is the blog-a-thon for you.

The blog-a-thon will run from May 16th to May 23rd to coincide with the film’s release. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to send me your contributions in Word format, and I’ll publish them here with your details. See you then.

Update (31/01/2008): Boy, oh boy, oh boy...