But hey – it’s always good to find some common ground:
“Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not as good a movie as Raiders of the Lost Ark”

“It seems like they had a lot of fun making it.”

Cheers!
Jonesy

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not as good a movie as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but then Raiders of the Lost Ark is not as good a movie as my memory of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s just no fighting nostalgia, especially now in the era of Internet Nitpicking.

If you were to watch Raiders now expecting to hate it, you’d find no shortage of clunky dialogue (bad dates, they’re digging in the wrong place!), cheesy Spielbergian reaction shots, corny gags (since you asked: Toht’s coathanger, Jock’s snake, Sallah’s reaction to the well of souls, Indy getting hit with a mirror), overblown melodramatic scenes (Indy being saved by Sallah’s kids, Marion doing the worst possible job of busing tables at her bar), and cheesy effects (face melting, storm over the well of souls, light in the staff room).

But none of that crap matters, because we all watched it in the spirit it was presented. Doing the same for the new movie makes it a lot more enjoyable, and it seems like they had a lot of fun making it.

My memory of Raiders of the Lost Ark is pretty solid, and I cannot remember many goofy elements. I can only think of these two, which are SLIGHTLY goofy:

- When Indy dodges the blade of a cairo swordsman, causing him to stab another swordsman, if you look very closely, you’ll notice that the blade sticks into some fruit behind his back, forming a “kebab.”
- When the arab’s monkey repeatedly gives the Nazi salute and the Nazi salutes him back.

Can you name some other goofy elements from Raiders that I am missing?

My memory of Crystal Skull is thankfully thin, but here are a few of the painfully goofy things I can remember:

- When the groundhog came out of Paramount logo.
- When Indy was blown across the desert inside a refrigerator by an atomic bomb.
- When the groundhogs stood around and looked inquisitively at Indy after he escaped the Russians.
- When Indy and Marion were re-united and their Russian captors stood around patiently for ten minutes to let them banter and bicker.
- When Mutt found a handy snake to pull Indy out of the “dry-sand” instead of taking off his jacket and throwing him a sleeve.
- When the Russians needed a jungle-chopping machine designed by Dr. Seuss to get through the jungle.
- When the Dr. Seuss machine was destroyed and all the trucks found their way through the jungle without it anyway.
- When Mutt was standing on two moving trucks and the trees thwomped him in the balls.
- When the monkeys taught Mutt to swing through the trees like Tarzan (faster than the motor vehicles that were speeding away from him).
- When the monkeys attacked the Russians.
- When the ants formed an ant ladder to climb after the Russian psychic.
- When Marion drove her truck onto the tree over the river and then used it to swat the Russians off the side of the cliff.
- When the rock walls gave birth to the native warriors.
- All of the dialog.
- When the aliens from the space within the spaces made the Russian psychic’s eyes bleed fire even though she didn’t really do anything to them.
- Every single scene in the movie with the possible exception of the discussion between Indy and the Dean (Jim Broadbent) in Indy’s home.

I have to respectfully disagree w/ ya here. Even though the subject matter and the on-screen action is over-the-top in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film always takes itself seriously (yet still manages some sharp humor). Crystal Skull seems to constantly poke fun at itself and its audience, and in doing so failed completely to amuse or entertain me and (seemingly) the audience I was with.

Cheers,
Jones
http://www.OnTheBigScreen.net

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this terrible movie was presented in anywhere near the same spirit as Raiders. Raiders is a fantastic popcorn movie, but it always takes itself completely seriously. There is not one single moment of goofiness, slapstick, farce, self-reference.

Errr… I think you’re seriously misremembering or underestimating the goofiness of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s all there; we’re just blind to it after years of thinking how cool it all was (and it still is!) I wonder if they did Raiders in 2008, the “Love You” written on the student’s eyelids would be done in CG.

It’s odd that you’d call out the campus chase from the new movie as being the worst offender, since that’s the part that’s most in the spirit of Raiders, the marketplace chase in particular. It’s only after they get to South America that the new movie starts to go off the rails.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this terrible movie was presented in anywhere near the same spirit as Raiders. Raiders is a fantastic popcorn movie, but it always takes itself completely seriously. There is not one single moment of goofiness, slapstick, farce, self-reference.

In a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course you know the hero won’t die, but you’re still on the edge of your seat, worried for him, because his (fantasy) world and its dangers seems so real.

In Crystal Skull, he crashes a motorcycle in a university library and a student asks him a question about class as he rolls to a stop. And he answers. He actually answers him.

This movie felt more like a Naked Gun film than an Indiana Jones film.

Is this “geekrage” on my part? I dunno. I just feel sad.

Hoping for more from Wall*e.

Jonesy