Further thoughts on the Book of Jones

  • Raiders of the Lost Ark & Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

    These movies are just so shining and pure. The choreography and comedic timing on the fights and the chase scenes are without compare. To be clear, I despise Spielberg. I find almost everything he's done to be pandering, saccharine nonsense, and I'm repulsed by his fetishization of the suburbs that informs everything he's done. But these two movies are masterpieces. Absolute gold. Also there's so much nazi punching.

  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:

    I hated this when it came out, and I hate it even more now. It's just plain mean-spirited. It has none of the "fun" of episodes 1 and 3, no good choreography, and this movie just really, really dislikes women. And though the whole series is awfully imperialist -- I mean how could it not be -- holy cow is this one racist. But more than that, it just mostly makes no god damned sense. There's a secret temple under a secret temple and a secret mine and subway under that. Yo dawg I heard you liked theme park rides so we theme parked your theme park so you can theme park under your theme park. Ugh, it's just the worst.

    (Counterpoint: Say what you want about Mola Ram, at least his goal was to attack and dethrone God.)

    Also -- and this may be the nightclub owner in me speaking -- but any time someone crawls through a hole to get to the secret gigantic auditorium, I immediately want to know how those other two hundred people got in there, even the elderly ones with bad knees, and how nobody saw them doing it. Not to mention catering and janitorial. Someone has to service and re-set the trapdoors.

  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

    I hated this when it came out, and... I am shocked to say this, but you know what, I don't hate it. Now this is not a good movie, don't get me wrong. It's bad. It is a bad movie. Shia LaBeouf is terrible. Karen Allen and John Hurt are wasted. Cate Blanchett deserved a better movie in which to chew that particular scenery (and finally got it, in Thor Ragnarok). All these things are true. But it has some fun moments, it made me laugh several times, and in retrospect, it is far better than Temple of Doom. Your worst memory of Crystal Skull is how incredibly stupid that "getting nuked inside the refrigerator" scene was, but I'm here to tell you that that scene is not nearly as stupid as the Temple of Doom opener where they jump out of an airplane in an inflatable raft.

Where's the Marion Ravenwood movie?

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Gotham Girls

A cute series of interactive cartoons from 2002 that Internet Archive has also rescued from the Flashpocalypse:

Gotham Girls is an American Flash animated web television series focusing on several of the female characters of Gotham City, created and produced jointly by Warner Bros. Animation and Noodle Soup Productions. The webseries, which ran from 2000 to 2002, starred Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Batgirl, Catwoman, Renee Montoya and Zatanna in short stories of varying length about the daily lives of the characters (from the DC Comics universe).

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