I've Got My New Shoes On...

After surviving a monsoon at a Radiohead Concert and dodging beer can warfare, drunken brawls, and general redneck mayhem at Zombie Beach Blanket BingoPreakness, I'm finally settled back up North and can resume my active blogging schedule. Last night I experienced one of the biggest disappointments in recent history. Bigger than High School (it was NOT AT ALL like Saved By the Bell), and almost as big as Bush's presidency: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or as it could be called Indiana Jones and the Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Nuclear warfare? Cate Blanchett channelling Bullwinkle's Natasha Fatale? Mind control? Crystal Alien Skulls? Please, give me old fashioned religious relics anyday. Now I have a lot of love for Doctor Jones--that rugged sexuality, his tete-a-tetes with difficult women, his mastery of the whip. I even love him at age 60-something when hes standing in his white undershirt looking more like a lost grandpa then an action hero. However, not even he of the well-timed one liner could quip his way out the mounds of cheese pounded into this clunky plot. In trying to recapture the same youthful eagnerness of the originals, Spielberg and Lucas take their nostalgia for their childhoods too far. The supposedly sinister Commies are about as scary as 8th grade bullies--sure, a tough exterior but they fall like a house of cards after the first punch is thrown. Ms. Blanchett does her best to masculinze her Irina Spalko to fit the part's Rasputin-shaped mold, but she still comes out looking more like a Lucas' wet dream than a real villain. And that accent? Would it have killed Spielberg to cast an actual Ukrainean? Or atleast spent a little more money on a dialect coach. And again, that plot. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it, but at one point I was sure Mulder would pop out from behind a skeleton to scold the professor for his disbelief--"the truth is out there, Indy." I know its been awhile since they came out, but would it have hurt Spielberg & Co to have rewatched the originals before embarking on this epic disaster? At times, you see glimmers of the old spirit shine through--theres a great motorcycle chase early on and some of the scenes in the jungles of Peru rival moments in Raiders--but for the most part, I think, money, fame and power have made Lucas and Spielberg forget themselves and the men they once were in the late 70s, when Indiana was still just a mythic hero they idolized and not a commodity they owned outright.