..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Indiana Jones
& the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Postal and Contempt
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs,

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Four stars)
U.S.; Steven Spielberg

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull whirls us off once again to that delicious, zingy, over-the-top world of recycled Saturday Afternoon serials and pop culture that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg opened up back in 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a high-stakes blockbuster movie reunion that really works -- though not necessarily in the ways we’d expect.

In the movie, director Spielberg, story-writer/executive producer Lucas and star Harrison Ford bring back their brawny brainchild Indiana Jones after 19 years -- bomber jacket and fedora in place, bullwhip and wisecracks on hand -- for a sequel that puts Indy, in his 50s (and Ford at 65), in 1957, the era of blacklists, black leather jackets, bomb shelters and black-and-white TV. Then they send him off on a fantastic quest that seems to derive from the old movie serials, ’50s sci-fi and Carl Barks’ great ‘50s Uncle Scrooge comic novels about Duck family expeditions to Atlantis, El Dorado or the Seven Cities of Cibola. El Dorado and the city of gold are the legends Lucas and Spielberg mine this time.

The result is a smashing movie sequel blockbuster that begins with a bang; reproduces most of the wonder, excitement and sass of the original; idles for a while and then becomes something truly weird and wonderful, almost a great movie. I like Iron Man, but Crystal Skull is the champion of the summer action monoliths so far, and will probably remain so. More important, it’s a damned good movie, one capable of pleasing both the mass and the cognoscenti -- or at least that part of the cognoscenti that hasn’t decided to go smart-ass.

(Ed. Note: SPOILERS IN THE NEXT 5 GRAPHS)

The movie begins by hurling us into the rock n‘ roll ‘50s, with a peppy drag race near bomb test ground, set to Elvis’ raunchy anthem “(You Ain’t Nothing’ but a) Hound Dog.” This is the intro for a three-pronged assault on cold war paranoia. First we get Indy, who actually says “I like Ike,” pitted against an invading band of marauding crew-cut Russkies led by the deadly Irina Spalko (Stalin‘s onetime pet, played by indomitable Cate Blanchett). The we get a typical hell-for-leather opening thrill-scene, followed by a Twilight Zone-ish dummy suburb getting blown to hell and a truly ominous mushroom cloud backdropping Indy.

And then Spielberg and Lucas -- and writer David Koepp, who has provided the series’ top script since Lawrence Kasdan’s nifty Raiders blueprint -- double back and cover themselves politically by bringing in two nasty, bullying FBI agents, to sneer at and victimize O.S.S. vet Indy.

I wouldn’t claim massive originality for Koepp’s script then or later, but, truth to tell, none of the Jones series has been very original, except stylistically. That‘s the whole point of the series, which is a conscious throwback -- intended to let Spielberg and Lucas’ own generation feel the pleasures and frissons of youth recaptured, while seducing later (or earlier) generations as well. Crystal Skull follows that James Bond-ian sizzler start with the usual format: the introduction of the quest, the action set-pieces, the comic or expository interludes and the final explosive grand finale. In this case, though, what’s new is old, and very pleasantly so.

The plot and dramatis personae are just what you’d expect. Indy has lost his dad (Sean Connery, who didn’t want another tour) and his longtime university boss (Denholm Elliott, who died in 1992), but has gained a youthful sidekick in Marlon Brando drag named Mutt Williams (played with a temper by Shia LaBeouf), new Brit academic buddies in Dean Charles Stanforth (Jim Broadbent) and the seemingly pixilated skull-possessing Professor Oxley (John Hurt) and a host of new villains, including Blanchett as the Louise Brooks-banged Natasha Fatale equivalent Irina, Igor Jijikine (of the Cirque Soleil) as Dovchenko, a Russian superman baddie in the Robert Shaw/From Russia With Love mold, and Ray Winstone as unpredictable “Mac” McHale, a Jones WW2 crony and spy with a volatile disposition.

Also, most importantly, there’s a return engagement, after 27 years, from Karen Allen as the most Hawksian of all play-the-field Indy’s heroines, Raiders’ Marion Ravenwood, who’s ready as ever to trade blows, wisecracks and smooches -- and to provide play-the-field bachelor Indy with lots of tussles and one real jolt.

(SPOILERS END)

Crystal Skull may have an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style jawbreaker of a title, but it’s no boring parade of clichés, as some have suggested; clichés of a kind have been the series’ lifeblood from the start, but the four Jones movies, whatever flaws they may have, are never boring -- unless you’re determined to be impervious. It’s different from the first three movies in the series -- but how could it possibly not be? The other three were sharp, hard-edged, lean, fast and spectacular. This one is understandably dreamier, softer and more vulnerable. Ford is 19 years older and so is everybody else: Spielberg, Lucas, Allen, and the rest of the veterans. It’s an old man‘s movie, in fact, a bit like Rio Bravo crossed with The Ten Commandments -- and the presence of LaBeouf, who plays a kind of cocky Ricky Nelson type to Ford‘s John Wayne, only enhances the sense of mortality.
    
This isn’t a bad thing. In many ways, that’s what often makes this film so surprisingly beautiful, almost as heartfelt and emotional as the father-son sections of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and even more mystical than Raiders. Crystal Skull” deliberately keeps inviting comparisons. But Spielberg is a better director here than when he made Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas a better producer and Ford a better actor -- and the holdover crew, including ace editor Michael Kahn, and ace composer John Williams, are more expert as well. By a heavy margin, Skull has the most talented cast ever to grace an Indiana Jones movie - and they all seem to having a grand old time, especially Blanchett, Winstone and Hurt.

To ignore the sheer expertise of that ensemble -- including relative new guy cinematographer Janus Kaminski, deftly replacing the series’ old deep focus master Dougie Slocombe (the man who also put the sharp edges into Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Servant) is to descend into rampant God-damned ageism, the besetting vice of the would-be cultural hipster.

Age before beauty? Baloney. You can look at Spielberg at least two ways if you like him: You can focus on the box-office monster of his moviemaking youth, and pick, as his masterpieces, audience-grabbing marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T. and Raiders -- or prefer the later (some would say more pretentious) Spielberg of Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and A.I. I prefer the latter myself (without at all rejecting the first), which means -- I admit it -- I‘m prejudiced in favor of this movie.

But I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot. (More the second time, actually.) I like Ford‘s more weathered look and his more ginger way with the stunts (which he still tends to perform). I like the quiet, reflexive way he puts Mutt in his place. I like the movie’s canny confidence, its more relaxed sense of exposition and the casual ease with which is uses CGI. (Since this is a show packed with zombies, Mayan ruins and space creatures, it needs more CGI.) I even like the softer, gentler focus and flare lighting of one non-Indy vet, a younger guy who shoots older: Kaminski.

Most of all I like the continuous, near-symphonic flow of the action and cliffhangers (and I mean cliffhangers) that make up this movie’s incredible last act, the dreamy mix of horror movie shockeroos and epic tongue-in-cheek adventure: the ant’s eye shots of inexorable insect invasions, the three successive and amazing waterfall drops, the endearingly ridiculous swordfight on the racing side-by-side truck and jeep, and...

SPOILER ALERT

...the A.I.-like science fiction poetics of the saucer scene.

And, after all that, I liked the deliberately Norman Rockwell-ish last scene and the final old-man-wins hat gag.

SPOILER OVER

Is it the last Indy? I hope not. This one deserves another. And so we don’t have to wait another 19 years, here’s a suggestion: Set the next one a few years after this one in deep space, in Tibet and in China, evolve Mutt into an older rebel college student caught up in demonstrations with a buddy in Vietnam, find a Chinese femme fatale to endanger Indy’s marriage, and stage the big race and fight on the Great Wall, or in the mountains.

Meanwhile, Crystal Skull will do, even if it doesn’t pretend to do more than entertain us, mightily. But, for professional entertainers, isn’t that a noble endeavor? Let’s hear it for movie whip-snappers and whipper-snappers alike -- but especially for the old guys. Not to get too schmaltzy, but “over the hill” can also be where you find the next adventure. Long may they rove, ramble, dig those dreams, dodge those snakes, go over those waterfalls and drive those flabbergasting trucks.

Postal (One-half star)
U.S.; Uwe Boll

Cheerfully idiotic and offensive movie based on the video game and supposedly about sex-crazed religious fakes, bloodthirsty halfwits, a battle with Osama bin Laden over a shipment of Krotchy Dolls, and a grotesque "Little Germany" amusement park financed by Nazis. If you’re in a charitable mood you could call it satire, though it’s about as funny as watching a bowel movement interrupted by massacres.

Director Boll has been cited as a candidate for modern Ed Wood Jr. “worst director” laurels, but that isn’t fair. Wood really didn’t know what he was doing, and he had an honestly purple writing style, horrible taste and no budget. Boll is less inept than deliberately gross and shameless. This is one to watch if you have absolutely nothing to do, and feel like punishing yourself.

Contempt (Four stars)
France; Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (In art-house release by Rialto)

Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt is a superb, melancholy drama of love’s dissolution and the compromises of moviemaking; few films on either subject project so much beauty and bitterness. Based on Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel Ghost at Noon, about a couple falling apart during a blighted film production of Homer’s “Odyssey” -- a movie considered a failure on its first release in 1963 -- it’s become rightly acknowledged as one of the great French films of the ‘60s: a masterpiece of sad eroticism, one of the cinema’s most anguishing portrayals of the ways love turns to hatred and passion curdles to contempt.

The film's doomed couple are personified by Michel Piccoli (in his star-making role) as Paul, the literate but opportunistic young playwright hired to doctor the script of “The Odyssey,” and Brigitte Bardot -- then the world‘s reigning movie sex goddess -- as Camille, Paul’s infinitely desirable, initially loving but finally alienated wife. Supporting them, powerfully, are Jack Palance as the brutal and horny American producer Jerry Prokosch, Georgia Moll as Prokosch‘s indefatigable translator/secretary and Fritz Lang as himself, a legendary film director trying to create art in the midst of madness.

It‘s a transitional film for Godard, who also appears in the movie as Lang’s assistant and calls the last shot. When Godard started Contempt, he had one foot inside the door of the studio system: a maverick art house director with one big international hit (Breathless) and an ambivalent but strong affection for classic Hollywood. After his fracases with Contempt’s producers, including Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine, and the picture’s commercial disappointment, he was an independent and an outsider again -- and remains so to this way.

“I have contempt for Contempt," said Levine (also producer on 8 ½ and The Graduate.) What Godard thought of Levine and other arrogant executives is generally thought to shine through Jack Palance’s rowdy characterization of producer Prokosch: a narcissistic, smartly dressed bully who heaves film cans around a screening room to show his disgust with the dailies, openly chases after Camille and says that he loves the gods of “The Odyssey,” because he knows how they feel.

Contempt is a sad film, but also a stunningly beautiful one -- dazzling us with visions of Bardot and the sun-drenched backdrops of Italy’s Cinecitta Studios and Capri, photographed by Godard‘s master cinematographer Raoul Coutard. (We see Coutard in the very first shot, with Godard reciting the film’s credits as Coutard, on dolly tracks, operates a camera moving toward us.)

That shot sets the mood. Godard, then more famous for the jump-cut editing style of Breathless, here favors long, luxuriant takes in the Minnelli-Ophuls mode, elegantly composed moving camera shots that drink in the sights: the plush screening rooms, the swimming pools, the coffee table art books or paperback cinema studies the characters peruse, the austere shots of Lang’s “Odyssey,” the sparkling blue ocean that surrounds them -- and most of all, Bardot’s radiant blond Camille, a ravishing yet vulnerable sexpot, shot in the nude through red, white and blue filters in the movie’s first bedroom scheme (an exposure that Contempt's producers angrily demanded and that Godard and Bardot turned into an ironic triumph of the cinematic gaze).

Camille is the movie‘s not-so-obscure object of desire; Paul -- who resembles Godard and who never removes his hat (in homage he says to Dean Martin in Minnelli’s Some Came Running) -- is the voyeur. And when Paul loses Camille -- first to the tyrant-fool Prokosch, then to death -- his life, we feel, is almost deservedly shattered. How will he ever find such a paradise again? The movie resonates with regret at lost romance and squandered lives, showing excruciatingly the exact points at which love dies, could be rescued and is thrown away again.

Contempt also shows us another kind of threatened passion -- for the cinema of the great international auteurs (like weary old Fritz), a cinema that seems to be dying along with Camille‘s love for Paul. One of the images I love best in it is that strangely Cinematheque-ish wall outside the screening room, near where Paul, Camille and Fritz converse about Lang‘s films Rancho Notorious and M -- a wall improbably adorned with movie posters that probably only Godard would have put there: Hitchcock’s Psycho, Hawks’ Hatari! Rossellini’s Vanina Vanini, and Godard’s own Vivre sa Vie. These four films form a little Cahiers du Cinema pantheon, taking us to the roots of the film’s style (Godard has called Contempt a film with an Antonioni subject done in the style of Hitchcock and Hawks) and to Godard’s (and Lang’s) whole conception of cinema as the possible classical literature of today.

Film is literature; film is life. It’s said that Moravia‘s novel -- a book nowadays sometimes sold under Godard’s title Contempt -- was inspired by his relationship with his own wife, novelist Elsa Morante, a goddess of fiction. Godard, retelling the story in pictures --just as “Lang” reimagines “The Odyssey” -- turns Bardot into another kind of deity, and not just of sex or cinema. She is a goddess of the land of lost chances, of the moving camera and Ulysses’ gaze, of measureless desire and the boundless ocean and sky.

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

The Willow Tree (Three stars)
Iran; Majid Majidi, 2005 (2007 in U.S.)

CLASSIC RELEASES

Night of the Living Dead (Four stars)
U. S.; George Romero, 1968

CO-PICK: The Night They Raided Minsky’s (Three stars)
U.S.; William Friedkin, 1968

BOX SET

James Stewart: The Western Collection (Four stars)
U.S.; Various directors, 1938-66
Includes: “Destry Rides Again” (George Marshall, 1938) Four stars. “Winchester 73” (Anthony Mann, 1950) Four stars. “Bend of the River” (Mann, 1952). Four stars. “The Far Country” (Mann, 1955). Three stars. “Night Passage” (James Neilsen, 1957) Three stars. “The Rare Breed” (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1966) Two and a half stars.

CO-PICK
James Stewart: Columbia Screen Legends Three and a half stars.
U.S.; Various directors, 1955-9
Includes: “The Man from Laramie“ (Mann; 1955) Three and a half stars. “Bell, Book and Candle” (Richard Quine, 1958) Three stars. “Anatomy of a Murder” (Otto Preminger, 1959) Four stars.

- Michael Wilmington
May 22, 2008

May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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