Say A Big, Bloated Goodbye To 'Indiana Jones'
Say A Big, Bloated Goodbye To 'Indiana Jones'
#232: "Indiana Jones And the Dial Of Destiny," "Rye Lane," "The Negotiator," "Enough Said"
Edition 232:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Harrison Ford says goodbye to Indiana Jones. Plus, a great little rom-com to stream, and a few other gems you may not have heard of before. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we get our first full-length look at Scorcese’s epic coming this fall.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
It’s been 42 years since Harrison Ford first appeared on the silver screen with his fedora and bull whip, in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. That movie, now considered one of the foremost cinematic masterpieces in the history of the form, was just Raiders of the Lost Ark and not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, until the movie was retitled for a DVD collection of the initial trilogy in 1999. Just a summer action adventure movie from a promising young director with a promising movie star and a humble $20 million budget.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is unmistakably the fifth installment in what is now a massive modern franchise. Reports place its production budget around $295 million, sold to us as a proper send-off for Ford as Indy after the “one final adventure” sales pitch for 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was decidedly…improper.
Much of the conversation around the film has centered on how much of that budget was poured into CGI work to “de-age” Ford, and whether the technology has now reached the uncanny valley of realism (it hasn’t, but it’s darn close).
The debate misses the point, in my opinion. The only reason for the de-aging is a flashback sequence at the start of the movie, which shows Indy in 1944 in hot pursuit of an artifact on a train across Nazi Germany. It’s a classic modern blockbuster trope — starting with a big action set piece right out of the gate — that lasts a good 25 minutes and does all the narrative work of about two lines of exposition.
The flash and sizzle detached from storytelling is a microcosm of today’s blockbuster bloat — spending money because it’s in the budget…a flex for the sake of a flex. (The climactic sequence, which I won’t spoil here, is an even bigger example of spending run rampant.) Is there some reason why movies like this need to last 2hr34min these days??
Still, the movie succeeds in its central mission of making audiences feel like they’re in another classic Indiana Jones adventure. Non-stop chase sequences narrated by banter and mythology lead us to a satisfying character farewell. I’m not surprised by its competence, given that director James Mangold might be the most reliable director in Hollywood when it comes to big productions. He made Ford v. Ferrari, Logan and 3:10 To Yuma. He’s an incredibly steady pair of hands.
What he’s not is a big risk taker, willing to push back on the further symptoms of the disease I call ‘blockbuster mumbo jumbo.’ One MacGuffin leads our characters to another MacGuffin to another, criss-crossing the globe for reasons that are never exactly clear other than the fact that we trust the movie to eventually spoon feed us the answers. The villains are comically one-dimensional. And in order to give the movie a gravitas befitting its massive investment, each plot development must feel like it carries the weight of the universe.
These aren’t so much condemnations, because you go into movies like this with a different standard, but the more the movie tries to be in step with the times it moves out of step with what made the original trilogy great.
That said, Ford still has the charm past his 80th birthday, and while his charisma in the role could never be matched and I hope against hope the franchise dies with him, Phoebe Waller-Bridge does all she can to offer a 2023 equivalent of a swashbuckling adventurer. She’s in the somewhat thankless role of second fiddle, needing to constantly sell us on the legitimacy of an octogenarian performing stunts that would kill any normal 30-year-old. In this she delivers, and the pair are great together.
As a piece of franchise management, as all movies costing $200 million+ have necessarily become, Indiana Jones 5 is successful. Do I think those conditions make for fertile ground from which good storytelling can grow? I never have. But audiences have been conditioned to this standard for years, and I’m not sure they can tell the difference. Strong box office returns out of the gate — $159 million worldwide and counting — show that roguish hero from 40 years ago can still steal the gold away from the moviegoing public.
Something New
Rye Lane (Hulu): Every year we see only a handful of feature debuts like this, that announce the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker. Director Raine Allen-Miller’s first is a very simple walk-and-talk romcom starring two relatively unknown actors (I liked one of them from the show “Industry”), elevated by a very confident style and dramatic flair that makes this low budget affair feel grandiose. It also feels fresh and modern, thanks in large part to its setting in the vibrant neighborhoods of South London (Peckham and Brixton, if those names mean something to you).
Interspersing our ‘two people talking’ narrative are over-the-top recreations of each story being told, giving Allen-Miller the chance to flex her talents. Beau Is Afraid reinforced for me my idea that modern anxieties can only really be rendered on-screen through absurdist fantasy cutaways, played there for horror but here for comedy to great effect. The movie punches way above its weight, and at a lean 82 minutes, it’s all you can hope for in a midweek streamer.
Something Old
The Negotiator (1998, Netflix): In this crazy, late-90s fever dream of a thriller, Samuel L. Jackson stars as a police negotiator in Chicago who gets framed for the murder of his partner. When he takes hostages of his own for leverage (among them, a young Paul Giamatti), he has to be talked down by the department’s other crack negotiator…Kevin Spacey.
It’s a relic of its era in many ways, among them the outsized fascination with police jurisdiction, internal affairs investigations and the outlandish possibility that members of the Chicago PD might could maybe possibly potentially be crooked (what!), but as a thriller there’s more than enough excitement to hold a viewer through it’s unnecessarily long run time (2hr20min). The sell is essentially Die Hard meets Serpico, with two of the decade’s most charismatic screen presences trying to outwit each other. That’s enough of a sell for me.
Something to Stream
Enough Said (2013): I know I’m cheating since this movie isn’t currently on a streamer (but my “Something Old” was, so fair trade), it’s just been on my mind since the lead-up to Nicole Holofcener’s latest You Hurt My Feelings, when people all cited this as her best movie. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini co-star in a middle-aged romcom set in suburban Los Angeles.
Focusing on the first-world problems of the comfortable and unsatisfied isn’t Holofcener’s only calling card, and present here are her signature naturalistic dialogue and sharp cultural observations. I’ve learned by now that she doesn’t care too much about plot in the traditional sense, choosing to wrap up her central conflicts in unsentimental fashion in order to ponder a central question. This one: is Mr. Right a bad guy if he’s Mr. Wrong for someone else? The chemistry between our leads is excellent, giving some heart to a movie that’s so authentic and unsparing that it’s almost harrowing (even for someone who hasn’t yet entered this stage of life). It made not be for the Hallmark romcom crowd but it’s far above the average romance story in quality. Definitely recommend.
Trailer Watch: Killers of the Flower Moon
I continue to back my prediction that Dune: Part 2 can and will win Best Picture, based on the reaction that its trailer has gotten in some recent screenings I’ve gone to. But when the full trailer for Martin Scorcese’s epic dropped, it reached for an even higher distinction: it’s got all the makings of all-time cinema. It looks like the kind of movie that might entire “the canon” of films every aspiring cinephile must see. Definite shades of There Will Be Blood. DiCaprio, De Niro, Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Jesse Plemmons, and apparently newcomer Lily Gladstone is amazing. If it lives up to expectations, the sky is the limit.