The Movie Empress

Ill-fated fourth films.

Apparently, a fourth Jason Bourne movie is in the works.  Bourne is hanging up his fighting/shooting/running/swimming/spying spurs and has accepted a desk job at the CIA. 

The Bourne Memorandum

Jason Bourne practices for his upcoming commute.

And while I'm at it...

Even if "worlds" is plural -- which seems unlikely; I doubt they've included a scene on Neptune -- there still needs to be a bloody apostrophe. 

Avast Apostrophe Abuse!

Word is filtering around the internet that the "correct" title of the third Jack Sparrow movie is Pirates of the Caribbean:  At Worlds [no apostrophe] End.

Now, I'm sorry to have to say this, but I think my tolerance is about spent.  There was no one more willing than I to accept the various anachronisms and improbabilities of Dead Man's (see?!  appropriate use of the apostrophe!) Chest, but this is too much.  Even on the high seas, certain standards must be maintained. 

I will have no part in this abuse of the English language by screenwriters who ought to know better.  Hereafter, I shall refer to this film by a slightly modified title. 

Pirates of the Caribbean:  At World[']s End

Harrison Ford's New Year's Resolution

Fourth Indiana Jones to Film in 2007

I'm not going to repeat myself, so I'll limit my comments for the time being. 

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure they are.

Rush Is Dead

I was going to do a post about the massive disparity between critical and audience response to Pirates of the Caribbean:  Dead Man's Chest, and about how I really liked the movie, and appreciated the darker undertones required by any bridge episode in a trilogy, as well as the humorous bones thrown to the loyal fans, but all of this has pretty much been done to death, and I'm not feeling all that analytical when it's 103 degrees in the Armpit.  There's a good article in the New York Times about why critics are such wankers, so you can go read their take on that issue if you're feeling so inclined. 

Instead, I'm going to remark on a common complaint that I heard after viewing Dead Man's Chest, namely (spoiler alert) that Captain Barbossa was dead, so how the hell did he come back to life in this episode, and, to make a long, whiny, diatribe short, how that didn't make any sense at all and we expect a little continuity out of our summer blockbusters. 

To which I say, gently and kindly...

You're okay with a band of half-man/half-sea creatures sailing around underneath the ocean on a cursed ship, a man's still-beating heart kept in a box on an island without any obvious impediment to his health, a mythological octopus, a thoroughly liberated woman cruising the Caribbean unmolested by the kindly pirates whom she has befriended, Johnny Depp's miraculous waterproof eyeliner, and an undead monkey, but the resurrection of a once-cursed, apple-loving pirate captain strains the very limits of your credulity?

And critics say the public is too forgiving of Hollywood.

Brief thoughts on Da Vinci & 2 Previews

The Da Vinci Code - neither a legitimate threat to Christianity nor the latest nadir of movie making, no matter what various critics have said.  Even Tom Hanks' coiffure fares better than we'd been led to believe.  And if Paul Bettany's ass is the main reason for the PG-13 rating... well then, it was lovely of him to make the sacrifice for art. 

Now, the previews. 

Despite (or perhaps because of) Paul Giamatti's bare chest, Lady in the Water looks to be appropriately scary and not the dreamy "bedtime story" it had been pitched as earlier.  Bryce Dallas Howard has an amazingly ethereal and creature-like look about her and there is something very, very nasty in the shrubbery.

Daniel Craig ought to pay the makers of Layer Cake a sizeable chunk of whatever his Bond paycheck might be, just for bringing him to the attention of the Broccolis.  I take back whatever Bond not Blonde thoughts I may have had.  The actor playing 007 should cause the most liberal bluestocking feminist to stand up and beg to be a Bond Girl.  After seeing the preview for Casino Royale, all I can say is, "Oh, James."

Americana on the High Seas

A friend was visiting from out of town this weekend, which is a rare occurrence in the Armpit.  Having exhausted the site, we thought to introduce her (and ourselves) to a pleasure particular to rural towns - the drive-in. 

Poseidon seemed like an obvious choice, and we were not disappointed, either by the movie or our inaugural experience with this particular piece of Americana.

The movie was solid entertainment of the basic disaster movie variety.  Not too long, no lengthy build-up, amusingly disgusting death scenes without gratuitous blood-splatters, stock characters dispensed just after uttering lines that heralded their impending doom:  "They don't call me Lucky Larry for nothing!"

I'm not sure whether I should be comforted or dismayed by certain consistencies in the genre that have been unaffected by the past decade and a half of political correctness.  Women, with their floatation-device cleavage, are cast to be rescued by strong-jawed men.  Children are to be cute and wander off at inopportune moments so their bosomy mothers can wail and the Hapsburg heroes can rescue them.  Unrepentant jerks will be incinerated at the right comedic moment.  As far as survival rate is concerned, African-Americans and Latinos might as well be that unnamed ensign on every episode of Star Trek.  And woe to those who demand or provide sex in return for any favor.  Harlotry, no matter how prompted by desperate circumstances, is not to be borne on today's sinking ocean liner.

Cozily wrapped in cliché, I was willing to accept all the improbable derring-do that Poseidon had to offer.  Last-minute escapes, breath held long past the point of normal lung capacity, the physics-defying impossibility of escaping the vortex caused by a massive object being sucked beneath the ocean surface.  But the passengers in our car broke out in a unified, "Yeah right," of outrage at the timely appearance of a lifeboat, which appeared beneath the ragtag escapees just in time to save them from the frigid ocean.  Combined pluck and know-how and inspired use of fire hoses and necklaces I'm willing to believe.  Lifeboat ex machina, on the other hand, was a little too much.

The drive-in, patriotically named the Stars and Stripes, was as rooted in its features as Poseidon was in its genre.  My previous impressions of the drive-in were garnered from Grease, and the Stars and Stripes provided the same big white screen, irregularly parked cars, and playground for the kids (or the spontaneous song stylings of love-struck teenagers.)

It was lovely to watch the moon rise to the left of the screen, and eerie to catch site of a fellow movie-goer as he walked towards us, seemingly from the screen itself.  It was very pleasant to turn around and mock Tom Cruise on the screen behind us, and particularly enjoyable to put our feet on the dashboard and make all the rude comments we wanted without fear of disturbing the people around us.  The menu at the concession stand put all other theatres to shame, offering Frito pie, funnel cakes, and the "famous" Chihuahua. 

In fact, the only thing I missed at the drive-in was the audience camaraderie created in a traditional theatre, the kind that a good disaster movie can hone to perfection.  There were no gale-force gasps, no juicy giggles at death-by-elevator, and no chorale of cat-calls at that blasted lifeboat.

Dilemma: MI3

On the one hand, I'm morally opposed to lining Tom Cruise's scientological, misogynistic pocket.  On the other hand, I would pay good money to see Truman Capote beat the ever-loving snot out of Ethan Maverick Cole McDeere Lestat McGuire Babbitt Hunt.

Josh Hairnett

Part of me would like to see Lucky Number Slevin, because it looks kind of cool in that Layer Cake, Ocean's 11 kind of way, and it has Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley acting all tough, and even though I'm bored with Lucy Liu and her mean-girl routine, the previews were funny.

But then there's the issue of Josh Hartnett and his horrible hair.  And if Ben Affleck is the poor man's Matt Damon, then Josh Hartnett is the government subsidized Ben Affleck, and I'm just not sure I can spend $7.50 and an hour and forty-four minutes on that.

They didn't call it "The Penultimate Crusade."

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, billed as the final installment in the trilogy, opened in 1989.  In 1994, Harrison Ford mentioned that he was reading scripts for a potential fourth film, and a great movie rumor was born.  Or rumors.  Atlantis!  Mars!  Cast reunion from all three films!  M. Night Shyamalan has a hand in the script!  They're filming next year!  It'll be out soon!  The twists and turns of the rumors are detailed succinctly and with humor in David Hughes' 2003 book Tales from Development Hell:  Hollywood Film-Making the Hard Way.  IMDB lists the fourth film as being in pre-production, and gives a release year of 2007.  This date changes every year, so we're really left with nothing more solid than a quote given by Harrison Ford in the February 17, 2006 issue of Entertainment Weekly.  "I know in my heart it's gonna happen."

With only these heart-felt conclusions to go on, I'd like to express my own hopes that the Messrs. Ford, Spielberg, and Lucas quit their speculations and script-reading and leave us alone with our happy memories. 

I saw Last Crusade when it first came out, and I saw it begrudgingly.  I'd spent too many hours at the cafeteria table, listening to gross little boys describe, with great glee, the tribal feast in Temple of Doom.  But Last Crusade left me in the grips of my first big movie star crush - while all my school friends debated which New Kid was the hottest, I swooned for Harrison Ford: fedora, bullwhip, and all.  They say you never forget your first love, and even though I've transferred my primary affections to more nuanced actors, I'll still watch Harrison Ford do pretty much anything.  There was no one more willing to like the dreck that was Firewall, and heaven knows I tried.  But the one thing that Firewall made clear, despite its underwritten characters, murky plot, and hackneyed dialogue, was that Harrison Ford, action king, is, getting a little old for all the derring-do.  He still jumps gamely off of walls, bursts through windows, and takes earnest swings at the bad guys, but it all seems to be punctuated by arthritic grunts. 

So on the one hand, there's Ford's advancing age, which wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for what the other hand holds, which is a plot corner so firmly painted by the writers of Last Crusade as to all but guarantee that it really would be the last outing for the man in the hat.  It was, as I'm sure you'll remember, a little matter of the Holy Grail and what happens to those who drink from it. 

It's not that they're immortal - that only works if the drinker stays with the Grail and takes a sip every now and then.  But, as the legend of the two knights who walked out of the desert and lived for centuries before "dying of extreme old age," tells us, they're pretty damn hard to kill.  Let's think about it.  These guys took one sip of water out of a relic most holy, and they're able to survive all the plagues, wars, and infections of history without succumbing until they're a few hundred years old?  Water from the Grail cured Henry's gunshot wound.  It's potent stuff.  We can extrapolate that a person who drinks from the "cup of a carpenter" would be damn hard to kill via normal methods.  I don't know about you, but I like my action movies to come with just a hint of suspense.  Even Superman had his Kryptonite.  It's no fun if Indy doesn't even have to dodge the bullets.

Go ahead and argue with me if you want to.  I've got no hard and fast proof of a formula that says "Grail effectiveness divided by distance and multiplied by time equals a one-third decrease in human imperviousness to nerve gas."  But I think we can all agree that the one thing this life-extending elixir does provide is a slow-down of the aging process.  Which brings me back to those arthritic grunts. 

According to the lore, and to Wikipedia, Henry Jones, Jr. was born in 1899.  He rescued the Holy Grail in 1938.  Harrison Ford is now 63.  While I have no doubt that Indy would keep tearing around the world for decades to come, they'd have to set the next movie in the present day and make Junior a ripe old 107 to account for Ford's present visage.  He looks damned good for a modern 63, but if that's what 63 looks like after a refreshing gulp of eternal life, then someone up there has a sick sense of humor. 

I don't want to view Indiana Jones through a lens fogged with vaseline.  I don't want to hear his arthritic grunts.  I don't want to see him replaced by Ben Affleck.  Dr. Jones is a legend - in his own time and in ours.  The Last Crusade should be just that.  Let's not run the risk of being embarrassed for our heroes.