I’ll just come out and say it: I’m bored. Oh sure, there’s plenty to do around the house, plenty to keep my attention when dealing with my mom’s health and figuring out her future plans. But none of that does much to alleviate the boredom. If anything, these quotidian tasks only accentuate the boredom I’ve found in being mostly alone in Florida.
As such, a good part of my time has been spent finding ways to slake that boredom. Some options are right out. Alcohol, for instance. I’ll have a beer most nights, but beyond that extremely moderate amount, I’ve found I start getting headaches, sometimes accompanied by a tummy ache. Plus I never once had a good night’s sleep after overindulging. As I’ve said before, I would make a terrible alcoholic.
I also invested in a Nintendo Switch, because I like to stay at the forefront of the gaming industry. Honestly, the Switch made the most sense to me for three reasons. First, my buddy Arnie had one, and he swore by Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, the sequel to the sequel to the X-Men Legends series of games we would play together as roommates. Two, it was portable, meaning I could take it home with me on my trips back to Philly. And three, it was available.
But one of the best ways I’ve found to pass the time are movies. In December I started rewatching all the Marvel movies again, eventually finishing them in February. But once that was done, I was at a loss as to what I should watch next. I have a list a mile long with all the movies I want to see, but those weren’t the kind of movies I was looking for. At this point, I’m not trying to catch up on the kinds of movies that demand my attention. I’m looking for something I can enjoy having on in the background, half-listening and half-watching while I sit and work a jigsaw puzzle. Because I’m exactly that cool.
And so this past month, I’ve mixed familiar favorites with movies I’ve never seen before, most of them chosen at random on streaming services from the randomly sorted titles in the library. I thought it would be fun this week and next to give you some quick takes on the movies I’ve watched this month. Some are phenomenal. Others are big misses. You can decide for yourself if any of them are worth your time.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
So yeah, I started with a classic. This has long been one of my favorite movies. Indiana Jones is still super cool, and Spielberg and Lucas really nailed the pulpy feel of the serial films from the 40s and 50s. The action can be over the top at times, but Spielberg cuts the violence with a hearty helping of humor and whimsy throughout.
Mostly, though, there are two things that make this movie work. The first is the characters. Indiana Jones isn’t a classic character because he’s a superman. He’s classic because of his flaws and shortcomings, succeeding in spite of his overabundant self-confidence. And Karen Allen’s Marion is phenomenal, sassy and self-reliant, super smart and super funny.
The second thing is that the movie trusts its MacGuffin. The ark becomes the thing that all the characters are in search of, the object that motivates the characters to action, and in the denouement, it proves to be both savior and downfall. But while it drives the action, the magical effects are limited until the final moments of the film. It’s a perfect device, and in the end is indispensable to the film. But it—and its magic—never overshadows the characters.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
As you all probably know, I’m a fan of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, as you can read about here and here. But when I learned there was a D&D movie coming out, I was trepidatious. Sure, the property has plenty of lore to draw from, but it would all too easy to screw up this movie—and potentially drive D&D back from its growing mainstream acceptance. The news that Paramount pushed back the release date of the movie left me even more apprehensive.
I shouldn’t have worried. What I and the rest of the audience got was an extremely enjoyable genre movie, a joyous celebration of fantasy stories that never took itself too seriously. As my buddy Arnie put it, they understood the assignment. Rather than skew too far into the heroic, overblown territory of epic fantasy, Honor Among Thieves was a character-driven spot of fun that matched might and magic with wit and ribaldry.
What I liked best about the movie was that, in many ways, it felt like I was watching characters acting out an actual D&D campaign. Each character had their motivations, had their strengths and weaknesses, and deployed their skills in creative and interesting ways. Yes, there are rules in the D&D books that say a druid can’t turn into an owlbear. But the writers and directors adapted the rules to fit their story, and the whole experience was better for it. It was clear throughout that the creators were not only D&D fans, but experienced players and dungeonmasters in their own right.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
A lot of times you’ll hear people shit on Temple of Doom, and they have a point. It was clearly the worst of the Indiana Jones trilogy, and yes I’m ignoring Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.* Offensive characterizations, a broad, inaccurate, and rather bland reading of Hinduism, and an overemphasis on gross-out imagery were bad enough. But it was Willie Scott’s screeching voice throughout the movie that rankles most people. Seriously, her voice makes my nails curl.
* While leaving the theatre after watching Crystal Skull, my friend Charles just kept saying, “Aliens? Really? Really? Really? Aliens? Really?” We all felt the same, Charles. We all felt the same way.
For all its shortcomings, I still enjoy Temple of Doom. A lot of this is probably because I was a young kid when it came out, and my parents liked it. The food scene in Pankot Palace was memorably disturbing, and obviously the man having his heart removed before being lowered into hot lava made an impression. And whenever my parents would give me cough medicine, I would reenact Harrison Ford’s writhing after drinking the mind-control potion Mola Ram forced him to drink. The first time it was cute. The seventh time it was tedious.
Remember that thing I said about the MacGuffin? Yeah, this one doesn’t work as well. It’s too obscure, too diffuse. Indy has to find the Sankara stone to…get the children back? To help crops grow? I don’t know, it’s never very clear. And that’s the problem. There’s too much other noise, whether it’s removing a man’s still-beating heart, an out-of-place voodoo doll that apparently works, or that weird moment when the Sankara stones start to…harmonize, I guess, and burn through Indy’s satchel. Because that’s a thing. It’s a fine adventure movie, I suppose, but it pales in comparison to the original.
Oh, and Short Round. I loved Short Round. It was so heartwarming to see Ke Huy Quan and Harrison Ford hug on the Oscars.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Jurassic World was an enjoyable movie. It brought back the Jurassic Park concept in fun and interesting ways, thanks mostly to Chris Pratt’s raptor wrangler character. Did it pretty much stick to recreating most of the beats from the original? Sure. But it did so in a way that was ultimately satisfying.
Unfortunately, the sequel Fallen Kingdom was only slightly better than the sequel to the original Jurassic Park. That film turned into a kaiju movie (think Godzilla) by sending T. Rex to San Diego, and if I’m being honest, all I remember was how stupid it was to make that one kid’s failure to make the gymnastics team into a major plot point.
Fallen Kingdom hit the action film sequel points. It starts with getting the band back together, one by one, as we discover each team member after the events of the original. Life usually isn’t going that great for these characters, mostly because if it was, then why the hell would they go back to Jurassic World? In any case, some plot device brings them back together, and the team follows the organizer behind that plot device, except whoops! He has an ulterior motive! Now you have to not only escape, but put back what you screwed up in the process. And obviously they leave a plot hole wide open to make the third movie without having to go through all the trouble.
The movie was…fine, I guess. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t good, either. It was mostly a little boring, and a poor waste of some good actors. Like most action film sequels, it focuses on the flashiest but ultimately least interesting parts (monster dinosaurs, bloody action, criminal betrayal) at the expense of the more dramatically interesting elements, like the morality of bringing dinosaurs back into a world. Yes, there’s lip service about whether to preserve the dinosaurs on the island. But the philosophy feels tacked on, like the director and producers realized they needed to fill a few more minutes, and wouldn’t it be interesting if we took a little time and thought about the thing the entire first movie was about.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Obviously I was going to finish the trilogy. While I acknowledge that Raiders is the better movie, I think I love Last Crusade even more. First and foremost, the chemistry between Ford and Sean Connery is unbeatable. Ford’s flawed he-man archaeologist and Connery’s equally flawed nebbish scholar play off each other perfectly, a testament to both their performances and the screenplay itself. As a kid I didn’t understand the father-son stuff all that well. Now I can tell just how well the writers and actors both hit the mark.
This was another movie I saw when I was young. In fact, it was one of the earliest movies I can remember seeing in the theatre. The action, the humor, and the fantastic mystery of the holy grail as told in the movie drew me in, and I was hooked from the beginning. To this day, it’s hard for me not to get sucked in if I see Last Crusade on TV.
Unlike Temple of Doom, and more like Raiders, the MacGuffin of the grail worked as intended. It drove the action, motivated the characters in their race to decode the secrets of the grail and therefore the secret of eternal life. But until Donovan and Indy arrive in the chalice room, there is no magic. And even that magic is limited to a few brief if important moments. The grail facilitates the action without getting in the way. That, my friends, is how you use a MacGuffin.
Back to the Future
My buddy Mike, he of the “What’s the endgame” fame, has long argued that Back to the Future is the perfect movie—and he means it. I mean, his groom’s cake at his wedding was a DeLorean. And he was lucky enough to see a 30th anniversary showing in 2015 at Radio City, where he happened to be sitting right behind James Tolkan, better known as Principal Strickland.
I for one will not argue with Mike. Back to the Future is one of the most perfect movies ever made. Sure, the time travel logic doesn’t hold up, and you could argue that Crispin Glover’s argument that the family didn’t need to be rich in alternate 1985 to be happy. But the movie is so good that you never even notice that stuff. It’s got a perfect structure, a perfect build, a perfect denouement, and even a perfect ending—even if there had never been a sequel.
Back to the Future is the perfect marriage of performers and material overseen by the perfect director. The chemistry between Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd is so natural that it’s hard to believe they spent weeks shooting with another actor as Marty McFly. Lloyd’s physical acting alone is worth the price of admission. At one point, as the tiny model DeLorean careens off the (not to scale) model of Hill Valley and ignites a pile of oily rags, Christopher Lloyd pulls a face that is both unbelievably cartoony and thematically realistic. It might just be my favorite moment in the whole movie.
And just in case you doubt my fandom credentials…my wife bought me as shirt several years back, a gift as we were preparing for our first trip to Disney World. It was a red shirt featuring Mickey Mouse dressed in red pants, a yellow shirt, and blue shoes. I loved the shirt, and I loved her even more. Why? Because it’s the shirt Marty’s brother Dave wears in the photograph that shows them disappearing. Perfect film. Perfect wife.
And that’s where we’ll end it this week. Most of the films here are familiar favorites, with a new release and a “we’re watching this because it was on our list” selection. Next week, we’ll venture into some of my more random selections. None of them are completely off the wall; they’re all major releases with familiar names. But they’re also not my usual first choice of movie. We’ll see what you think. Until then!
MetaFrizzics 