In a sidekick battle I’d put down good money on Ke Huy Quan over Shia LaBeouf any day of the week.
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Counterpoint: Temple of Doom is my favorite Indiana Jones movie, hands down. My friends and I also saw it when it came out and pretty much didn’t stop talking about it all summer, even going back to see it a few more times.
The first part of the movie, in particular–starting with the opening musical number and ending when the inflatable raft comes to rest on the river–is one of the most perfectly-paced 20 minutes of film, maybe ever. And the rest of the film is no slouch, either.
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“Gophers. Why did it have to be gophers?”
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I have to say that the action and pacing was good enough that I completely missed a few obvious plot holes the first couple times watching it. For example: “why is jumping out of a plane sans parachute safer than attempting a crash landing?” And “why did an airplane that’s completely out of fuel make such a big explosion on impact?” But I can’t fault the filmmakers because the action was just such silly fun.
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My dad gave me the book V which brought me to Gravity’s Rainbow. By Thomas Pynchon. Get some imagination adventure. But ww2 stuff a bit hard to take. And Leave the moon alone. Colonizer heard that some indigenous had land up there too?
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No one who thinks three people surviving jumping out of an airplane in a raft and a sliding down a Himalaya is “silly fun,” is allowed to mock Indy surviving a nuclear bomb blast in a refrigerator. Sorry, it’s the law. I just made up that law.
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Indiana Jones 5
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That god awful car chase with the monkies in 4 just… the movie was already limping and that just took a baseball bat to its knee.
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Could be good. Spielberg movies with Nazis are better than those without. Just look at Indy 1 & 3 (great) vs Indy 2 & 4 (sucked). Nazis in 1 & 3, no Nazis in 2 & 4. The pattern is pretty clear.
Narrator: It won’t be.
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Or the Highlander trilogy, where they only made the first movie.
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Like so many things about that movie the scene probably could have been saved with a minor rewrite. For example:
During the car chase Shia LeBoufe falls out of one of the vehicles heading down a windy road. Tumbling down the slope he accidentally disturbs a jaguar. He high-tails it downhill as fast as he can and makes it to the next switchback just before the convoy. The jaguar leaps for the kill just as the bad guy in the lead car drives between them, causing the car to careen off the road.
Granted, that version would basically be a rip-off of one of the chase scenes in Apocalypto but better to steal from another action movie than to steal from George of the Jungle.
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Please kill Indy at the end. Please. Write him out of existence the way they wrote Han out of existence. So they’ll never be tempted to make six.
My favorite remains 3, although there’s huge fondness for 1. But 3 gave us young Indy so beautiful played by the late River Phoenix. More Nazi fun, Sean Connery nailing every scene as both an absent minded professor AND the wisest man Indy has ever known.
“I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne. ‘Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky’.”
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Snakes on a Space Station.
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Am I the only one who wants to see it just for Mads Mikkelsen?
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Good point. Schindler’s List was and is an exceptional film.
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But I’m afraid that your law has been violently overturned by mob rule. You claim that Temple of Doom (Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%) is not only worse than Crystal Skull (RT score: 78%) but also worse than 1941 (RT: 44%).
Besides, we were talking specifically about how good pacing and action can make you forget about just how silly or improbable certain scenarios are. Maybe if there had been a cool musical number or something just before the nuke went off then the fridge scene would have worked better, but for me it just didn’t feel right.
All this triggered memories of my science fiction saturated youth-
This trope has been around for quite a while.
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Heck, there was an uncanny CGI prairie dog reacting with shock at what just happened to make sure you were thinking about how divorced the scene was from reality. There’s a reason it’s become a saying.
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