Tag: harrison ford

Awesome 80s in April: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

indiana jones and the temple of doom poster

I was too young to have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in theaters when it came out in 1980, but I must have watched it a million times on television soon after.  I did see Temple of Doom in the theater. Probably three or four times. I would have been about 11 years old.  I loved it.

As a kid I especially loved all the stuff that made the moral majority people clutch their pearls which eventually led to the making of the PG-13 rating. My friends and I would constantly ask each other which thing we’d rather eat – snakes, bugs, or monkey brains. We would pretend to reach into each other’s chests and pull our hearts out. We dreamed of being on that awesome mine roller coaster.  

As an adult, I recognize the film’s many flaws. The least of which is not its cultural insensitivity, if not downright racism. Short Round is nothing but a Chinese stereotype, and there is a lot of stuff going on with the Indian characters and the “weird” stuff they eat. You could also certainly complain about the one female character and how she is nothing more than a “damsel in distress.” 

I do not think any of this was intentional by the filmmakers in the sense that they were not trying to be racist or sexist. I think a lot of that comes from how the Indiana Jones films are Spielberg and Lucas riffing on the old serial films they used to watch as kids. Old adventure films were rife with racist tropes and inherent sexism.

But I’m also going to table that discussion. I’ll let the experts dig into that stuff. I feel like when talking about this film, you need to mention those concerns and recognize their validity, but at the same time I don’t want to get bogged down in them.

Also this film rips.

It is generally considered the worst of the original trilogy. Spielberg has distanced himself, claiming it was made during a difficult time in his life (he was getting divorced) and it is too dark. I’ll stand by the opinion that it isn’t as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, but those are pretty high watermarks. There is still a ton of stuff to love in this film.

The opening scene in Shanghai, for starters. It begins with Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw, who later married Spielberg) singing “Anything Goes.” Spielberg shoots it like a classic musical. When the song ends, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) enters. He’s made a deal with a Chinese gangster, trading the remains of some ancient emperor for a precious diamond.

Set in 1935, one year before the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, making this film technically a prequel. They say Lucas and Spielberg didn’t want Indiana fighting Nazis again, so they set it a little earlier than the first film and moved the locations to Asia. It is interesting that in this film Indiana Jones is all about fortune and glory, and makes no mention of anything belonging in a museum.

With the help of Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), Indiana’s young sidekick, the three of them escape Shanghai but find themselves on a plane owned by the bad guy. The pilots dump the fuel and jump out of the plane, leaving it to crash into the Himalayas. Our heroes jump out of the plane using an inflatable raft as a sort of parachute and then sled that zooms down the snow covered mountain and over an impossibly high cliff and into some major rapids.

This scene is cartoonish in its impossibility. Most of the film will continue in this pattern. Raiders wasn’t exactly grounded in realism, but Temple of Doom pushes the bounds of possibility to an absurd degree. Not that it matters. It is still extraordinarily enjoyable.

They’ll be picked up by some villagers who explain that some thieves stole their sacred rock and their children, and ever since, everything has gone bad. Our heroes head to a palace where they are treated with kindness (and those crazy food choices.) There they will find a hidden passage that takes them to an underground temple and a group of cultists who practice child slavery and human sacrificing. 

It all culminates in a wild chase scene with our heroes riding a mine cart like a roller coaster through an impossibly long shaft and then battling it out on a ridiculously high rope bridge. 

I don’t know why I’m describing the plot; you’ve probably seen this film. It is crammed full with wonderfully crafted action sequences. Even when it slows down, it’s still entertaining. 

You do have to table some of that insensitive stuff, and I completely understand those who can’t do that, but if you can this is a heck of a ride.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: What Lies Beneath (2020)

WHaT LIES BENEATH poster

Robert Zemeckis had an incredible run in the 1980s through the 1990s. It started with Romancing the Stone in 1984 and ran through the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, and Contact. I was a big fan. When I learned he was making a thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I was completely on board. I believe I saw it opening weekend in the theater. I was highly disappointed. I’ve not seen it since.

The Criterion Channel is currently running a bunch of horror films from the 2000s. This is one of them. Lately, I’ve been revisiting films from my youth that I didn’t much care for at the time to see if the decades since might have made me more attuned to their wavelength. This is especially true for films that my critic friends seem to like.

So, I figured it was time to revisit this one and see if I’ve changed my mind. Friends, it still stinks. Well, okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is a bit of a mess.

This is basically Zemeckis doing Hitchcock, but that’s not really a thing in his wheelhouse. 

It begins like a Rear Window homage. Claire Spencer (Pfeiffer) and her husband, Norman (Ford) live in a big, beautiful, lakeside house in Vermont. He’s a fancy researcher at a fancy college. She gave up her musical career to be a mom. As the film begins, they are saying goodbye to their daughter, who is headed off to college. Claire is having a hard time with this.  She’s lonely and bored.

She notices the new neighbors are often fighting. Loudly. One rainy night she spies him loading something (a big covered something) into the trunk of his car. Did he just murder his wife? Suspicions run even higher when she stops by with a welcoming package and realizes that the wife’s car is in the garage, but she seems to be gone. And the husband is being cagey.

But just as that idea gets going, the film shifts gears. Now Claire is seeing ghosts. She hears whispers, the front door keeps finding itself open, and the bath is filled with hot water when nobody’s home. 

All of this works well enough. Ford and Pfeiffer are too good of actors, and Zemekis too talented a director for it not to, but it never rises above. It never quite thrilled me. I never really believed the ghost angle, and without that there isn’t much more to the story. I kept half expecting the neighbor to show back up and to be an actual killer. I think I would have preferred that to what we actually get. 

The trailer for the film famously spoils half the movie and the big twist towards the end. I won’t do that in case you haven’t seen it. The first time I watched the film, I felt the ending really killed the film’s momentum, but this time I found the final act to be the most interesting. That’s when Zemeckis goes into full Hitchcock mode, allowing himself to move away from the problematic script (by Clark Gregg!) and into pure direction. Although, I’ll still admit there are some really silly bits to its conclusion.

It isn’t a terrible film, just not a great one. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how this marks the beginning of a downside to the director and his two stars.

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

the mosquito coast poster

I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We’re now up to 1986.

Harrison Ford is such an iconic actor, he’s portrayed so many characters that are a part of our cultural consciousness – from Han Solo and Indiana Jones to Rick Deckard and Richard Kimble that it is difficult to remember just how much of an interesting actor he was. I don’t mean to take away from anything he’s doing now, but there was a time when he took risks. He made movies with some of the world’s greatest directors – Roman Polanski, Mike Nichols, Alan J. Pakula, and Peter Weir. He was so much more than the icon he has become.

In 1986 he made The Mosquito Coast with Peter Weir and it feels so many lightyears away from the types of films he’s known for, the types of films people dress up as at cons, that he’s almost unrecognizable.

He plays Allie Fox, a brilliant inventor who is what we now might call a kooky conspiracy theorist. He’s lost his faith in the American Dream and its consumerism, and undying thirst for the almighty dollar. He thinks the government is out to destroy everything good in the world. He fears an oncoming nuclear holocaust.

So, he sells everything he has and moves his family to Belize. There he buys a small village on a river in the middle of the jungle. There he tries to set up a utopian society. It kind of works for a while, especially when he invents a machine that makes ice – a novelty in the isolated village. The machine is huge and lingers over the village like a giant, metallic god. When missionaries visit the village he kicks them out. When three rebels visit…well, things don’t go so well.

The jungle and the isolation don’t alleviate any of Allie’s fears. His madness only grows worse. Eventually, he destroys nearly everything he cares for, even as he slowly stops caring for just about everything.

Harrison Ford is magnificent in this. It is so fascinating to watch him play what could only kindly be called an anti-hero, and might more correctly be called an outright villain. But he’s never intentionally terrible. Allie is a man who knows down to his bones that he is righteous, but everything keeps getting in his way. Hellen Mirren, as his wife, is good as well, but she’s not given much to do. River Phoenix reminds us of what a wonderful young actor he was and makes me wish he’s lived longer.

It is an odd little film, not really fun to watch, but interesting nonetheless.