Indy...? Jonesy...!

Ah, we meet again, Dr. Jones...

Like most people of my era, Dr. Jones is an institution, much like Star Wars. We grew up with it, we were dazzled by it, we wanted to be Harrison Ford, just in the same way we wanted to be Han Solo and later on Dr. Richard Kimble.

What? No one wanted to be Ford in the Fugitive? I'd rather be Kimble than Jack Ryan.

Either way, I grew up on Indy. The score alone brings up a whole swell of emotions and memories of a much more innocent time, a time when I wore one of my dad's hats that vaguely resembled a fedora and made my own bullwhip out of a shit load of rubber bands linked together and practice whipping the clothes stand in an attempt to wrap it around, Indy-style. Indiana Jones was the type of hero that made you think that being a hero was possible, because the dude often got three shades of shit kicked out of him. He wasn't as acrobatic and agile and strong as other so-called heroes. He felt a bit more... real. Real, yet fantastic at the same time. I'm sure a lot of people out there felt the same way and, as much as they may not want to admit, definitely got a kick out of the thought of another Indy movie, regardless of any doubts about age.

The night before I was going to see it, Col. Kurtz buzzed me...

"Hey, I saw Indy 4 tonight."

"Yeah, how was it?"

"Answer me this: how would you put the Indiana Jones movies in order, from favorite to least favorite?"

"Well, I love all of them, but I'd put Last Crusade at the top and Doom at the bottom. I loved Doom as a kid but nowadays I totally get a kick out of Sean Connery being his dad."

"Ok. Well, this Indiana Jones movie makes Temple of Doom look like the Godfather."

He then proceeded to tell me just how shit he thought the movie was, with choice quotes such as,

"This movie made Shia LeBeouf's acting in Transformers look like Marlon Brando."

"National Treasure 2 was better than this shit."

"Ray Winstone sounds like an American trying to put on a British accent."

"John Hurt is Dumbledore on crack."

Regardless, I went and watched it last night, and yes, I totally understand where old Kurtz was coming from, but at the same time...

...that shit was fun.

Don't get me wrong: it definitely won't replace any of the slots of anyones 'top 3 Indy movies' list, but it's still fun. Silly, mindless fun, and I enjoyed it. There's fisticuffs and snakes and weird artifacts and a bullwhip and Marion Ravenwood and military bad guys and jet setting adventures. And fuck it, Shia was fun too. And the rest of the cast. It was a fun adventure movie, full stop.

Though there are two comments of Kurtz's  that did ring true...

The lighting - what... the... fuck...? There's some strange ass cinematography going on in this movie. There are some scenes where I was actually thinking "my God, I've never seen a movie so wrongly lit in my life."

The CGI - what... the... holy... fuck...? Spielberg's CGI is usually better than anything ILM comes up with for other directors, but this one just looked... supremely fake. Badly matted and composited with that blurry finish which cheaper production companies usually use to hide the errors.

And that's where the biggest gripe about the movie comes in, the main difference between this one and the previous movies - the overdose and over-reliance of CGI. One of the most consistent memories of the Indiana Jones movies was that feeling that Indy's in real trouble because those were real people riding horses and jumping on tanks and holding on to a truck with a piece of rope. I know that Doom and Crusade had some CGI but ever so slightly to enhance the whole thing. In this one, the major race set piece through the jungle was totally CGI, which kinda made it feel lesser compared to the other ones.

And it's not like stuntmen haven't been able to pull off the insane ideas the filmmakers had for Indy - in Last Crusade Indy takes on a tank on a horse. A fucking horse!

Perhaps what's going to alienate people the most is the setting - Indiana Jones was so much the product of a 40's environment that some people may not be able to follow him into the fifties, where it's no longer religious artifacts but sci-fi tinged spookiness and ruskies.

All I can say is go in without expecting any of the past movies, and you should have a decent time. Sure, Indy looks old as fuck now, but he's still Indy, and he can still throw a hook harder than any of you other cats.

Peace, daddy-o.

Hello, Dear Readers...

...whoever you may be.

It's fascinating, isn't it? How technology has advanced so much and how it's affected the way we act and communicate socially. The biggest technological advancement in the past twenty years is that of communications: mobile phones, the world wide web, etc. It's affected how we communicate with other humans in ways that one could never even dream of thirty years ago, even.

Like this.

Right now I'm talking to a number of people at the same time. No doubt some of you found this blog through typing 'Jenna Jameson' in the search field, hoping for some big titty action and discovering instead only a post on her latest movie, 'Zombie Strippers', and a whole bunch of crap that you're not interested in.

You can move along.

Then there are those of you who I either know or don't know but find this site interesting or, at the very least, found my old blog interesting and occasionally log-in here in the vain hope that it will reach the same heights as my past blog did.

Sorry.

There are those of you who are reading this who are my friends, and are just curious what's been going down in Guber-town.

'Sup.

And then there are others. I know for a fact there's someone reading this right now who'd want nothing better than to beat the unholy shit out of me three ways from Sunday, disembowel me and feed my innards to Uptown rats whilst hiring mutated bovine creatures from a sadistic genetics professor for the purposes of anally rampaging me in every orifice leaving me like a pig on a spit.

Hello. How's it going? Love the new look.

And this isn't my only on-line presence. There's my MySpace (which I loathe), my Friendster (which doesn't often register in my head) and my Facebook, where I find myself spending a lot of time on. My existence is plastered all over the world wide web for all to see, different aspects of my life from as far as when I was 14 (if you search hard enough). It doesn't take much to find me or things about me on-line, you just have to know how to spell my name. Hell, even if you don't spell my name properly you'll probably find something.
This is not because I'm trying to break Jessica Alba's record of 'most google hits' (which I know I'll never achieve in a million years even if I tried) but because I use the internet for what it is: a communication tool, either for keeping in touch with friends or to pimp out anything of mine that requires pimpage.

It has, however, come to my attention, now more than ever, how even with this incredible communication tool, sometimes the message doesn't come across right. People have a way of misinterpreting things that they see on-line, reading into it too much, taking it to heart too much, making assumptions and reacting towards them.

And, quite frankly, I think it's irritating.

I can understand how, from a certain way of thinking (that I don't subscribe to), this can happen, but I also can't exactly hide how it makes me feel, nor can I hide how, even though I can understand it, I can't comprehend it. I can't see the point of it.

And I'm not exactly sure whether or not I understand what is expected of me based on this.

There have been numerous cases where people take the internet too damn seriously that have either been taken way out of proportion or just ended tragically. One of the more typical cases where the shit's been taken out of proportion that I was actually privy to was when numerous local indie musicians got into a huge 'flame war' on jamtank, dissing each other left and right to the point where shit got incredibly out of hand when the dissers and dissees (if such words exist) went looking for each other in person.

Then, of course, there's the case of Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide because of MySpace.

I repeat with more clarity: a teenage girl killed herself because of MySpace.

The internet is just a communications tool. You can read into it all you like, make assumptions and presumptions about shit as much as you want, if that is what you choose. You can stalk someone and talk shit about them as much as you want with the internet as a cover. I have no way of stopping you.

But the shit's coming back to me in the real world, and I don't appreciate it. And I certainly won't censor myself anymore than I usually do just to calm the flames. I can't stop you from doing what you do, but believe me, what you do won't stop me from doing what I do, posting what I post and writing what I write. Please, give it a rest and take things at face value, because trust me, there's nothing sadder than Facebook/MySpace/Friendster-stalking, blog-combing or google-hunting. Open up a bittorrent and download porn like a regular human being, for God's sake. Please.

Seacrest, out.