Roger Ebert and the Demise of the Ink-Stained Wretch

It's funny -- I typically consider Roger Ebert's movie opinions pretty worthless, off-the-mark and overly deferential to mainstream tripe [insert Cribbs rebuttal here and here and here]. That's not to say he can't turn a phrase among some of the best reviewers, such as this one from his Kingdom of the Crystal Skull review, which he, predictably, enjoyed:

"If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best? Well, the first one, of course, and then there's a steady drop-off of interest."

But his thoughts on the decline of the newspaper industry and his defenses of the value of the printed word have been spot on, even stirring in their passion. He wrote a blog post Wednesday about the AP's new limit of 500 words on movie reviews. Here's the hottest selection:

“Perhaps fearing the challenge of reading a newspaper will prove daunting, papers are using increasing portions of their shrinking news holes in providing guides to reading themselves.” … “The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small.”

Yowzers. Ebert isn't too cheery on his future with newspapers, and with good cause. Ebert, however, is representing a different view of the decay of the industry, one that is being lamented more than the the loss of the physical product itself: he says the fault lies not soley at the feet of the internet, blogs and the 24-hour news environment, but rather on the doorstep of the decline of intellectualism among the population as a whole, this fascination with tasting the trifle that is destroying our abilities to digest the significant.

Read the whole thing here. It's still not enough to get me to watch Crystal Skull again though. Sorry Rog.

Raiders of the Master System

This museum-worthy piece of art, titled "Nobody Wants to Play Sega With Harrison Ford," comes from Brandon Bird, the artist responsible for such modern masterpieces as "Lazy Sunday Afternoon" depicting Christopher Walken tinkering in the workshop on what appears to be a prototype of Optimus Prime; and "King of the Cage" demonstrating Lincoln's true strengths used in keeping the Union together.



There is, I think, a deeper truth spoken through this work in light of the release of the wholly unnecessary fourth Indiana Jones movie, the one filled with the grumpy, tired old man who resembles the Harrison Ford of old. Nintendo, you see, was always the company that stuck with the beloved and tested pillars of video gaming that translated into success from Donkey Kong to Wii Fit. Fun, reliable play that was good to return to over and over again. Sega was the company that tried to come in and shake things out a bit, add fancy new devices and trendy gimmicks that tried to capture the diversions of the day. You abandon that sense of wonderment and fun that Nintendo clung to and it will only get you so far.
So it went for the latest Indy movie, somewhere between the CGI gophers and the travelogues through the part of the Earth where physics cease to exist and spills down several gigantic waterfalls don't result in any damages to person, vehicle or momentum. Really people would have been happy to be back to basics all along.

Then again, if Harrison Ford walked up to me and asked me to play Altered Beast with him, you bet your ass I'd werewolf down in a second.

George Lucas and the Kingdom of Sabotaged Trilogies

The best that can be said of the new Indiana Jones move is that it is 100 percent unnecessary. It's not a complete desecration of the franchise, and it doesn't commit the sacrilege of trying to attribute Indy's wit to tiny bacteria in his bloodstream. But the whole thing hardly seems worth the effort.

When you take a property this esteemed off the shelf for another go-round, you have to make a pretty damn good justification for doing so. I wouldn't drag my 85 year old World War II hero grandfather out of bed to help me settle a dispute with my neighbor over the overgrown rhododendron bushes. There had better be fucking Nazis marching down our street, and they had better be running up on his lawn stealing his newspaper. So to dust off the Indy franchise, which had a perfectly holistic and satisfying conclusion in 1989, for what could be confused for a fan-fiction graphic novel incarnation, seems like Lucas and Spielberg are stubbornly unaware they are playing fast and loose with a film legacy.


Yes, Harrison Ford is old — and perhaps several years of making depressingly disappointing movies from K-19 to Firewall have taken their toll on his swagger as well as his prestige — but aging movie icons are big these days (see Rambo, Rocky, Adam Sandler). I can't help but think this movie might have been better if instead filling the 19-off-screen years with lots of super-secret government work and other off-screen exposition, we joined Indy as a retired adventurer, someone who has hung up the whip and hat and settled into a nice life of tenured professorship.

It would take a lot to pull him off the bench again, just as it should have taken a lot to pull this character out of the cabinet. Then we could see Indy reconciling with his past, rediscovering the emotional rush of adventure and paving the way for his own lineage to continue. There's hints at social commentary, but Spielberg and co. back off right away, opting instead for a narrative that chooses action over human connection but achieves neither.

Some good parts are still there: the punches still sound like hunks of thawing meat smashing into each other at 50 mph and Karen Allen's (Terp!) smile shines as the film's only other tie to its other chapters.
The mythology and MacGuffin of the movie could probably have worked if they didn't transgress from kinda weak to downright silly. In the end, it turns out the frustrating climax would have transpired exactly the same regardless of the previous hour and a half of CGI fights and monkey chases (yes, monkey chases).


There's nothing iconic about this film whatsoever, and I'll wager that even the oft-maligned Temple of Doom will stir up pangs of nostalgia among fans after seeing this clunker. (I have a soft spot for Temple after watching it 97 times on a taped-from-TV video as a kid, plus don't tell me you've never tried to rip someone's heart out from their chest or informed someone there is no time for love, Dr. Jones. I know you have.)

Instead, we got a collective feeling of: "Why bother?" Basically, someone should probably lock George Lucas in a room without any access to his previous body of work. Unless he plans to remake Howard the Duck, and finally give Jeffrey Jones his post-child-pornography conviction renaissance.

A commenter named Thumb from Slashfilm pretty much sums it up:

"So I’d say that George Lucas didn’t rape the corpse of my childhood, but he gave it a good, rough tongue-kissing."