soapbox

… and apparently they hate him back: members of Russia’s communist party are calling for a boycott of the Crystal Skull.  The quote is funny: the movie “aims to undermine communist ideology and distort history.”

If anybody thinks that this movie will be taken at all literally, well, good on them.  We went to see it over the weekend, and K summed it up well: “I don’t think that was worth $9.50, but I would have wanted to see it eventually, and if you’re going to see it you might as well see it on the big screen.”

First, the good: it’s entertaining, it has the standard Indy elements, including the requisite bad guy being dissolved/eaten/goo-ified/etc, and has a decent chase scene.  More subtly, Harrison Ford’s age is appropriate, and they did a good job not hiding that fact and instead making it work with the story.

That said, sometimes it seemed like Ford did his own stunts, and the film was discouragingly linear.  Maybe I was hoping for too much? dunno.

Finally, back to the Russian communist boycott (wow, I feel like I’m back in the ’80s), it occurs to me that really filmmakers have very limited options.  The only acceptable baddies are white; you have to be <strong> really</strong> careful if you’re going to use middle-eastern bad guys, I don’t think you could use Japanese bad guys unless it’s a period piece, and similarly Chinese bad guys are off limits unless the movie is set in 19th-century Hong Kong or something.  So, you’re left with cultures, not races, as historical baddies: Nazi Germans (but still white) and Communist Russians (still white).  And I guess even then you’re going to piss people off.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under humor, movies, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.