Thoughts on Indiana, Bond, and Oscars (post-dated)

This week we have been graced with the trailer for a small, modestly budgeted under-the-radar picture with a name so silly it climbs the mountain of kitsch to gaze out over the lands of retro pastiche: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Thoughts move instantly to the work of Damien Hirst. Will Spielberg’s movie be an indictment of the rape of African nations and resources by the Western world in the same fashion? One doubts, although the issues that surrounded the diamond-studded human skull which Hirst unveiled last year with a Lagerfeldian flurry of self-importance and off-handedness, do to some extent reflect the problems faced by the new archaeological adventure.

As with Lucas’ Star Wars of 1977, the Indiana Jones films were exercises in the reanimation of a style of wilfully breezy filmmaking that had gone out of fashion as America adjusted itself to the long winter of the Cold War. Replicating the simplistic narrative framework of earlier days, but with budget, effects, and stars which were previously unheard of, the American Blockbuster exploded onto the stage, and American Adult Cinema walked quietly to the back of the theatre to pretend to be very interested in the wallpaper.
But, as the world seems to tip into ever-shallower Baudrillardian arcs of self-regarding “irony”, we must wonder what the point of this new Indiana is. The trailer, stuffed with clips and nods to the preceding trilogy, seems almost a Far From Heavenesque exercise in pastiche, making it an imitation of a replication. Harrison Ford acts like a man trying to act like Harrison Ford in a film which is trying to be an Indiana Jones film.
On the nitty-gritty side, the warehouse set-piece looks like so much recycled gymnasto-technics (is that Colin Farrell and Tom Cruise I spy fighting in the background?), Ray Winstone appears to already be in costume for the forthcoming tie-in night at G-A-Y, and some of the effects look just plain bad. Still, nostalgia can be a powerful drug.

Another franchise instalment received a silly title this last month: Quantum of Solace meaning both a significant yet infinitesimally measured amount of comfort, and a huge paycheque for all those involved in what was formerly termed Bond 22. Picking up where Casino Royale left off (in the manner of The Karate Kid, Part 2, if you will, or the first episode in a fresh season of ER), it seems Bond is out for some payback. The title, inevitably, grows on you, and we can only hope that like its namesake in the world of physics it shakes the foundations of filmic discipline to its very core and opens up entirely unheard of avenues of human investigation into the world around us. Or at least tells us whether Mathis was a bastard or not.
Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: the writer’s strike is over, and the Oscars shall go ahead. How would we have coped learning all the results at one a.m. in a dull press conference, missing the unalloyed joy of learning not just who won Best Supporting Actress, but also those lucky devils who achieved Best Sound Design and Best Foreign Language Sound Design before giving up, buggering off to bed, and having someone who’s been up for thirty-six hours mumble the results to us the next morning? Alas, we shall never know.