Cannes, Out of Competition: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," "Vicky Christina Barcelona," "The Chaser"

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Best appreciated as a pulp prequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind...no, I can't. I mean the thing kind of is that, but the fourth Indy installment isn't really an attempt to retroactively create a Spielberg omniverse. But David Koepp's script, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and Herge and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Erik von Daniken and Carl Stephenson and...well, you get the idea...does tie together a good number of Spielbergian themes into an eventually pretty nifty package. Yeah—this is, by my sights, the most fun and least irritating installment of the series since the first one.

Although it starts out pretty unpromisingly.

The opening third, set in 1957 United States, does for 1957 what 1941 did for, you know, 1941. The waves of references and cultural signifiers come at you in strengths from coy to borderline repulsive, as Indy is kidnapped by post-Stalinists, caught in the middle of a nuclear test sight, falls victim to a HUAC-esque blacklist, and is waylaid by Shia La Beouf dressed up to look like Brando in The Wild One. Ugh. The one bright spot of this section is Cate Blanchett's superb Natasha Fatale impersonation as a Russkie-psychic-military-commander or something. (Okay, Ray Winstone—as a Jones partner who appears to sell him out—is Ray Winstone, and hence quite enjoyable. John Hurt turns up later as a whacked-out scholar and is, duh, perfect.)

Once Harrison Ford's Jones and LaBeouf's "Mutt" (who introduces himself as the son of some of Jones' confreres, who seem to have been kidnapped) team up to go to South America in search of the titular crystal skull, the movie shakes off its particular case of the cutes and turns into a far more creditable, enjoyable saga. The secret weapon? One of them has to be Karen Allen, returning to the franchise for the first time since the first film. Always the most winning of the Jones women, she's lost none of her spunk and charm and she is, if anything, more beautiful now than she was back then. It doesn't take a script analyst to figure out that some revelations concerning Indy's relations to "Mutt" (real name: Henry) will come out, nor to predict that Jones and Allen's Marion will return to their passionate squabbling...or that a lot of chasing, punching and falling will happen. I gave up on even trying to resist the movie when its centerpiece, a furious chase through the Amazon jungle punctuated with fistfights, gunshots, and swordplay, climaxed with an over-the-top homage to The Naked Jungle. When X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes was referenced later on, I lost whatever critical balance I might have been able to immediately bring to bear. So sue me.

Vicky Christina Barcelona

Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona might be the easiest film to sit through of all in his recent European period, but that doesn’t mean it’s any damn good. What makes it an easy sit? The prettiness of the people; Rebecca Hall, Scarlet Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem; the prettiness of the setting (although some might argue that Allen doesn’t celebrate Barcelona so much as try to embalm it) and the sheer galloping oddness of its tone, which maintains a kind of “huh?” interest throughout.

Via the title’s two main characters Allen sets up a classic, albeit tiresome, duality; Hall’s Vicky is staid, studious, straight, and engaged to be married, while Johansson’s Christina is the sort of impulsive romantic artistic striver that Allen has drawn with equal parts mockery and admiration throughout his career. No sooner have they arrived for their summer in Barcelona than they meet big bad painter wolf Bardem, whose proposal of a threesome one dearly wishes he ask the girls to decide through a coin toss. Vicky, of course, is the one who falls for him first, because in Allen’s world rectitude is only ever a camouflage for repression; but it’s Christina who winds up in an eventual ménage with Bardem and crazy ex-wife Cruz. Complications and darkroom makeout sessions (no explicit scenes, contrary to early wishful-thinking buzz) ensue. It’s all tied together with a narration read by an uncredited performer who sounds like a young, slightly preppie Gene Hackman. This text is meant to set a not of dry detachment that’s only implicitly wry, and one wishes that Allen had broken out a thesaurus during its composition. “They saw the old lighthouse at Oviedas, which she found very beautiful,” check, “tragic, romantic, free-thinking view of life,” yeesh. The dialogue has a similar flatness—“He had that fiery relationship with this beautiful woman,” is one character’s helpful take on Bardem’s. And while I yield to no one in my contempt for yuppie dinks, I have to say that the portrayal of Vicky’s fiancé, in which an enthusiasm for golf is made one of the signifiers of yuppie dinkiness, stacks the deck almost unfairly. The film comes to peculiar life during Bardem and Cruz’s exchanges, which are largely in Spanish and which I suspect the pair rewrote and directed themselves. The exchanges are ridiculous—Cruz comes off like a Spanish-speaking Daffy Duck in a particularly foul humor—but even so ring truer than anything else.

One may recall from the memoirs of Allen’s former editor Ralph Rosenblum that the filmmaker wanted to end his goofy comedy Take the Money and Run with a scene of Allen’s protagonist Virgil Starkwell massacred, in the manner of Bonnie And Clyde, which Rosenblum talked him out of. The temptation of garish tragedy has often screwed up Allen’s story sense, so I ought to commend his restraint here, as he gives himself an opportunity to indulge it and then declines. So at the end we are left with a dry feeling of nothing much, really—yet strangely grateful for it.

The Chaser

Some kind soul really ought to have taken first-time director Na Hong-jin aside during some point in the creation of this film and told him that Oldboy both opened and closed the book on hammer violence in Korean film. For it is the hammer violence, at the picture’s beginning and end, that helps sickeningly sink what could have been an engaging hybrid of Detective Story and The President’s Last Bang. We begin with our seemingly irredeemable hero—an ex-cop turned pimp (Kim Yoon-suk, superb as he runs himself ragged) who’s ticked off at a client he thinks is absconding with his girls and selling them off. Said client isn’t doing that at all; rather, he’s murdering them with a hammer and sometimes a chisel. He doesn’t realize much of this until after he’s hectored one of his prostitutes into forgoing a genuine sick day and sending her straight to the killer’s lair, where she manages to survive the sicko’s onslaught before said sicko is compelled to lam it. Then the ultra incompetent, corrupt, and thoroughly self-interested police force and government bureaucracy join in the pimp’s quest. “You must think that we’re clowns,” an interrogator says to the killer (who will soon be set free). Well, yes. The plot twists to mount tragedy on tragedy (did I mention the captive woman has an adorable seven-year-old daughter), along the way upending genre conventions that even the most seasoned moviemaker messes with at his or her own peril. Without giving too much away, the last twenty minutes had my seatmates and I muttering “Jesus!” over and over.

Comments

[Dan]

Oh, thank God "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull" (I reject the redundant words in that title) doesn't suck. That's been the real nailbiter for me over the summer. Considering I love all three of the entries for different reasons ("Raiders" is the best action film, "Temple" is the best pulp film and has the best setpieces, and "Crusade" is the funniest), I'll probably enjoy it. That is a relief beyond words!

[Jason]

Harrison Ford still has a long way to go to atone for fifteen years of bad movies. Now that he's 65 maybe he could lighten up and become an engaging character actor?

[rob]

So far the people who matter seem to be the ones saying the best things about Indy 4. Looking good.

[Bordeaux]

Forget Woody and and Indiana Jones 8, you've got me really interested in The Chaser, which I had never heard of. I gotta see this one.

[oakling]

What I find weird about this movie is the realization that the main character, were he real, would be dead right now.

the fourth Indy installment isn't really an attempt to retroactively create a Spielberg omniverse

I'm so torn. On one hand, I would hate for him to have an omniverse. On the other hand, why the hell HASN'T he tried that yet?

[Josh]

So, Glenn, you make The Chaser sound really intriguing, but you also say it is sunk by hammer violence.

Guess I'll have to see for myself.

I'm kind of surprised that the Woody Allen film isn't sunk by hammer violence. Doesn't one of the women inexplicably change from a seductive, witty, and worldly beauty into a shrill shrieking banshee who needs to be put down? I thought that happened in all of his films.

[Whitney Borup]

It's nice that Harrison Ford has finally stepped back into decent filmmaking, but what's with Woody Allen lately? A lesbian make-out scene to draw in crowds? ...I'm disappointed.

[patrick]

i keep imagining Cate Blanchett speaking English with a German accent in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even though she's supposed to be Russian