MousePlanet staff writer Alex Stroup responds to feedback from readers on his recent reviews of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Tony R. writes:
I don’t think I’ve ever written you before, so let me first say that I enjoy your reviews quite a bit. I find them to be well reasoned, informed, and most importantly, parent-centric.
Having said that, and being the stickler for proper usage of the English language, please tell me these were oversights on your part from your Prince Caspian review.
“…so that he can take the thrown.”
“Warned by his tutor, Caspian fleas to the woods”
My hope is these were included as jokes to make sure people were paying attention. I would hate to think these were intentional in any other sense.
Keep up the good work, sir.
Thanks for the kind words. Let me assure you that they were in no way intentional, nor do those errors reflect a gap in my knowledge of the English language. One disadvantage of being a very accomplished typist is that I am generally not actually looking at what I type while I’m typing it and I also type nearly as fast as I think up the words.
Unfortunately this has resulted in me being a master of homophones when I write. My brain thinks of the correct word and my fingers immediately spit it out, in some correctly spelled form and apparently without regard to whether it was actually the word I was thinking. I should keep a record of them since over the years I have stumbled across some amazing ones.
Movies are generally screened just a day or two before the review is submitted for publication meaning that they get copyedited on short notice and under pressure so unfortunately, even aware of this quirk of mine, they still get through every once in a while.
Thanks for pointing them out (really, I do like to get them corrected) without assuming that I must be completely uneducated.
John writes:
Thank God [George Lucas] is still making movies, despite the incessant whining and ungrateful attitude of people like you. He has created a mythology, universe and characters like no other person since, well, mythmakers. It’s one that people around the world know and come back to over and over.
George Lucas made the movies he wanted to make, and they obviously pleased someone somewhere—just not Internet writers. It’s a shame that you have to continue bashing him, and amazing to me that he continues to make movies despite people like you. He probably should just shut down his company and call it a day, but he doesn’t—and thankfully he’s grown a thick enough skin to put up with the taunts and name-calling that people like you do.
Without George Lucas, there would be no Indiana Jones, there would be no Star Wars, there would, closer to your world, have been no revival in the ’80s and ’90s of Tomorrowland and Adventureland, there would be no Star Wars Weekends… and there would be no Pixar.
You don’t like his movies. OK. That’s fair. Many of us do. We love them. Every single one of them. The ones he directed and the ones he didn’t. We don’t “blame” him. And we don’t put him down.
We also get a little tired of the complaining. Relax. Enjoy the movies—or don’t. And leave it at that.
Thanks for the feedback, John. Honestly, I do appreciate it and I would admit to being hyperbolic in my comment about George Lucas.
You’re right that George Lucas is one of the great American mythmakers. Or was 20-30 years ago. In my opinion, he hasn’t done anything but tarnish that well-deserved reputation since. That said, he has continued to make (or at least his technical companies have) amazing contributions to the work of others. He is, again in my opinion, at his best when he has little direct involvement in the story being told and is just there to make it look as good as possible.
But perhaps I do overreact to the absolute disaster he made of the second Star Wars trilogy. It doesn’t detract from the brilliance of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, American Graffiti, and The Empire Strikes Back but I do wonder where the person that made those movies went because I haven’t seen any evidence of him in a very long time.
John responds:
That’s a matter of opinion, though, isn’t it? I mean Phantom Menace is second only to the first Star Wars in terms of the number of people who saw it worldwide. And clearly many saw it over and over and over, and still do on DVD.
It’s a matter of perspective and opinion about whether he’s “tarnished it” by telling the stories he wants to tell the way he wants to tell them, something no other major American filmmaker is able or even tries to do—and something that can only be done by breaking off from the studio system. Say what you will, but they’re exactly what he wanted to see on screen.
And if I were him, which I sadly am not, I’d frankly have had enough with people who continually tell me how terrible, horrible, untalented and unworthy I am. How my movies are “absolute disasters.” I’d have given up. I’m so glad he’s not me and I’m not him, because now we get more Star Wars, and he’s good enough to say, “I don’t really pay attention to them.” I’m so glad we get more. I can’t wait to see ’em.
As for Indy, if you don’t like it, then the director and screenwriter should probably take a bit of the blame, rather than the executive producer, who by all accounts was on the set for something like six days.
Of course it is a matter of opinion. There is nothing objective at all to the decision whether a movie is good or not. Personally, I would prefer that the last three Star Wars movies had never been made. Better to still live with the idea of what could have been than that mess that actually was. But yes, that is personal opinion and you’ll find many people who disagree with me.
My job, as I see it, is not to try and guess what millions of moviegoers are going to think of a movie but rather to explain what I think of it and why. Hopefully some people will find that information interesting and over time perhaps they can begin to use me as a guide to what they have the best chance of liking for themselves (either because we tend to agree or we disagree so often than they can use me as a negative indicator).
It is definitely the case that George Lucas does not deserve primary blame for the problems that exist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He has a story credit, and the story in the movie is weak. Where blame should be split with screenwriter David Koepp is hard to say but I’m willing to put it primarily on Koepp. The problems with overused CGI I lay at the feet of Steven Spielberg.
But where I mentioned George Lucas in my review it was not in relation to his impact on this particular movie but rather explaining why, when just hearing about the movie being made, I was torn between excitement and dread. And, for me, George Lucas having creative involvement in a movie (and, admittedly, that hasn’t been very many movies) has not been a good omen for many, many years now.
Pete writes:
Honestly, Alex, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for your credentials. Have you watched films for long? Are you even aware what the Indy films seek to imitate?
First this: I didn’t read your review before seeing Indy because I wanted to enjoy the film, and I knew that you would trash it. Why did I know? Because you praised a horrible film a few weeks earlier: the new Narnia movie. That Narnia movie had no story whatsoever and yet you praised it as something one would definitely want to see. Really bad review. I wasted my money on a movie that started nowhere and ended exactly where it started with not a whole lot happening in between. Contrast Narnia with the incredible Lord of the Rings trilogy and you’ll understand the difference between great filmmaking and a cheap attempt to make money.
So, on to Indy. Remember last summer when I took you to task for expecting too much of the second National Treasure film; remember how I referred to it as a poor man’s Indy? Well, you’re at it again. Indy, in fact the whole franchise, is designed to imitate the serial cliffhangers of the, I think, ’50s. The story was secondary in those films; it was the action and the heroics that mattered. From the start the Indy films re-created this with absolute perfection. Even the mediocre Temple of Doom had great action and fun moments. It’s a summer movie, Alex. It’s not an Oscar-worthy picture. You’re allowed to have a film where the impossible happens; in fact, in a picture like this, the moviegoer expects and demands it. It’s happened in all the Indy films. Don’t you remember all the improbable escapes in the first, second, and third Indy films? Escaping from a crashing plane in an inflatable boat? Hitching a ride on a submarine that mysteriously doesn’t submerge on its hundreds of miles journey? A thousands of years old Knight still alive, protecting the cup of Christ? It’s the same thing here; it’s Indiana Jones for goodness sake.
Once again, you have taken yourself too seriously. I truly would love to know how you got to be the chief poobah of movie reviewers on this site, because you are nearly always wrong. I’m sure you’re a pretty decent guy, just incapable of reviewing a movie.
About Indy 4: yes, it was a bit slow; yes, Indy was older—it’s amazing how hard it is for us to reconcile the passing of time in any of our movie heroes, but it was the same old Indy. Sure the plot was a bit “out there”, but again, the cliffhangers of old never made sense, the plot just set the scene for all the action and comedy. In this installment, the action was top notch and the comedy was great; so many really great lines in this movie, including the old Star War’s line, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Spielberg was back on form for the first time in a while, in my opinion. It was wonderfully filmed. I loved how the film reminded us of George Lucas’ American Graffiti. Did you see the same film as I did or did you accidentally wander into the Narnia movie and come to your senses about its lack of quality?
Take off your “reviewers” cap and go see the film again as a normal person, wanting to escape the real world for a while in search of fun. I guarantee that you will have a good time.
Suz writes:
I couldn’t agree more with your review. It was great to see Indy again (and he is miraculously well preserved—I guess that sip from the Holy Grail is all it was cracked up to be). But. The story just wasn’t as engaging and there were numerous problems—Indy’s trust of the Mac character (and his magical lighter impervious to three giant waterfalls) being not the least. And don’t even get me started on the tacked-on wedding, as nice as it is to think of Indy and Marion happy together after all these years.
But for me, the indelible memory of this movie will be the fact that Indiana Jones pronounces it “nuke-you-lar.” This may be the greatest heartbreak of my life.
