Hey everybody! Happy 100th post! It's been a fun ride since January. We've made some great friends and surprisingly few enemies. I think I'm a better writer now than I was at the beginning of this thing, so thanks for sticking around! There's lots of good stuff coming up as we head into the fall: Our 2nd annual Halloween Horror Movie Fest, the Starz Denver Film Festival in November, and - fingers crossed - Butt-Numb-A-Thon in December. For TMA's 100th story, I decided to go with something a little... controversal...
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! I am not pulling your leg, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is better than The Last Crusade. How’s that for controversy!?
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom opens with Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in Shanghai singing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”…in Mandarin Chinese. What starts in a realistic nightclub setting quickly evolves into a Busby Berkley-esque fantasy dreamscape populated with beautiful ladies in fabulous costumes hamming it up for the camera and performing magnificent feats of synchronized dance. And may I remind you, this is the opening to an Indiana Jones movie. So to anybody who is surprised or shocked at the bad taste of the ridiculous scenarios yet to come, I say you haven’t been paying attention.
If there is one thing Steven Spielberg makes uncomfortably clear from the get go, it is that “anything goes.” That one line haunts this entire movie. If you hate Temple of Doom, this mantra is where everything went wrong. But if you are a fan – and trust me, cool people like Temple of Doom – it is a challenge that Spielberg and co. more than live up to.
It’s fairly common knowledge that young Spielberg often fantasized that he would one day direct a James Bond movie. Legend has it, George Lucas countered, “I’ll do you one better. We’ll make our own James Bond.” Thus the gods spoke, Indiana Jones was born, and the rest is blockbuster history. Obviously Spielberg didn’t get all of his James Bond ya-yas out with Raiders, however, because he begins Indy’s second adventure with the most drawn out, ludicrous, absurd, and stone-classic James Bond intro ever. If James Bond had sex with the imagination of a seven year old boy with severe ADHD, their baby would be the first ten minutes of Temple of Doom. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, and after seeing the first ten minutes of Temple of Doom you will understand why. The world isn’t ready for this kind of madness. In case it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, the opening of this movie culminates with Indy, Willie, and Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) jumping out of a pilotless airplane over the Himalayas in an emergency raft, landing on the top of a mountain, sliding all the way down the mountain, plunging off a cliff, and landing in a river that takes them to India. And what comes after that is so insane that nobody remembers this part. Anything goes.
Tarantino has gotten some heat from haters in the last decade for directing very well made collages of the movies he grew up with. But damn if Spielberg didn't beat him to that punch about two decades early. The James Bond opening sequence is just the tip of the Himalayan mountain. Temple of Doom pays tribute to Busby Berkley musicals, not just in the opening song and dance number, but in the staging of the Thugee cult rituals. Witness the Capra-esque sentiment in the reunion of the kidnapped children with their parents. Spielberg even throws a little Wayne/O’Hara McLintock nod at the end when Indy whips Willie back to him for a kiss. More subtly, there are several notable uses of sped up film stock during the movie's action sequences that owe a heavy debt to the great silent slapstick comedians Chaplin and Keaton.
Anybody who has traveled abroad, or even anyone who’s read National Geographic, knows how ridiculous this portrayal of the Orient is. This is a great movie to watch right after a trip to the Far East. It’s like a distillation of all American fears about the world outside our country’s borders. Giant bats, creepy crawlies, bizarre food, unsanitary conditions, getting kidnapped and having your heart torn out by ethnic cultists. Obviously in reality you will probably only experience one of these things on a trip to a foreign country, not all of them on the same trip.
And of course, anyone revisiting Temple of Doom would be remiss not to note the legendarily obnoxious Willie Scott. This character is a perfect storm of poor writing, awful performance choices by romantic comedy non-legend Kate Capshaw, and the uncritical eye of a director infatuated with his leading lady. It’s majestically terrible. That’s why people still talk about it. It’s not bad, it’s the worst.
George Lucas has been in the news lately as being one of the forty-odd billionaires who have pledged at least half of their fortunes to charity. Watching Temple of Doom with that on my mind was illuminating. Suddenly the subplot wherein Indy frees all the poor Indian children from their shackles reveals a little too much. Whether it’s Indy freeing the slaves, Han Solo freeing the Ewoks, or George Lucas freeing the world, it’s a good thing that in life as in the movies the ethnics have whites around to save them.
At the beginning of this revisitation, I declared Temple of Doom better than The Last Crusade. It is. At its best Last Crusade manages to revive a small modicum of the magic of Raiders of the Lost Ark. At its worst, it’s a subpar retread. Nazis? Check. Biblical MacGuffan? Check. Desert horsey rides? Check. Temple of Doom, on the other hand, is a monster of excess, and regardless of its inconsistency it overflows with imagination and bravado. Neither movie lives up to the genius of Raiders. At least Temple of Doom chases its own dragons. Anything goes.
-Ben
