Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

WHEN Raiders Of The Lost Ark came out in 1981, the trio of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford were forever etched onto the annals of cinema as an unstoppable force.

In Lucas they had the visionary, in Spielberg the perfect story-teller and with Harrison's rugged good looks and dead-pan charisma, they virtually had a licence to print massive wads of money.

They did. Three fantastic times. And then had the good sense to call it a day before their fedora-wearing golden goose started to lay rotten eggs.

But now the year is 2008 and it begs the question: When did these former box-office heavyweights actually do anything GOOD in the last decade? Or even a little bit DECENT?

Worse still, after the final death of the Star Wars prequel franchise, the thought of Lucas getting his bearded mitts on another childhood treasure seems about as welcome as a vicious snake bite.

So on paper a new Indiana Jones movie seems like forcing a healthy, if elderly, giant out of a dignified retirement and making it do tricks, to the obvious detriment of its health.

Yet that's unfair. Because although the legs on this franchise are a little worn and the exercise does genuinely seem pointless, there is clearly life in this old dog yet.

Not a great big flash, mind. But certainly a glimmer.

Return

Ford returns, good value as ever in the role of Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. Time has moved on, with Indy ready to retire as professor at the height of the commie-fearing 1950s.

The belt is a little looser, the shoes more comfortable, the jowls certainly more grizzled and that famous hatband – and pretty much everywhere else in fact – is now a lot sweatier.

This ‘new' adventure is another portion of the old serials that Spielberg and Lucas triumphantly reintroduced into the popular culture.

And therefore this film basically reads as homage to their homage.

The idea is that Jones, working for US intelligence, discovers a fiendish Russian plot to locate a highly classified but apparently undissected alien corpse.

Here Jones confronts his new foe, a Russian ice queen called Irina, played by eerily sexily by Cate Blanchett, who uses the time-honoured technique of putting a "y" before every vowel.

"You wiyill tyell mye ayall Amyerica's syecryets!"

With a black bob hairpiece, fetchingly tailored military fatigues and sexy boots, this Russkie babe wants to get her kinky claws on a mythic crystal skull perhaps belonging to some alien visitor.

And if reintroduced into its last resting place in the tomb of a legendary pre-Mayan civilisation deep in the South American jungle, it will give the Kremlin mystical power over the west.

Yes, it's one of those films.

Chase

So the chase is on, followed by another, then another, then another and another.

The great man is aided by a new young sidekick called Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), who arrives modelling Marlon Brando's biker look, presumably waiting for Wham! a few years too early.

The annoyingly over-acting and archetypical sulky LaBeouf takes over some of Indy's derring-do responsibilities, but thankfully not all of them by any means.

There is also Jones's unreliable Brit pal Mac, played by Ray Winstone, who has to shout "Jonesy!" in his cockney-tones a lot, while John Hurt plays a befuddled professor called Oxley.

It seems sad though that the legendary Hurt, playing someone so obviously old and senile, appears only in shot to make Ford look youngish in comparison.

A tall order for any actor.

It's good to see Karen Allen back as Indiana's first, and feistiest, love.

When I think of the Indiana Jones movies now, the single glorious moment is that superb visual gag pitting the swordsman against the gunman-the winner being all too obvious.

It was a brilliant joke, and it chimed with Indiana Jones's paradoxical modernity: the gun beats the sword, of course it does, duh!

Despite harking back to a golden age, the Jones franchise was thrillingly modern and new.

We'd never seen such stunts, such action, blended so effortlessly with self-deprecatory humour.

But since then, everyone else has been ripping off the act.

Rip-offs

While Ford has been away, we've had National Treasure, Sahara, The Mummy and The Da Vinci Code all tapping into the archaeologist-come-action hero market.

So when we see lost tombs, great grinding stone walls, sand waterfalls and gigantic underground shrines swivelling into new positions like enormous occult machines-well, the thrill is gone.

Plus the treasures themselves look as if they are going to be on the Antiques Roadshow.

Similarly, the CGI elements in this movie seem absurdly pointless and detract somewhat from the real stunts which made the first three films so utterly beguiling.

A computer generated LaBeouf swinging through the computer generated trees may put a few more female bums on seats, but it's the REAL stunts that get the BIG laughs.

There is one moment of the old Spielberg magic.

Jones finds himself alone on a nuclear test site with just 10 seconds to go before annihilation.

Desperately, he knocks on the door of a house, but finds the only occupants are lifesize mannequins: the whole community is a fake, constructed by the US government to assess the effect of a nuclear blast on civilians.

To see Indiana Jones alone in this chilling ghost town, desperately improvising a shelter from the explosion, is a tremendous moment, satirical and surreal.

As for much of the rest-well, let's hope this really is the Last Crusade.

The Savages

DYSFUNCTIONAL families are big business in an American film industry ridiculously bent on exploiting the supposed grim realities that exist in relationships.

Concepts of reality in the self-proclaimed ‘dream-factory,' however, get displaced by characters so ‘quirky' and full of ‘foibles,' it's a wonder any of them can get dressed in the morning.

Worse still, they fill these flicks with so much soggy sentiment, you're never exactly sure whether you're drowning in the slap-in-the-face ‘we love each other really' or their pleading for an Oscar.

Cue – in any order you feel – road trips, group hugs, lessons learnt, country soundtrack, arthouse direction and a pallet of primary colours so bright, even Superman would it find them garish.

And Tamara Jenkins' The Savages opens in much the same sugary vain.

Peggy Lee's I Don't Want To Play In Your Yard echoes over cutesy images of retirement life – cheerful seniors, sun-drenched hedges and a geriatric chorus line emerging from pristine homes.

But underneath this glossy-brochure façade, all is not well. Inside Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) and Doris Metzger's bungalow, two dignified lives are approaching their undignified ends.

The Little Miss Sunshine world is instantly dismissed as Lenny, chastised by the home help for "not flushing", smears a rude word on the bathroom wall with said unflushed item.

At least it looked like a rude word on first viewing. It could have very easily been the screenplay for Family Guy: Blue Harvest.

This act of defiance swiftly moves The Savages into an unsparing attack on the selfish half-lies that adults use to forgive themselves and into one of the finest films of the year.

When Doris dies, it becomes evident that Lenny's dementia will not allow him to live alone. His estranged children, back east, will have to come and get him.

The golden glow of Arizona is about to give way to the wintry grey of upstate New York in setting up a crisis for his fortysomething kids, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy (Laura Linney).

Suddenly they both find themselves obliged to deal with dementia head-on. "Does it smell?" Wendy asks Jon about the care home he's found. "They all smell," he replies.

Linney plays New York temp with playwright aspirations, Wendy Savage. Brittle and insecure, she resists real intimacy to fool around with a distressingly ugly and balding married man.

Hoffman plays her brother Jon, a morose professor of drama in who's trying to finish his study of Brecht ("I know everyone's really itching for a book about Bertolt Brecht this holiday season").

That brother and sister are both romantically unfulfilled and mildly addicted to painkillers tells its own story, and Jon's attempt to palm off responsibility on Wendy raises ghosts of sibling rivalry.

"Your life's more portable than mine," he tells her.

"What do you mean by that – like a toilet?"

Jenkins gets all the little details right, too, such as the titles of each sibling's work-in-progress: Wendy's semi-autobiographical play about her childhood is called 'Wake Me Up When It's Over,' while Jon's Brecht book is entitled 'No Laughing Matter.'

We can safely assume these be appearing in Richard and Judy's book club.

I suspect it all could have been a bit of a trial but for the performances of Linney and Seymour Hoffman, two actors at the very top of their game and criminally robbed of Oscars.

It's not often one sees the complicated relationships between adult siblings explored on film, and Jenkins is utterly blessed with two of the finest character actors of the decade.

But it's the film's searing honestly that pushes it above the dross in it's unavoidable truth: it's a bloody nuisance having to look after an ill parent, specifically one who has not earned their children's love.

The scene in which Jon and Wendy leave their father in the care home the first night and walk out into the car park, in particular, accurately distils what any child might feel on "abandoning" a parent – an internal commotion of guilt, relief and misery.

"We're just horrible people," cries Wendy, uselessly and naturally.

But then that's the point. Everything about this film is so natural and so very very real.

It may lack the comedy of say a Woody Allen classic, but Jenkin's solemn piece has a tenderness about these flawed heroes that is so profoundly touching and very moving.

A rare film which, incredibly, actually has something to say.

Iron Man

PICTURE the scene: King of the fairies Al Gore wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming carbon neutrally about a terrible nightmare.

He remembers horrifying images of incredibly manly-looking machines run purely on ozone thinning fossil fuels and testosterone.

Turns out it was just Iron Man—the only superhero to watch An Inconvenient Truth and then promptly fireball the cinema to sound of loud electric guitar solos.

Then again, he's probably not alone in that idea.

The first of planned trilogy, Iron Man's an 'origins' story—in the same vein as Batman Begins—in more ways than one.

After all, it's the first true Marvel Studios picture and the first fully financed by those comic-book publishers-turned-entertainment mega house.

With north of $150 million resting on those broad gold and red shoulders, it represents a pretty risky way to kick-start a fledgling business.

Add to the mix a creative team who have never opened a summer blockbuster—despite several Oscar nods—it sounds like the workings of a studio in need of a Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmare-style reality b******ing.

But this BIG gamble in going for talent over big-names has paid off big time, because Iron Man positively roars onto the screen and a new francise is born.

Billionaire-slash-playboy weapons manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is touring Afghanistan in the hope he can convince the US military to buy some of fancy-pants missiles.

Unfortunately for the goateed-Stark, the tour is ambushed and he's captured by a terrorist group who force him to build them the same missile for free.

Not the brightest bunch, these guys, luckily for Stark.

They only realise their 'missile' looks suspiciously like a giant killer robot with flame throwers for arms a few minutes before Stark climbs inside it, boots down the door and toasts them alive.

Still, it's one of those errors anyone could make on their first day of a new job.

On his return to the US, Stark promptly decides to right the wrongs made by the weapons his creates by creating, ahem, another weapon in the form of a more garish and powerful suit.

Did we forget to mention he also has some fatal shrapnel swimming around in his heart waiting to pounce and put an early end to his superhero-ing career?

Don't worry as he's built himself a nice little electromagnetic pacemaker powered by a mini-reactor from the odds and ends one usually finds hanging around a remote cave.

Logic aside, I can't remember too many people shaking their heads in sky-cursing anger when dinosaurs suddenly appeared in Jurassic Park.

Nor did anyone protest too much when Doc Emmett Brown uttered something from the ‘it just does travel in time' school of movie technology in Back To The Future?

And in the same way that both those particular films pushed the barriers of special effects, ILM's incredible photo-real work on Iron Man himself is utterly flawless.

In fact, it even builds on last year's Transformers in terms of getting the weight, power and look of heavy metal hardware just about perfect.

Fortunately for those wanting more than smash-bang-wallop in their popcorn film, the cast have also got it well sussed to create a suprisingly compelling and composed character piece.

Gwyneth Paltrow is perfect in the thankless archetype of the torch-holding and unfortunately-named secretary Pepper Potts, and shows real warmth and zing bantering against Downey Jr.

Jeff Bridges, too, shines as the bullish and hard-edged Obidiah Stane, even if he's the worst-kept secret-movie-bad-guy since Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine.

And in case you haven't guessed, the role of Stark fits Robert Downey Jr perfectly like a titanium-alloy, servo-assisted glove.

The back-from-the-brink actor veers nimbly between both the swaggering and sensitive sides of his character, never mistiming a brutally hilarious wisecrack.

The Comeback Man in more ways than one then.

However, the film is typical of origin stories like Batman Begins and X-Men in that it tragically suffers a serious case of OSS (Origin-Story-Syndrome).

Once Stark has his powers, the film runs out of steam and is unsure where to go. thus leaving the latter-half to quickly summon up and dispense with a token threat to test the hero's mettle.

The action sequences, too, also lack the certain punch of a summer blockbuster and feel a little wanting in their pay-offs, particularly the disappointing final battle.

That aside, the central performances director Jon Favreau pulls from his actors and the desire to see these characters develop in the next films more than makes-up for any short-comings.

Here's hoping Marvel keep their Iron Man on a one-villian-a-movie diet.

And yes, I'm talking to you Spider-Man.

Iron Man is now showing in cinemas worldwide.

Family Guys Presents: Blue Harvest

A LONG time ago, yet somehow in the future, a couple of Star Wars loving nerds decided to make a cartoon of their favourite film.

Sounds like something worth avoiding as far as the Hoth System, right?

But what if those Lucasfilm-worshipping geeks were the creators of one of the funniest adult animation series on the planet?

And what if Obi-Wan Kenobi was a Luke-obsessed paedophile, Han Solo an overweight slob and megalomaniac Darth Vader a nappy-wearing baby in a helmet?

Excited? Well, don't be. Because while Family Guys Presents: Blue Harvest is certainly a bold concept, it rarely hits the dizzying heights of its regular series.

Central to its failure is that it comes across a weepy-eyed love-in for a writing staff who presumably grew-up desperately wishing they could s**g Princess Leia.

And if they couldn't have her, they would've probably taken the Crown-Prince of nerds, George Lucas himself – at least it seems that way from the amount of Star Wars references normally in Family Guy.

However, because their source material clearly makes FG go weak at the knees, satire is suddenly replaced with homage, bite with kisses and humour with sheer boredom.

Indeed, their reworking of the first film in the original trilogy – shoehorned into the show when there is a blackout in Quahog and Peter decides to tell a story – adds very little in terms of story-telling to the actual motion picture.

Many of the so-called jokes are also incredibly obvious – casting Stewie as Vader, Brian as Chewbacca – and the rest assume an intimate Stars Wars knowledge that too few viewers may have.

The interview with Lucas as a bonus feature, too, suggests anything truly risqué would have already been gathered in the net and removed by a company notorious for being very protective of their brands.

If there is any real plus is that Blue Harvest features some truly fantastic animation that pushes the show's characteristic format, and trades it in for a lush and vibrant cinematic feel.

But some pretty pictures hardly merit the some-what extortionate £19.99 price tag for a single ropey episode and a couple of ordinary extras, including a montage of FG Star Wars references.

In this world, The Simpsons may the most respected and South Park more edgy, but for pure laughs, no show can even compete with Family Guy.

So save your money or buy one of the earlier series, and see why this USUALLY great show was once the most outrageous and hilarious on earth.

If you really need your satirical Star Wars fix then you'll probably have to look a lot further than what has sadly amounted to just another piece of Lucas-endorsed money-racking tat.

Anyone suddenly thinking ‘Jar Jar' Blinks?

Coldplay - Violet Hill

THEY'VE been described as a incredibly morose group, producing music for students who still wet the bed, and the Dulux equivalent of comatose beige.

Like them or loathe them, Coldplay are back with their new single Violet Hill, and the first track from their fourth album Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends.

And it's pretty damn good.

Except, it probably won't seem the least bit groundbreaking, with the opening atmospheric wash of sound and piano intro seeming like the soft-rockers are on autopilot.

But just stay with it.

Because once the distorted, tense opening guitar chords and stampeding drums arrive on the scene, things suddenly start to get very interesting.

OK, Chris Martin's – AKA Mr Paltrow (the one without the shoes) – voice may sound the same as ever with none of the alleged crazed falsetto, but the band do sound distinctly different.

It's almost like U2's Where The Streets Have No Name, played by Avalon-era Roxy Music.

And that's just dandy with us.

Lyrically too, it's a far more ambitious, ambiguous affair than much of the band's slap-you-round-the-face-sentimentality, usually featured on their bigger tracks.

There's also no traditional chorus per se, just a repeated refrain of "If you love me, won't you let me know…" followed by Secret Machines-esque and chord walloping.

And oddly it's this distinct musical phrase, the simplest in the track, that proves the most effective and moving.

But oddest of all is Johnny Buckland's solo.

Eschewing his paint-by-numbers soaring sustained notes, the centrepiece of this song is a melodic light-hearted (jolly even) glam rock guitar loop.

Which-if nothing else on the track-bears the fingerprints of producer Brian Eno, making this latest effort sound little like the band have ever recorded.

It really leaves you expecting a more ambitious experimental album to follow.

And best of all, the more you hear it, the better it sounds...

Alvin And The Chipmunks

THE once great Hollywood film industry is officially on its knees.

Creatively spent, full of unhappy striking writers, and now left to rummage through the toy box and exhuming the mothballed cartoons of its troubled youth.

And so with every other feature being created by the Judd Apatow juggernaught this year – and hot off the tail(s) of Scooby Doo and Garfield – comes the return of Alvin And The Chipmunks.

Theoretically at least, then, a live-action/animation version of the singing Chipmunks pretty much stands for everything that right-thinking film fanatics should be fervently fighting against.

But there's a problem. It's actually not that bad.

Not groundbreaking, mind you – not like The Snowman or Toy Story – but director Tim Hill's film is so breezy and utterly daft that it's perfect food for the kind of trash your mind occasionally craves after a long day in a steaming office.

The first surprise is that Jason Lee (of My Name is Earl fame) does a sufficiently decent job as the failing songwriter/boyfriend/general human-being Dave Seville.

He's hardly the most three-dimensional, nor most memorable of characters.

Yet it's to the likeable Lee's credit that he happily steps aside to play patsy to the three CGI rendered Chipmunks, who he enlists to pull him out of the mire into song writing stardom.

The next revelation is just how astonishing alive the computerised Alvin, Simon and Theodore (don't pretend like you'd forgotten their names) appear on screen.

Gone are soulless CGI characters, without a glimmer of life of emotion between their eyes. And yes, we're talking about you Scooby Doo and Beowulf.

These lifelike emoting ‘Monks effortlessly sail just the right side of mawkish, with their sadistic slapstick routines recalling the most vintage Tom And Jerry.

All this means that it probably doesn't matter that the plot is pure chipmunk droppings – as some truly desperate and heavy-handed attempts at pathos attest – because you'll be laughing too hard to care.

But mutter all this very quietly, as the official line from headquarters is that we still have unadulterated contempt for the reclamation of cartoon classics for a quick buck.

But on account of its gleeful, brainless pace and sheer belly-laugh quota, we'll let this VERY guilty pleasure slip through the good-taste net just this once.

Out now on DVD.

QI: The B Series

TAKE one legendary comedian slash actor, renowned for his magnificent wit and, let's be honest, really Quite Intelligence (Stephen Fry).

Mix said national treasure with yet another part comedian part actor, only this one being more renowned for his less-than-Quiet Ignorance (Alan Davis).

And the resulting concoction? Well, it's Quite Interesting. More specifically, it's QI: The B Series.

Now in its fifth series, it's business as usual for the consistently highbrow comedy fixture in an increasingly lowbrow TV schedule.

It's a schedule run by producers who commission ‘My Family' into series four billion, and still persist with the idea that YouTube clips presented by ‘comedian' Lenny Henry make great TV.

‘Lenny Henry dot TV' doesn't, but QI really does.

Its ace was convincing the ever-excellent and irrepressible Fry to take the quizmaster's chair.

His wealth of knowledge is only marred by the inexplicable revelation in the DVD extras that he sometimes has information piped to him by the producers. This is probably a fact you'll want to instantly dismiss, like the first time you hear that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the idea of good ITV drama on Sundays is just pure fantasy.

But the dynamic of the series wouldn't work, without its permanent contestant, Davies. He's the pupil to Fry's teacher; the show's Paul Merton to Fry's Angus Deayton.

This second series is loosely based on the theme of ‘things beginning with the letter B.' Blue, Bombs, and Big Bountiful Bears are therefore just a few of the diverse subjects put on trial.

Yet, while the complex themes change week-by-week, mercifully the simple format does not.

Davies gets the funny buzzer, states the obvious and gets playfully reprimanded because of it while the bewildered guests look on and occasionally chip in with something meaningful.

Company included in this series range from Jeremy Clarkson, John Sessions, Jimmy Carr and Josie Lawrence; all fill in the gaps when neither Fry or Davies have something to say.

On paper, somehow this show really really shouldn't work.

But by God it does and, as a result, it champions the kind of programming that should be propping up TV channels for years in order to offer a much needed alternative to Robert Lindsay.

Quite Interesting? More like Very Interesting.

QI: The B Series is now available in shops as a double DVD.

The Darjeeling Limited

WES Anderson walks into a bar clad in a white suit, spills his typically pastel-coloured smoothie on his lap, and leaves the bar without a mark on it.

Not the set-up for a woeful comedic turn, but rather the abnormal phenomena of how this director has managed to avoid virtually any backlash in a usually artistically suspicious critical community.

With more stars than a Michelin chef, it seems languid words such as ‘poignant,' ‘quirky,' and ‘visionary' are now positively akin to films with day-glo fish and ‘Look At Me' eccentricities.

But while The Darjeeling Limited is bursting with Anderson's usual vivid aesthetic, the colours are merely from the stunning Indian milieu in his most restrained film since Rushmore.

It's a gorgeous travelogue as three brothers – Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) – embark on a journey of discovery across the continent after their father's death to reaffirm the long-frayed bonds that once connected them.

Soon it's apparent they're a trio of utter screw-ups, full of tacit grief for obvious reasons, and devoid of direction, both in their journey and in their lives, particularly in Francis' case.

The heavily bandaged Texan, for once playing dad, forgoes the usual dippy schtick and emerges as a much more vivid, human presence than in his previous stoner incarnations.

Similarly, Adrien Brody combines pathos with dignity, a very tricky act to pull off.

Essential to the mix is Hotel Chevalier – the short that plays between the main feature – which sees Schwartzman spending fraught moments with his ex (Natalie Portman).

With so many of Jack's gags in the feature stemming from this 12-minute lovers' tryst, his lugubrious, dark-eyed character seems comparatively underwritten without it.

So basically don't take the 'Watch The Film Alone' option on this DVD release.

But despite the great cast and breathtaking sweeping cinematography from Anderson's long-time cohort Robert Yeoman, the film does lose steam once the boys alight from the train, morphing from a considered ensemble act into a series of overwrought set pieces.

But this is still sad, funny and touching – substance FINALLY winning over style.

Extra-wise, the disc is pretty flimsy, which is disappointing, considering other DVDs from the director have been double-disc affairs with commentaries, outtakes and interviews.

Then again, this is Anderson at his rawest: bumph not included.

The Darjeeling Limited is out now on DVD.