karen allen

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Things Heard and Seen (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Things Heard and Seen is good, actually. I don’t know if people are simply unprepared for reckoning with the fact that, if you live with ghosts and a gaslighter, the abuser is still the most dangerous thing in your house, or if this is another instance of modern audiences having been infantilized with jump scare horror pablum to the point that slow burns are impenetrable, but don’t believe the backlash. Maybe I should know better by now than to wonder why a film like Things Heard and Seen is treated with so much derision by the general public, resulting in largely negative reviews of both the professional and armchair variety. I suppose that derivativity, like beauty, must be in the eye of the beholder, especially when one of the negative reviews that I read had to stretch all the way back to What Lies Beneath to find something specific to which Heard and Seen could be compared (negatively, and illegitimately I think). There were a few writers I saw who also felt a little bit of a connection to The Shining as well, which is practically unavoidable given its subject matter, but the film also seems to be doing some of that intentionally, given its 1980 setting and its snowy conclusion. Overall, this felt fresh to me in a way that apparently it did not to others.

Successful art restorer Catherine Clare (Amanda Seyfried) lives in Manhattan with her husband George (James Norton) and daughter Fanny. George was once a painter of no small talent and has recently finished his dissertation. At Fanny’s birthday party, the couple share the news with their family and friends that they are moving to upstate New York, where George has secured a teaching position at the fictional liberal arts college Saginaw, near the town of Chosen, also fictional, in the real Hudson Valley. We learn that George was very recently cut off financially by his parents, and that Catherine only became aware of their prior dependency once that funding source dried up. We also learn that Catherine has an eating disorder, as she generally eats a starvation diet and purges after having one bite of Fanny’s cake.

The two get set up in a beautiful, if unmaintained, farm house by real estate agent Mare Laughton (Karen Allen), and the domesticity of this life isolates Catherine pretty quickly. This isolation isn’t helped by the fact that she almost immediately begins to see evidence of a haunting in their new home: she smells phantom, inexplicable gas fumes, occasionally sees lights that seemingly have no origin, and discovers personal items of previous occupants that appear cursed at best, including a ring jammed in a window sash and an ancient Bible belonging to the house’s first owner, a man of the cloth, in which certain names have been scratched out and replaced with only the word “damned.” For his part, George immediately seems to get along with his colleagues, especially Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham), the department chair who offered George the position based on his glowing letter of recommendation and his thesis on the work of Hudson Valley School founder Thomas Cole. He compliments George for the section of his thesis that pertained to Cole’s religious ideas, which were of the Spiritualist ideas that largely derived from the theological work of Emanuel Swedenborg; George shrugs off this praise, noting that Cole’s Spiritualism was the issue with which he struggled the most in the composition of his dissertation. When they meet, Catherine and DeBeers immediately hit it off, as he likewise notes that there is something in her house that George refuses to see. 

Despite George’s passive controlling of Catherine’s social circle, she still manages to form relationships with a few locals and some of George’s other peers, including the Vayle brothers, college-aged Eddie (Alex Neustaedter) and younger teen Cole (Jack Gore), as well as “adjunct weaving instructor” Justine Sokolov (Rhea Seehorn, who steals the show), George’s colleague and wife of fellow instructor—and marijuana cultivator—Bran (James Urbaniak). Meanwhile, George strikes up a relationship with Willis (Natalia Dyer), an Ivy League student home from school, against her better judgment. When he decides to throw a party for his colleagues, Catherine insists (over George’s pretentious objections) that they also invite their neighbors, and it is from Marie that Catherine learns about the tragic deaths of the last couple who lived in the house, and that not only was George intentionally keeping this information from her, he also kept secret that Eddie and Cole are actually their surviving children. George’s other lies, perhaps a lifetime of them, start to unravel, and so does he, as Catherine learns from the local spiritualists that evil spirits only commune with evil people, and that the spirits she sees in the house are actually there to protect her, and that she should listen to their warnings. 

There’s a lot of art discussion happening, and I’m always interested in that. There’s a little quotation that I like from video essayist and artist Lola Sebastian that I really love and think about all the time, because it articulates something that I could never express so succinctly and with such ineffably quiet brevity. She’s specifically writing about Sufjan Stevens, but her statement has much further reaching and broader implications about the importance of acknowledging the wider human experience outside of the various American pop culture meccas that we see over and over again: “Rich lives [and] big stories happen everywhere, to everyone.” George is a person who fails to see that, even a little bit, because of his obsession with being a person of status. He takes money from his parents to support the family in New York until they can’t help him any longer, and he decides that if he’s going to have to live upstate, he’ll be spending time only with those he deems fit company for a man of his standing, so only his academic colleagues and none of the family’s rural local neighbors. And given that he himself knows that he only has his position fraudulently, we know that he must be performing a constant tightrope act of delusion and self-deception. He’s a truly infuriating character, and that he can be so damned frustrating while attempting to come off as friendly and affable is a testament to a truly great performance by Norton. He effectively captures that ineffable quality of being smug but incredibly fragile, like a balloon that’s constantly threatening to burst. 

This is not a movie that you can watch half-heartedly while also doomscrolling or thinking about your grocery list. It’s decompressed, but that’s the point; it creates a painting before you, giving you enough time to see every detail and every brush stroke, and peopling its landscape with fully realized characters who are as believable as if they were flesh and blood. It requires all of your attention, and if you can give it all of that, you’ll be rewarded. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond