Indiana Jones and the Temple of Explanatory Dialogue

Last night I had another fabulous date with TMC and Mrs. TMC, this time to see the new Indiana Jones movie, in which the aging Indy solves the mystery of which nurse keeps stealing his pills.

No, no, that's not what happened. And in fact the movie was fairly entertaining, if pretty much what one has come to expect from an Indiana Jones movie: the quippy one-liners, the tan-on-tan outfits, the creepy skeletons, the ancient tombs and temples boasting surprisingly complex engineering (am I the only one who wonders what force, exactly, powers all those sliding rock doors?) Plus there are the dastardly Russians, who I've really been missing as movie villains. They bring a certain doofy, stone-faced incompetence to their evil hijinks that the evil Arabs just can't match, though in fairness I suppose the War o' Terror is still young and our Lucases and Spielbergs may yet compose an effective caricature of the ol' Desert Menace.

My one beef with the film was the dialogue, which tended toward the patronizing, as if the movie audience was made up entirely of ADD-addled first-graders. Here's just a brief representative sample:

Indy (Harrison Ford): The coins are being pulled toward the skull.
Mutt (Shia LaBeouf): The crystal skull?
Indy: Yes.
Mutt: But crystal isn't magnetic.
Indy: That's correct. There must be something else inside the skull.
Mutt: Something magnetic.
Indy: Yes. In the skull.
Mutt: The crystal skull.
Indy: Which we've been hunting for across the Amazon. The skull, I mean.
Mutt: But isn't this movie being filmed in Hawaii?
Indy: Look out! Angry natives!

Luckily, most of these conversations were pretty quickly interrupted by swordplay, monkeys, or killer red ants, though Indiana's capacity for explanatory speeches while fighting off gangs of comically inept Russians is pretty much without peer.

Too bad Indy couldn't have been there in person last night to fight off the hordes of
over-makeuped and under-sexed middle-aged ladies lining up to see that other movie that will remain nameless. I've been debating the relative ethics of publishing a picture of a few of those ladies, and while I feel just a little bit bad -- aw, fuck it, I don't feel bad at all. Enjoy:




I'm pretty sure the non-boa'd woman is the frigid Charlotte, while the lady dressed up as an Austin Powers Menopausal Fembot thinks she's a Carrie but is in fact a total Samantha.