Destiny and Juju

I watch three films from three different media franchises. Still reading that Ellroy memoir. A round of Roulette. I finish a collection of newspaper comics and start another one.

Feast or Franchise

Recently I’ve been exclusively watching movies from major media franchises. This section about ‘em is gonna get detail-explicit, mainly with regards to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and could really take a shit on your enjoyment if you haven’t seen it. Like Indy in a booby trapped ancient temple, I advise you to proceed with meticulous caution.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, directed by James Mangold, 2023. I went out and paid to see this by myself in a theater, something I do so infrequently that I can’t remember the time before.

With regards to the Indiana Jones pictures, I grew up on ‘em and love the franchise. As a kid I was also really into the The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series and read at least one of the Young Indiana Jones novels. I take the character seriously as one of the great innovations in cinema and I think the first film Raiders of the Lost Ark is a genuinely excellent picture all around.

This newest installment, the final film in the franchise and the first one not directed by Steven Spielberg, isn’t nearly as bad as I’ve heard people saying and has a lot of good things going for it. When I first saw the preview I thought it looked awful, partly because I couldn’t believe anyone thought it was a good idea to put the word “dial” in the title of an adventure film series famous for cool-sounding titles.

But everyone involved seems pretty determined not to have fucked this up and to average all of the best-liked components of the previous films into something fans might not universally love but would roundly have a hard time feeling betrayed by. They pulled it off, though some details worked better than others.

• As with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they updated the year in which the film is set so that the number of years Indiana Jones has aged between installments roughly corresponds to how many years Harrison Ford has aged. Crystal Skull was set in 1957 and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is set in 1969, except for a lengthy opening chapter set in the European War theater in 1944 and which makes use of what I have to admit is the most convincing cinematic de-aging CGI I’ve ever seen. First point in the film’s favor: the special effects are decidedly non-cringe and functionally effective throughout.

• The overall story is solid. Well-trodden territory, good-not-great. Looking back over the previous four films the producers appear to have noticed or at least heard the fans out about the reality that the vastly superior first and third films both involve Indy and his allies racing the Third Reich to obtain powerful artifacts that could tip the balance of World War II. Incommensurately high stakes aligned with the whimsical adventures of a plucky, globe-trotting, whip-cracking smartass archaeologist who improvises a plan as he goes and maneuvers in the face of evil adversaries who possess superior resources. (Seeing fictitious Nazis get killed in pulp or pulp-pastiche pictures is always a morally clean way to satiate the bloodlust of the cinema-going public. And is very fun.) Like the two other truly great Indy films they made Nazis the bad guys in this one, and they found a way to do it that connects reasonably well to that 1969 timeline update.

• What is this way? Time travel. The “Dial of Destiny” turns out to be a machine designed in antiquity by Archimedes that permits for time travel by “locating fissures in time,” if I remember correctly the language deployed by the aging Nazi villain played by Mads Mikkelsen, the preeminent cinematic creep-psychotic heavyweight marquee star of our era. In a clever touch the writers make Mikkelsen’s character one of those real-life brilliant Nazi scientists that the USA and USSR divided up and squared off against one another as World War II gave way to the Cold War; in the Indy universe this particular scientist worked for the USA on the moonshot mission but never relinquished his Nazi sympathies and wants to beat Indy to the Dial of Destiny so he can go backwards in time, seize power from Hitler and reprosecute the War as a Nazi victory. I thought all of this was good-enough writing and I liked the time-travel component, both at first as a MacGuffin and later as a development that becomes crucial to the story’s conclusion. This gives an emotional denoument to the life’s work of Indiana Jones that I found unexpectedly deeply moving: Indy the great archaeology professor ends up literally going back in time and seeing firsthand an era in which he is expert, even meeting one of the great geniuses of history and speaking to him in his native language, which of course a scholar like Indy knows fluently. This actually makes a wonderful kind of sense for this character — a man who has lived in the excavation of ancient civilizations and their relics ends up experiencing them firsthand for the first and last time in his bizarre and adventuresome life.

• The intention to bind together the best of the other four films is most apparently embodied in the character played by that talented actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge from that popular television program I had no interest in going past the first episode of. She plays a dashing and brilliant woman too young and too familiar (said to be his goddaughter) to the seventy-something Indy to be a romantic interest and her character switches repeatedly from being a collegiate friend to a traitorous competitor to a reliable ally. She’s fiercely bold and intelligent but is also greedy and cynical. Refreshingly complex and intentionally written to recall all four of Indy’s previous female lust-foils.

• Marion Ravenwood, the best of those female antagonist/love interest foils and for my money one of the sexiest and most interesting characters in cinema history, makes a late reappearance here. This is execeuted fairly tastefully and satisfactorily, both by the film’s quartet of writers and by Karen Allen in her third appearance as Marion. Her presence in the film’s final scene is to reconcile her to Indy, whom she married at the end of the last movie but is suing for divorce at the beginning of this one. Eventually we find out that their marriage began to crumble after the death of their adult son who joined the military and died fighting in the Vietnam War. This is a piece of writing that this fifth Indiana Jones picture gets blissfully right — not only do they kill off the character that was played by that shithead charlatan Shia LaBeouf in Crystal Skull but they do it retroactively, off-screen and with a deft piece of writing that perfectly establishes the sad, broken, redemption-ark-needing Indy to whom we are introduced in the beginning of Dial of Destiny.

• Waller-Bridge’s character also brings to the table a ragamuffin-pickpocket character intended as a fan-friendly throwback to Short Round, Indy’s sidekick from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The character is meant both to give children seeing their first Indiana Jones picture an emotional point of access to the goings-on and to make their parents fondly nod toward memories of Short Round. This is one of the weakest parts of the movie simply because Ethann Isidore who plays the Moroccan child sidekick here is surprisingly charisma-deficient, especially when compared with Ke Huy Quan as Short Round back in 1984, and also because the character is the most lazily-written in the picture. He still gets a few really cool stunt moments though, tangling with the Nazis emeritus in a car chase, in the air and especially in one thrilling bout of underwater fisti-handcuffs.

• Again for the fans: the legendary actor John Rhys-Davies is back as Indy’s Egyptian archaeology colleague Sallah, who like the Nazis only ever shows up in the less-flawed and more self-assured Indiana Jones pictures. Not sure whether correlation establishes causation here but it doesn’t hurt anything to have Sallah appear, nor to have him and his family living in New York City where Indy is holed up at the film’s beginning and where most of the action of the first act is enjoyably set.

In the final analysis: YEAH you can see some of the fraying seams in a franchise that is basically begging the fans’ permission to go out in style on a relative high note. They are trying to accomplish a little too much at once to make a great movie but they have definitely averted disaster and made something overall decent enough not to be embarrassing. The movie also has a very slick and elegant look to it with some vibrant colors and clever set pieces. And even when it’s kinda dumb it never quite gets slow enough to be boring.

Nowhere near as good as the stalwart first and third installments in the franchise. It’s definitely superior to the mixed bag of the fourth film. And it’s a toss-up in comparison with Temple of Doom, which is so discordantly different in tone and content from the other four films in the series as to make comparisons interestingly difficult. But Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is three things I didn’t expect it to be from the title and trailer: basically a pretty well-made film, a fun time at the movies and a non-embarrassing way for Ford, Spielberg and their collaborators and fans to say a fond farewell to a character that has brought us many hours of joy over a period of more than four decades.

2 Fast 2 Furious, directed by John Singleton, 2003. In my last entry I stated that I was unlikely to watch any more Fast and Furious films after having finally seen the first one for the first time. But then I was basically dared to watch the second one by the writer and designer Mills Baker and I decided to delegate to him, with a promise to do as he declared, the decision about whether or not I should watch it. Since you are reading this you know which way Caesar Millsius’s thumb pointed from his seat of honor in the One Could Argue gladiatorial arena.

2 Fast 2 Furious is really poorly made; much of it has the look and feel of some straight-to-video B-picture. It’s an exquisitely silly piece of shit. It has a bit of that kind of crunchy, shitty CGI that was really popular in the early 2000s where the camera flies INSIDE THE MACHINE and like shows you how the super-charged engine is powering up or whatever. Paul Walker, who from the two of his pictures I have now seen was never much of a gifted actor to begin with, is given just absolutely ghastly dialogue to work with here and is also saddled with dragging the picture along without any help from Vin Diesel, whom I mentioned previously was by far the most fun and interesting performer in the first film. Walker is forced instead to play off of Tyrese Gibson who is about as talented an actor as Walker. (I thought Gibson was known primarily as a model, but internet research indicates that he’s apparently more famous for being a singer. In any case he’s a lousy actor.)

You know who else is in this? That one guy Mark Boone Junior from the That One Guy From That Thing school of character acting, who almost always plays a sleazy, tastelessly-dressed corrupt police detective. In 2 Fast 2 Furious he plays a sleazy, tastelessly-dressed corrupt police detective.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic. I think the Super Nintendo game Super Mario World is one of the great works in the history of art and design and the Mario aesthetic in general is breathtakingly beautiful to me and is a noteworthy influence on my style as a cartoonist. (I mean this largely with reference to my more elaborate and colorful work, but the cartoons I produce for this newsletter do indeed bear a lineage downstream of characters from the Mario universe, most especially the vertical-line cartoon eyes that I got from the sixteen-bit version of Lakitu’s Cloud and the Starman invincibility item.)

I wrote about the older live-action Super Mario Bros. movie over a year ago while still living in my friends’ house before it burned. That one has a lot of problems and a few distinguishing strengths but interestingly almost all of these attributes for better and worse are completely misaligned with what this new CGI-animated version gets right and wrong. That batshit live-action one was poorly written but in an interesting way; the brand new one is poorly written in a headshakingly banal and far more boring way. The structure is an utterly uninvolving paint-by-numbers Campbell quest, the dialogue amounts to the writers panhandling for chuckles and the use of retro pop music and more than one embarrassing Elton John parody sequence are downright bilious.

They got a pretty good cast of talented movie stars like Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black to show up for this but they are given really bad dialogue to read and also sound like they just stopped by the studio to do one set of takes, get paid and get the fuck out of there. For which I don’t blame them.

The visuals are the only thing that this movie nails. They are fiercely loyal to the classic Mario imaging and brand in a way that the previous live-action movie wasn’t. The most beautiful games in the series hadn’t even been conceived of at that time, but now that the game series has only gone from strength to strength in the grandeur and inventiveness of its design the makers of this feature had only to stick to that look and use up-to-date CGI animation techniques to make the world of Mario, Luigi, Bowser et al appear fully-realized as a fantasy environment. They get pretty close to Pixar-worthy levels of awe with the expertise and care that is exhibited here on the part of the design team, though interestingly I don’t suppose that even a slick, expensive A-list Hollywood film production can ever feel as lived-in as a video game environment where you control the characters. Bottom line: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is delightful to look at and sucks shit in every other way.

Juju Comes and It Goes; Even a Good Man’ll Break

My Dark Places, “III: Stoner,” Ellroy writing about 1962 from the cultural and political redoubt of 1996: “America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.” Particularly for a guy who lost his mother to homicide when he was ten and battled addictions and committed petty crimes and spent time living in a public park, Ellroy sure does here seem retrospectively myopic and even naive. Several very short years after he wrote those words a lot of social switches got simultaneously short-circuited and that “divisive bad juju” that seemed in 1996 to have been bucked went tumbling back down a “25-year transit” to each and every one of Ellroy’s enumerated points.

Roulette

Maisy Goes to the Library by Lucy Cousins, read in 2016. Cousins is an English children’s book illustrator who works in a flattened, painterly, primary-colored style, rendering fun and simple stories about her signature character, a mouse named Maisy who moves through a community of other animals. Warm, undemanding, lighthearted and fun to look at.

Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath, read in 2020. Book-length spinoff of comedian Andrew Doyle’s parody Twitter account where Doyle viciously sends up vapid, narcissistic and pitifully self-unaware online wokesters. McGrath is his composite of every entitled, self-contradictory moral relativist Twitter mean girl. As an account that makes fun both of a particular type of insufferable online persona and of the stupidity of Twitter itself, Titania is bitingly subversive and hilarious. In the book format Doyle couldn’t stick the landing, perhaps partly because it’s too implausible that someone like Titania would get a glossy book contract (whereas any idiot can, and does, have a Twitter account) and partly because Doyle just couldn’t keep the gimmick funny for that long of a stretch. In fact I don’t remember so much as chuckling aloud once while reading this book.

Back in Bleck by Johnny Ryan, read in 2015. Ryan has been one of the best cartoonists working for about a decade now. He vivisects his old-timey, flexy/stretchy retro line onto a sense of humor that is wholly unrestrained in its vulgarity, bigotry and profanity. It’s the crudest, funniest and most dangerously subversive species of cartooning.

Back in Bleck is one of several collections of strips featuring Ryan’s alt-weekly newspaper character Blecky Yuckarella. I remember that I read this in one sitting inside the central branch of the Seattle Public Library because I had time to kill before a flight back to San Francisco, so I found the Johnny Ryan section and sat for a few hours and read three Blecky Yuckarella books in a row. I was visiting Seattle to coincide with my mother going there for a business conference; it was on this trip that I had my first meeting with Fantagraphics, which lead to me doing some business with them a few years later, which lead to me moving to Seattle for a while. I was still living there when I started this newsletter.

I Finished That Segar Book

E.C. Segar’s Popeye: “I Yam What I Yam!” is now officially the most recent addition to the complete reading list. As I mentioned in the last entry I really wanted to shift gears for my newspaper comics book-reading habit. To this end I’m betting back into FoxTrot by Bill Amend, a strip I used to read obsessively as a child both in the form of book collections and of new daily strips as they were coming out.

The first library FoxTrot book I could get my hands on is the 2002 collection FoxTrot: Assembled with Care. As the back-cover copy helpfully notes, this book “gives readers a heaping, nearly two-year helping of the Fox clan and their antics.” So I can extrapolate that these strips were probably some of the last FoxTrot comics I read in the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer every day before moving out of my parents’ house and away from their Inquirer subscription.

FoxTrot was composed in the constrained Nineties newspaper comics style and are far more digestible, though less aesthetically nutritious, than for example Segar’s Thimble Theater strips. So I’m trottin’ through this book at a pretty brisk pace. This entry has gone on quite long enough so I will hold fire on anything more to say about Amend and FoxTrot until I’ve put more of a dent in the book and have cleared out a little room in the newsletter to figure out what I think about this fun, funny, straightforward strip that I grew up on.