Ghost of a flea: Everybody’s favourite archaeologist

? David Bowie: Loving the Alien | Main | Alizée: Ella, elle l'a ?

January 03, 2008

Everybody’s favourite archaeologist

Vanity Fair considers the new Indiana Jones and its creators. Not a critical review but it comes with pictures and I am finding myself enormously enthusiastic for the project; this despite various Lucas prequel crapfests and sundry Spielberg puffed up Oscar bait. Also reassuring: Lucas and Spielberg appear to have resisted their impulse to ~~whitewash~~ revise their best work for the worse. No substitution of walkie-talkies for police sidearms and no Han Solo firing in "self defense". And no matter their intentions, at least Harrison Ford still kicks ass.

Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

This was a wise decision though - reading between the lines - it is all too easy to imagine the Lucas/Spielberg brainstorm session where the two men briefly considered an updated Indy combining the gravitas of Shindler's List with the edgy editing of The Bourne Ultimatum. There is a not terribly distant parallel world where the end result was worse than The Phantom Menace.

The magazine has thoughtfully provided a spoiler warning and I did not read beyond it; please to keep that bit to yourselves if you choose to do so! Cate Blanchett is smokin' in this too, btw.

Update: New lego sets for the upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hat tip to Agent Bedhead).

Posted by Ghost of a flea at January 3, 2008 06:57 AM

Comments

Ah, but who is everybody's favorite anthropologist/i>

PS - you misspelled "favorite"

Posted by: Bill from INDC at January 3, 2008 01:54 PM

Neighbourly of you to let me know.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at January 3, 2008 01:56 PM

I have hopes for this. But then again, I had hopes for Transformers, and look how that turned out.

Posted by: neonreflection at January 5, 2008 08:55 PM

Oh dear God...

I was hopeful until I read that article.

Posted by: dpatten at January 6, 2008 06:38 PM