A friend of a friend of somebody I know at work was in the subway and they bought this movie as a bootleg DVD and then lent it to me. Hooray for the underground economy!
The audio-visual quality was cruddy, and it was obviously shot from the back of a theater. They told me I’d be watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But the movie I was watching was titled "Indiana Jones und das Königreich des Kristallschädels."
Look at this film’s title—it’s long and clunky, just like the movie, but it’s also silly and over the top.
But the title does sound better in German somehow. If this movie was something discovered in a Munich film vault, some goofy German action flick from ages ago, it would be an interesting artifact, certainly, with plenty of nostalgic enjoyments. A kissing cousin to Fritz Lang’s India epic, perhaps? Or the German version of Disney fluff like The Island at the Top of the World? (I saw that one twice in the theater when I was a kid!)
Maybe my expectations were so low from all the negative press—and yes, there’s plenty to gripe about (if I had to pay $12 to see this, I’d be very angry; and would probably be happy that Shia LaBeouf is a mess. And he seemed so sweet in that movie Holes. Sigh…)—but the first two-thirds of Indiana Jones und das Königreich des Kristallschädels is a great piece of Hollywood action. No, don’t see this in a theater, but as a six-pack movie on a rainy day, why not?
And later today, once I get done with some of the work I do to get paid for, we’ll be discussing
BUGS.
Here’s the Tzar of Ivanlandia visiting the
Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo, Sping 2006. Lots of bugs there…
