See, for me, my biggest problem was the refrigerator thing. That's where I almost walked out. Especially since it ended up having no point.

MM, that worked for me because, instead of being a '30s pulp serial, this film was clearly a '50s pulp drive-in movie. It had all the tropes from that era angry teens, radiation, aliens, and evil commies. and that worked for me.

I got Feast, the result of the last season of Project Greenlight, as my weekend movie from Netflix. I watched it so you don't have to. I think the people behind it wanted to make a sick horror-comedy like Dead Alive or Slither, but with no writing or acting talent to bring to bear (seriously, they spent half the commentary raving about how good Eric Dane was in his two minutes of screentime!) were doomed to failure.

I think I had the same problems MM did. As I said leaving the theater, it was entertaining, but ridiculous. I get what people are saying, but it just wasn't believable to me in the way that the other ones were. Which is crazy in a way, because, really, it's Indiana Jones. I had a similar problem with Ratatouille--even though the whole movie was fantasy, I couldn't really get past the fact that the moving the arms via the hair was not "believable" to me.

Oh! Also, why can't Indy shut the hell up? The Commies didn't even have to threaten him half the time! It was all "I'll never help you, you're scum, I'm a true blue American..." "Well, there's this puzzle, see..." "Ooh! Lemme see! Oh, wow, see the answer is..."

When Shia LeBoeuf (sp?) came up to Indy and Bad Commie Lady at the map table in the jungle camp I was cheering for him to smack the shit out of Indy and yell "Dude, the fuck? Stop helping them!" I was actually disappointed when it was a simple escape attempt.

Also, when did Indy become such a fucking pedantic ass? He's *sinking* into the ground and has to stop and correct Mutt's use of the term "quicksand"? Seriously? I can only reason that they were going for a "Indy is turning into his dad" thing, but it didn't quite play.

So.

When Shia LeBoeuf (sp?) [whitefont]

See, I noticed that too, and I found it funny to remember that, even though he's always doing these things for the bad guys, it always seems that he ends up getting sucked into figuring out the puzzle, even though he's doing it for the wrong guys. Like finding the temple at the end of Holy Grail. That's always been a character note that I liked about Indy, that the puzzle so often wins out, at least in the very-short-term.

Okay, but at the end of Holy Grail they had his Dad hostage and dying. It was "find the Grail or Senior here buys it." In Crystal Skull it was more of a "Indy's got a weird compulsion, he just can't help himself." In Raiders he just gets caught solving the puzzle and...I don't remember Temple of Doom all that much but it doesn't seem like there was a puzzle, it was just "go get the magic rocks and try not to be brainwashed or excoriated."

I'm not saying it's a good character note. We are talking about a George Lucas joint, here.

THere was no puzzle in Temple. He just had to remember his humanity after slapping the crap out of Short Round.

There was no puzzle in Temple.

The only puzzle was trying to figure out why they made the movie in the first place.