It's rare when I have three movies to look forward to and rarer still when all three are actually enjoyable. I wrote about liking Iron Man a few weeks ago but since my last entry I saw Indiana Jones on opening day (although I want to keep calling it "Raiders") as well as Sex and the City on it's opening day. It's tricky to revisit characters that are so firmly established in the ether but both do admirable jobs in updating us on where these characters are in their lives. Critics have predictably grumbled about all three movies and I don't think it's a coincidence that all three feature older than normal central figures.
In our youth obsessed culture this is perhaps the gravest sin: to make "old" people cool but not treat them like cutesy clutzes the way the movie Cocoon thought it was funny to show Don Ameche break dancing. Granted those characters are much older, by a margin of about 30 years to most of these characters but nonetheless to the demographic that the studios hold so dear, Sarah Jessica Parker must look like Jessica Tandy's twin sister. And might as well be.
Except of course that Boomers are getting older and demographics be damned, they have the money, the real money and the influence and they'll decide what gets made, what makes money in the multiplexes. After all, they were the ones who created these characters in the past. Will we see a big screen version of crap like Gossip Girl in twenty years? Will it even still be remembered in twenty months? Doubtful. The way the youth culture consumes entertainment product these days, I'm surprised that the show, only a season old, is still something that people talk about. Thank God for the writers strike that put everything in suspended animation and stretched out series that would have normally been canned long ago (which in some cases might end up preserving them longer).
The phenomenon that I see at the multiplex nowadays is interesting though. I didn't see the latest chapter in the Rambo and Rocky movies but it's certainly a part of a genre that Indiana Jones and Sex and the City (as well as the upcoming X Files movie and, would I guess could argue, last years Simpsons movie even the series is still on the tube) are a part of: the genre that won't leave characters well enough alone, we insist on getting one more chapter of their lives. I think in the case of Indiana Jones and Sex these chapters are satisfying. I don't know that I need to see any more Jones flicks unless Harrison Ford is the president of the university his Henry Jones character works at and his son in the movie takes on the fedora and whip and although I love my Sex girls, I think it might be time to see a new generation take on the 'what's happening with single girls in the 21st century' mantle.
Still, these well meaning and well done movies are, I'm sure, a lot better than the ill fated Gone With the Wind book sequel of a few years back or the endless Disney cannibalization sequels to it's own classic library (Cinderella parts 2 and 3..and Lady and the Tramp 2.. really? is creativity really that dead over at the Mouse House??)
So what if Ford is visibly a little exhausted in the Indiana Jones movie; I thought he looked beat and ready to fall asleep in Working Girl (although playing opposite Melanie Griffith, how could one not want to doze off?). And so what if the critics piss and moan that Carrie and company are still self absorbed (isn't that sort of the point of the show - that the characters reveal themselves trying to figure out how to 'have it all' as all of us male and female are told so often we can?).. ... as for me, I'll take 'em when I can get 'em because the alternative is junk like The Bank Job (dreadfully violent) and Vantage Point (which falls down in the first ten minutes under the weight of it's own weird logic.. they're terrorists, no their super scientists, no they're cops.. uhm what?).
So I'll take my joy where I can get it and just feel lucky that they didn't go back and do "Indy, the Early Years" (note to JJ Abrams with Star Trek next year - you'd better not screw that reboot up!)
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