Screening Room

by Ari

Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007)

Here's another film that's not half as bad as people said it was. It's strange how musicals generate very little interest for today's young audience. How many musicals have succeeded in the last decade? Three? Like the Western, people seem to think of it as something that died with old Hollywood. Times have changed, but that doesn't mean the musical can't change with it. John Carney's Once is a brilliant example of how a filmmaker can reimagine a theatrical genre as something personal and identifiable for a new generation to enjoy, and with Across the Universe, Julie Taymor has reimagined the stylized, theatrical musical by giving it a fresh spin. You would think audiences would respond to a movie set to Beatles songs, but I guess even that was too much for some.

This is the perfect way to breath new life into a dying form. Not all the covers are great, but the concept is still fun and the actors perform the music and choreography with amazing energy. Taymor lets her imagination run wild with outrageous imagery and hallucinatory set-pieces, and even though the love story drags in places (the film is too long), the overall presentation is no less mesmerizing.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984)

After the mild entertainment that was Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I felt it was time to revisit the Indiana Jones sequel I enjoyed the least. It has been many years since I've seen Temple of Doom, and since then I've carried the feeling it was a lesser effort for Spielberg, a film with a few explosive set-pieces between a tedious story and a lot of irritating banter from Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw. But since Temple of Doom has become a cult favorite, I was inspired to give the film another look.

I'm glad I did, because now I'd like to take back everything I said about this crazy, uncompromising sequel and place it right next to Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Spielberg classic. Not only is it light years ahead of the last two sequels, but it's something of an oddity in Spielberg's filmography. Temple of Doom may lack the character development of its predecessor, but it's also something entirely different from the original film.

There's a bizarre tonal shift about 30 minutes into the story, a moment where Spielberg and Lucas defy expectation by tossing aside the light sense of fun from Raiders and by bringing forth a dread and horror unlike anything they've done before or since. There's a level of violence and malice in Temple of Doom that's particularly unusual for Spielberg escapism. Jurassic Park approaches this intensity in a few scenes, but the overall tone of that film is still wonder and awe over death and destruction. I was a bit shocked by how dark everything gets once Ford, Capshaw and Short Round enter the temple. I don't remember it being that creepy and relentless, but I admire the choice of taking the franchise in a new direction. As we've seen with Crystal Skull, nostalgia doesn't make a quality picture all by itself. Spielberg's command of film language is as powerful as ever in Temple of Doom, the mine chase is still one of his classic set-pieces, and even Capshaw wasn't as bothersome as I first thought she was.

Interesting that Spielberg and Lucas discuss the film unfavorably.