Thanks for the Indy review! Most importantly, or most curiously, it seems you’re a stickler for story structure, given that you don’t seem to have liked the way they kicked the thing off and the way that they had to pad the back-story exposition.That’s a bit rarefied for a general audience , but then you are the person who went to film school.

And fact-checking the wide-bodied Harley? Wow. just wow. (I was mostly trying to forget that Shia was in this movie, much less as the Marion-Indy love-child.) You obviously know your shit.

(My ‘opinion’ of IJ&TKotCS was nicely summarized by an Alternet reviewer in “Is Spielberg Too Rich and Famous to Be Good Anymore?” — Eileen Jones summed it up just right: a promising first half-hour gave way to by-the-numbers nonsense. Ms. Jones’ review is worth reading only because it suggests a better film than the one currently being exhibited. Around the fourth paragraph, she invokes post WWII, atomic-age noir and I found myself daydreaming of some Indy 4/’Kiss Me Deadly‘ mash-up, with glowing boxes, better chase scenes, and no contrived happy endings.

(The end of the crystal skulls struck me as particularly, painfully ‘Close Encounters’-like, but I can let it go. Shia’s Brando pastiche was never meant as anything but junk food, so this was not meant as a serious movie, and therefore it’s disposable. I don’t see Shia being in this for a long run.)

And is the answer to “Who brings a barber’s chair to the middle of the Amazon jungle?” Larry Olivier?