Dvader said:

sadly tree is a huge buck where he is gone and the movie drags.

Sadly tree is a huge buck?

I have no idea what that means!

It drags without Batman on screen? I felt that about the Dark Knight.

Because the tree was a huge buck.

Because it was.

Indy Fans: (This may be old, I dunno)

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/135531

While it’s not unusual for a film to have unused screenplays hiding in a filing cabinet somewhere, the lost scripts of Indiana Jones are a fascinating look at what might have been for everyone’s favorite whip-wielding, fedora-wearing archaeologist. We’ve discussed Indiana Jones and the Monkey King and Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars. Our final lost Indy script involves The City of the Gods.

In February 2000, the American Film Institute held a ceremony honoring the life and work of Harrison Ford. His old Indiana Jones friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, were on hand to speak at the event, marking the first time they’d all been in the same room together in many years. During the night, the idea was floated that they should do another Indiana Jones movie. Swept up in the moment, everyone said yes. Now they just had to come up with a script.

As Lucas and Spielberg started working on ideas for another movie, Lucas refused to budge from an idea he had five years before – a 1950s sci-fi B-movie tribute involving aliens and flying saucers. Spielberg also refused to budge on not liking that idea. But the two worked out a compromise – there could be aliens, but there couldn’t be flying saucers. That was enough for Lucas to dig out his old story notes, outlines, and screenplays, including one for a never-filmed episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles that dealt with the real-life mystery of strange, Peruvian skulls carved out of crystal.

Once he had an outline ready to go, Lucas hired director/screenwriter Frank Darabont, still fresh off his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Green Mile. Darabont turned in three versions of his screenplay, culminating in 2003′s Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods.

It’s been 20 years since Indiana Jones was in his prime. Now, in the 1950s, his research expeditions are solitary affairs in the Nevada desert, searching for small fragments of ancient Native American pottery; a far cry from the jungles and adventures of his youth. At his latest dig, a Russian friend and colleague, Yuri Makovsky, has been visiting him for a few weeks. However, on the last night of his stay, Yuri breaks into a secret U.S. military base, where two American traitors give him a canister of plutonium and an ordinary-looking bowling ball bag.

Indy gets his hands on the bag and finds it contains one of the 13 legendary crystal skulls. With the skull in his possession, Indy winds up in Peru where he learns that his old flame, Marion Ravenwood, is the one that hired Yuri to get the skull for her. She’s leading an expedition into the jungle with her husband, famed archaeologist Baron Peter Belasko, to find the lost City of the Gods, and needs the skull to unlock the city’s secrets.

Although he no longer has the skull, Yuri doesn’t give up. He convinces the President of Peru, Presidente Escalante, to go after the skull with the promise that the lost city will give Escalante anything his heart desires.

After many entanglements, the expeditions arrive at the City of the Gods and enter the giant pyramid at the center. Inside they discover a circular room filled with 13 golden thrones, each occupied by a headless, crystal skeleton. When the skull is attached to the correct skeleton, an alien presence welcomes “the five chosen ones” who will help rejuvenate the mummified remains of the beings buried inside the pyramid. In exchange, the alien will grant them one wish.

The Chosen Ones – Indy, Yuri, Belasko, Escalante, and a German researcher named Von Grauen – are lifted by a swirling alien vapor that hypnotizes them. Belasko, Escalante, and Von Grauen have their wishes granted first, but in a Faustian twist, they are immediately killed; their “life forces” assimilated into the alien mummies. When Indy is asked what he wants, Marion is able to shake him out of his trance, and that’s when he realizes all he wants is her. The alien releases him and moves on to Yuri. But before Yuri’s wish is granted, Indy shoots the crystal skull and it explodes into tiny shards.

The pyramid begins to shake and crumble apart. As Indy is leaving the room, he looks back and sees the alien mummy, rejuvenated by the deaths of the men, rising from its sarcophagus. He shouts, “Hey! Welcome to Earth!” before firing the rest of his rifle rounds into the thing’s body.

The survivors escape just in time to see the land swell and then break away. A flying saucer erupts from the ground, lifting the ruins into the air, but soon the machine sputters and falls back into its ancient grave. The nuclear explosion that follows wipes the City of the Gods off the map for good.

Safely back in the United States, Indy and Marion tie the knot with all of their old friends in attendance.

As you’d expect from any Indiana Jones script, action sequences are abundant and relentless in City of the Gods. The moment Indy gets out of one jam, something goes wrong, and he’s in another life-or-death situation. It’s quite a thrill ride that barely gives the audience a moment to breathe.

Many of the set pieces were dictated by Lucas and can be found in other Indy IV scripts, including some that made it into the final film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. For example, Indy gets into a fight on a rocket sled, Indy survives a nuclear blast inside a lead-lined refrigerator, the expedition is attacked by huge, red army ants, and a truck Indy’s riding in goes over a series of waterfalls. However, Darabont got to design his own action sequences too, and they’re just as exciting.

One of the best Darabont action scenes shows Indy and Marion flying to meet up with Belasko, when they’re attacked by Yuri in another plane. Yuri’s co-pilot uses a machine gun to take out one of the support struts on Indy’s biplane, which means Indy has to walk out on the wing and lash it back together with his whip. Meanwhile, Yuri comes up fast and uses his propeller like a buzzsaw, chopping up the tail on Indy’s plane. To stop Yuri, Indy lets go of his plane’s wing and is whisked back to Yuri’s plane, barely grabbing that wing’s support strut. He then swings around and decks Yuri, forcing the plane to swerve and dive. Indy climbs into the gunner’s seat and Yuri flips the plane upside down, hoping to make Indy fall out. Instead, the gunner falls out and Indy uses the co-pilot controls to flip the plane upside down again, causing Yuri to fall out.

With Marion in an unstable plane, Indy tells her to wing walk over to his plane. But then Yuri appears, floating down on a parachute, armed with a machine gun. He fires at Indy, taking out the plane’s engine, so now Indy’s in worse shape than Marion. She flies over the top of Indy’s plane, he grabs the bar that spans between the landing gear, and then lets the plane he’s piloting fall out beneath him. But little do they realize there’s a jungle plateau ahead and Marion can’t get the plane pulled up in time. Indy is dragged through the canopy, hitting treetops and scaring monkeys, until the plateau ends and he is finally able to drag himself into the cockpit.

“I’ll take it from here”, he says. The engine dies the moment he puts his hand on the stick. The plane comes in hard and fast, its wings sheared off by jungle foliage and it belly flops on the ground. Indy gives Marion a cocky smile, and she points to the flames that have just erupted from the engine. They grab the skull and make it out just before the plane explodes. Thankfully, he is able to recover his whip that is still wrapped around the wing struts. And of course, his hat is still on his head.

City of the Gods is a very “tight” screenplay, meaning every scene has a clear objective, and either relays information that is useful later on, or is an event that leads directly into the next scene. In addition, the script is filled with interesting Indy-esque characters, such as a henchman known as The Thin Man, who dresses in black and has a scar running down his face through a milky-white eye.

The script is often very clever. For example, the Belasko Expedition uses drawings of the Nazca Lines – gigantic, ancient figures that have been etched into the Nazca Desert – and lays them over the top of a map so that the figures match to geographic features. In this way, the Lines actually point them to the City of the Gods like enormous road signs.

So why didn’t the script get the green light? In a reversal of the situation surrounding the 1995 script, Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, Spielberg and Ford loved Darabont’s final script, but Lucas felt it needed more work.

Over the next few years, Lucas continued to develop the story, even retitling it Indiana Jones and the Phantom City of the Gods (no joke!). He also brought in a new writer, Jeff Nathanson, who authored Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. Nathanson’s script was called Indiana Jones and the Atomic Ants, but that script wasn’t quite up to snuff, either. Finally, David Koepp — screenwriter for Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man — was hired. Koepp turned in a screenplay titled Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds, borrowing from a famous quote by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb. This script was tweaked and became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The City of the Gods script was leaked to the internet shortly after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released in the summer of 2008. It was widely reported beforehand that Darabont had written a rejected Indiana Jones screenplay. So when many fans were unhappy with the final film, some believe Darabont secretly made his script available as a way of saying “Don’t blame me!”

Whether it would have actually made a better movie than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is impossible to know. But either way, Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods is an interesting look at what might have been for Indy’s latest silver screen adventure.

travo said:

Anybody else anticipating the Jaws Blu Ray that comes out here on the 14th?  I think it will be released in the UK on Sept. 3.

SHould be amazing.

Did you watch Battle Royale yet? To the end?

I saw Welcome to the Space Show a Japanese film. On the surface the backgrounds and character designs look like it could have been done by the same team responsible for the excellent Summer Wars.

Welcome to the Space Show, whose story "surpasses Star Wars in its scale" according to its producers, tells of the four adventures of five schoolmates and an alien dog in space during summer vacation.[1]


The plot revolves around five elementary school kids on their "school trip". In the process of looking for their missing class pet (a rabbit named Pyon-Kichi), the children find and rescue a dog they find injured in a corn field. The dog turns out to be an alien called Pochi Rickman, and he invites them to visit the moon as a reward for helping him. However, through a series of strange events, they become stranded and must make their way across the galaxy to get to Pochi's homeworld, Wan; so that they may return to Earth. Along the way they are pursued by the aliens responsible for Pochi being injured in the first place. The aliens work for the host (called Neppo) of the universe's most popular entertainment, "The Space Show", which appears to be a variety act broadcasted from a mysterious moving spaceship.

The film is a bit meh though, no pacing, stupid story, whining characters. It's entertaining-ish but I wouldn't bother with it.

Also saw the Emperor and the White Snake

Bizaarely renamed for the UK I spent the whole movie wondering when the emperor was going to show up. He never did.

Action director Ching Siu-Tung helms this fantasy film based on an old Chinese legend about an herbalist who falls in love with a thousand-year-old White Snake disguised as a woman. Jet Li stars as a sorcerer who discovers her true identity and battles to save the man's soul.

This film was intensely irritating and should have been renamed: Stupid Bitch: The Movie.

Whilst it had some really fantastic special effects, it was also a lame duck of a movie that had me wanting to fling the disc out of the window. This stupid woman demon snake thing falls in love with a human, then goes nuts and does some stupid shit. The stupid shit lasts for ages.

This film is notable for a couple of mind boggling moments:

1. The Spirit herb.

This herb is like a ginger root, a magical ginger root which can heal the dying. The male romanctic lead must retrieve it from a pagoda. When he does so he gets attacked by flying, talking ginger roots. Leading to an eye raisingly stupid scene.

2. The rats attack

One of the demons is a rat, near the end of the film the temple is submerged as the monks chant to keep the temple sealed (underwater at this point) the monks are somehow chanting and not dying whilst sitting underwater. The little talking rat appears, yells to other rats "Charge my brothers!" and all the rats attack like Aragorn leading the host against Mordor.

Ravenprose said:

Yeah, like a month ago.

You only gave us halfway impressions.

In news everyone expected, Total Recall sucks. Its a souless, funless, version of the movie. Loads of action but with no weight to it.

Finished Wolverine and the X-Men. I found the ending slightly disappointing, but it was also a relief. Disappointing because the last few episodes lost the momentum that they'd been building up before that. The battles were less epic, and some of the parts felt almost like an epilogue. The sacrifice was good, though, but the revelation of the phoenix organisation was so stupid. And why the hell were they wearing clothes from the past? Surely there's a better way of showing off that it's an old organisation. Oh, and relieved because they didn't really do much to lead into the next season. Just a vague teaser.

Is Apocalypse at all related to those weirdo MMA aliens?

aspro said:

Only thing more pointless is the Top Gun reboot. WTF?!

Top Gun is an actual sequel though.

I saw Batman Year One

Good stuff as always from the DC animation crew.

Based on the Frank Miller graphic novel. Quite monotone in tone compared to previous DC animation but that matches the story and tone of the GN which I have read. It's a fairly simple story and I've never really seen why the graphic novel deserved such acclaim. It's decent and probably a bit more enjoyable than the GN but isn't sparky, there are no fireworks here. I look forward to the Dark Knight animated films as the GNs are better there.