But can we talk about the real criminals? Are we really going to stand back and let these monsters further desecrate the corpse of Indiana Jones?

Monday night.

* What went wrong with Terminator Salvation? There's been some loose talk that T4 isn't all that bad, but this is incorrect. It is that bad. It's worse. Via MeFi.

* Speaking of bad scripts: On Lucas's original script for Star Wars. Also via MeFi.

* The Spider-Man newspaper strip has retconned the Spider-Man-was-never-married retconned. Please adjust your interest in Spider-Man accordingly.

* Scandal at Oxford! The university's first female professor of poetry has resigned nine days into her tenure amidst allegations that she organized a smear campaign against one of her opponents for the job.

* Five ways to tell if your life is a Wes Anderson film. Via Rushmore Academy.

Behold the 125-page transcript of the conference between George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan brainstorming Raiders of the Lost Ark. Discussion at MetaFilter.

The people vs. George Lucas.

In an early draft of Star Wars, Han Solo was married to a Wookie.

This somewhat surprising development in Han Solo's love life comes from a reputable source: the official Star Wars website itself, which is currently celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Holiday Special by interviewing people involved in the ill-fated production. One of those people is screenwriter Lenny Ripps, who drops the bombshell when discussing Lucas' involvement in the project:

To me, it didn't come together. The ideas were all right but I'm not sure that they belonged in the same room. What was interesting to me was that Lucas started talking about Star Wars as if it was a real world. He said things like "Well, you know Han Solo is married to a Wookiee. but we can't say that." Now that was 20 years ago [in 1998], so my memory may be wrong.

According to starwars.com's Ross Plesset, however, his memory is surprisingly good:

As outrageous as Ripps's recollection sounds, there is evidence supporting it. Pat Proft corroborates it and an early draft of the Star Wars script (January 28, 1975) has Han Solo living with a furry female creature who he kisses. Proft also remembers learning that Han was raised by Wookiees, which is verified on pages 46 & 131 of Laurent Bouzereau's Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays.

As every schoolchild knows, George Lucas wrote out nine original movie scripts in 1975 from which he never deviated in the slightest, so we must conclude that this is canon...

Being George Lucas: The Times has a long, wide-ranging interview with the man himself, touching on everything from his quasi-religious relationship with Star Wars canonicity to the chilling possibility of yet another Indiana Jones sequel. Via AICN.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

I have just a few Obama remainders from the last few days.

* First up, another edition of Veepwatch!, this one making a pretty strong claim for an Obama/Edwards ticket. I'm almost convinced—but the reality is that no one in an age of late-night comics is going to take the VP slot twice. The always-a-bridesmaid jokes write themselves, and as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail sagely reminds us in the comments to the Washington Montly post, Hunter S. Thompson was right when he said Americans hate voting for losers.

I really think we can believe Edwards when he says he doesn't want the job.

* VeepWatch! Jr.: The New York Review of Books reviews Jim Webb's A Time to Fight. Since I wrote about The Virginia Strategem earlier in the week I've been reminded that Virginia's Lt. Governor is a Republican, which all but takes Kaine out of the running and raises Webb's stock considerably, despite the unfortunate two-Senators aspect. Does anyone out there know what would happen if Webb steps down from the Senate to run for vice president? Does Kaine appoint, or is there a special election?

* Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services? The Shadow Cabinet grows...

* Speaking of kos, he's already made his first major self-inflicted wound of the general election season. Nearly made it 48 hours. Well done.

* Bob Dylan gushes over Barack Obama. So does George Lucas.

* Al Giordano at The Field gushes over the way Obama has already taken control of things at the DNC.

* And at TNR, the view from Africa.

I've been collecting a few Indiana Jones reviews from the Internets, both pro and con, to complement my own. The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich really dug it, as did Matt Zoller Seitz. But Cynical-C had an even stronger negative reaction than I did, titling his review Kingdom of the Crystal SUCK, and Jason Bellamy at The Cooler goes still deeper, dissecting the movie's failings beat by beat. Here's Bellamy:

That saddest part of all, though, is that this movie is entirely without romance. Oh, sure, Karen Allen is back as Marion Ravenwood, so there’s a love story of sorts. But the original trilogy’s yearning to turn over rocks and explore the hidden worlds underneath has been replaced by a retrospective fondness for the time when it was fun to turn over rocks, and that’s not the same thing. If The Last Crusade is evidence of just how much Spielberg cared about the legend of Indiana Jones, Crystal Skull is a love letter that he and Lucas wrote to themselves. It’s a celebration of adventures past (not all of them from the Indiana Jones series, by the way) rather than an advancement of the saga. Thus, it fittingly plays like a high school reunion, with folks sucking in their guts and mistakenly providing evidence of their rapidly eroding vision by telling themselves that they’re just as vital as they used to be.

The further I get from the afterglow of seeing the movie on opening night, the more I think Bellamy's right.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a rumination on the ravages of age, though early in the movie it briefly pretends to be. Nor is it an examination of the Cold War's culture of paranoia and suspicion—though it has a little bit of that too—nor is it about the way power ultimately looks the same whatever uniform it happens to wear or which flag it claims to fight under, nor about Chariot of the Gods and saucer men from Mars. In the end, it's about being an Indiana Jones movie, which is to say it's all about car chases, booby traps, clever in-jokes, and the sheer, unstoppable force that is Harrison Ford's charisma.

And it does this job quite well.

Now, if I were inclined to look at Indiana Jones with anything like a critical mind, I'm sure I'd find plenty of negative things to say about this movie, from a story that's strikingly light on character or emotional depth (even for its genre) to more than a few embarrassingly silly plot moments to a characteristically Lucasian overreliance on CGI. (Don't even get me started on politics, postcoloniality, or heteronormativity.) El Dorado is a good MacGuffin, but it just doesn't pack the same mythic punch as the Lost Ark or the Quest for the Grail—and while I thought the alien stuff was pretty well-handled overall, fundamentally there's a style mismatch here that approaches the level of category error.

And of course on some pure plane of aesthetic valuation it must be said that Lucas and Spielberg should have resisted the temptation to mess with perfection and let Last Crusade stand as the proper ending to this story it's always been. In this sense Crystal Skull is actually worse than superfluous—the need to return to Indy, 20 years on, undercuts and arguably destroys entirely the narrative arc that somehow took the cartoon hero of Raiders and turned him into a human being. Last Crusade didn't need a sequel; the trilogy was already a complete story, not Episodes 44-46 in the 108 Adventures of Indiana Jones.

Phantom Menance betrayed us right up front, and was pretty noisy about it. What Crystal Skull does is quieter, subtler, and perhaps ultimately more devastating to its franchise: it takes that human being from Crusade and turns him back to a cartoon again.

If I were inclined to look at Indiana Jones critically, I'm saying, I think I'd have a pretty ambivalent view of Crystal Skull. But tonight I'm not at all inclined to do any of that—I watched Indiana Jones tonight as I always do, with the spellbound eyes of my twelve-year-old self, and he liked the movie just fine.

Just a few hours ago I saw George Lucas trying to seriously downplay expectations for Indy 4:

George Lucas has gone out of his way to lower expectations. He said: "When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie, just like the other movies.

"You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up."

He added: "You're not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose."

But now I see him talking the movie up in a big way:

"I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this," he said. "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

"And it’s not like Harrison is even old. I mean, he’s 65 and he did everything in this movie. The old chemistry is there, and it’s not like he’s an old man. He’s incredibly agile; he looks even better than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me."

Conclusion: This movie cannot fail. Even the patented George Lucas reverse-Midas touch can't screw this up. Via AICN.

Plus: LEGO Indy.

The only news today is the release of the Indiana Jones 4 trailer. Yes, Harrison Ford can.



Damn, I thought that was closer.

Let this mark the first time in a long time I felt really happy with anything George Lucas had gone anywhere near.

If you've been worried about the recent paucity of low-quality Star Wars media, your prayers have been answered—we're about to be flooded with a whole boatload of crap.

Even when it's good news it's bad news: Entertainment Weekly reports that New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson may have begun to reconcile (fantastic news) and that Jackson hopes to make two movies (no worries there), one The Hobbit in its entirety (wait, what?) and the other "filling in the story arc between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of Rings" (WTFJackson?).

This is pretty close to sacrilege. If Jackson wants to retroactively ruin his first three movies, why not film a sequel with the original cast—Return of the Return of the King—and be done with it?

Has no one learned what George Lucas has to teach us? Via Slashdot.