I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls yesterday. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, because I had been set up to believe that it was really awful. It was ok. A lot of it reminded me of this woman I used to work with who we called No Punch, because she never had a punchline to her jokes. Throughout the movie there were moments where everything pointed toward a laugh line or sight gag, yet the actual content was mysteriously missing. There’s one scene, for instance, where Shia LaBoeuf’s character (Mud) gets stuck on a vine and raised up into a canopy of trees. In a different era, he’d let out some Schwarzenegger-esque punchline, a la “hang in there!” In this film, the punchline was that he looked to his left, and saw a monkey sitting on a tree branch. Now, I love monkeys as much as the next Joe, but the sight of a monkey alone does not constitute a joke. If the monkey had given him the raspberry … now that’s funny.

The other thing that was kind of bothersome about it was the feeling that it wasn’t really aimed at adults. I haven’t seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in years, but if I remember correctly, it was an adult movie that kids just happened to like, too. The new one is basically a kids movie with a few bones thrown to adults here and there. Which is kind of the downfall of a lot of movies lately … in attempting to appeal to everyone, they end up appealing to no one. Sarah tells me Iron Man gets the mix right, but I haven’t seen it, so I’ll have to take her word for it. Maybe it’s ironic that I wanted the movie to appeal more to adults, yet my major script recommendation is that they had more monkeys giving raspberries.