Even as I type this, Dr. Jones is cracking his ratty old whip in theaters across the land and reviews are generally (thankfully) positive. Due to a cruel twist of fate, however, I won’t be seeing it until tomorrow night, so all you folks out there who’ve already been just hold your tongues around me, okay? Okay!

In the meantime, let’s all get in the mood with this catchy little ditty:

IMG_1118, originally uploaded by Dave Malkoff.

…just testing out a new toy (Flickr’s “blog this photo” feature) and sharing a cool picture I saw earlier today…

The weekend box office results are in, and The Wachowski Brothers’ live-action remake of the old Speed Racer cartoon is looking to be a total bomb. Doesn’t surprise me in the least, as the previews made it look (to this grumpy old curmudgeon, at least) like a blur of meaningless color and noise that nobody would remember five minutes after leaving the theater, let alone a year from now. Peter David, however, liked the film and has a different prediction of how Speed Racer will fare long-term:

…I realized a lot of this negativism was sounding familiar to me. Too long. Too loud. Too overwhelming visually with lots of mindless sound and fury signifying nothing. And I realized where and when I had heard it all before:

 

“Blade Runner.”

 

Critics and fans leveled many of the same complaints at “Blade Runner,” comparing it unfavorably to other then-popular SF films, and it was crushed at the box office by a powerhouse called “E.T.” “Blade Runner” tanked.

 

Yet over time it was seen as visionary, and its stylings le[f]t an indelible impression on fans and future filmmakers. Any number of dramatic endeavors have the visual stamp of “Blade Runner” upon them. …I suspect you’re going to see tricks from “Speed Racer” showing up in other films in the next years, and it’s going to be one of those movies in which, years from now, film students are going to be seeing the basis for many subsequent films.

Well, maybe. You never know what’s going to inspire today’s kids when they become tomorrow’s filmmakers, and it’s tough to predict how any given thing is going to look after 10 or 20 years of hindsight. Still, I can see one big difference between Speed Racer in the year 2008 and Blade Runner in the year 1981:

I wanted to see Blade Runner…

One of the little games I enjoy is trying to imagine what iconic movie characters would’ve been like if they’d been played by someone other than whoever made them into icons. For example, I think everyone knows that Tom Selleck would’ve been Indiana Jones if CBS hadn’t held him to his Magnum contract, and that Ronald Reagan was once considered for Bogart’s signature role, Rick Blaine in Casablanca. (For the record, I think Selleck would’ve made a fine Indy, but nobody today would remember Casablanca if Reagan had played Rick. Just my opinion, of course…)

Somewhat lesser known is that Nick Nolte was considered for Han Solo, and that Luke and Leia could just as easily have been played by William Katt (of The Greatest American Hero fame) and Spielberg’s one-time girlfriend, Amy Irving, rather than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

One of the most intriguing possibilities, however, is the notion that Cary Grant could’ve been the original James Bond. That seems startling at first, given the lightweight stuff that Grant is mostly remembered for, but I really think it might have worked. I’ve long thought that North by Northwest has much the same tone and style as Dr. No, and I believe Grant could’ve played brutality if the script had called for it. Someone else apparently thinks so, too. Here’s a video compilation that gives you a taste of what might have been:

The image you see up there at the top of this entry is a poster I remember well from my younger days, when I was working at that infamous movie theater I’ve mentioned many times before. You see, back in the late ’80s, THX sound was still quite the novelty, at least in these parts, and my theater — the first in Utah to boast a THX-certified auditorium — used to heavily promote the system. This item, which the manager would occasionally throw up in one of the one-sheet cases when he didn’t have any interesting new movie posters to display, attempted to explain to average movie-goers why sound is a critical part of their viewing experience, and how a THX-certified system enhances that experience.

I was always weirdly fond of this poster. I was proud of that whole “first in Utah” thing and thrilled to be a booster for both my employer and a division of Lucasfilm, a company that at that time could do no wrong in my eyes. And of course it amused my inner fanboy that the little cartoon audience on the poster is watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I don’t know what happened to that poster. A lot of one-sheets from the theater found their way into the hands of me and my co-workers, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that one of my buddies ended up with it, but if that’s the case, I don’t know about it. Whatever happened, it eventually stopped appearing in the one-sheet cases, and then I eventually left that job and now damn near 20 years have passed. I probably haven’t seen this particular poster since 1991 or thereabouts.

This morning, I happened to run across a source that is selling them. Not reproductions, but actual vintage posters. I was immediately tempted to pull out the credit card, but… it’s been a long time since I impulse-bought any collectible stuff with no practical value, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or something I’d come to regret. Lately I’ve been thinking again that I ought to be liquidating some (most) of the crap down in the Bennion Archive (a.k.a., my basement), not adding to it. Unsure of what to do, I called The Girlfriend for advice. I told her what the item was and why it tempted me (i.e., it’s both a sentimental relic from my theater days and an Indiana Jones collectible). Here’s how our conversation went:

Her: So how much is it?

 

Me: Fifty bucks, including shipping.

 

Her: Oh, hell, I thought you were going to tell me it was a couple hundred or something.

 

Me: No, only fifty. Which isn’t really out of line for a one-sheet from this general time period. So what do you think?

 

Her: I think you should buy it.

 

Me: You don’t think it’s dumb?

 

Her: I just said, I think you should buy it.

 

Me: Why? Help me rationalize here…

 

Her: You’ve got a personal connection to it, it’s an Indy item, and it’s only fifty bucks. Just buy it.

 

Me: Really?

 

Her: Will you buy the damn thing already? We’ll eat in this weekend…

And that, my friends, is why I love this girl…

(For the record, the poster is on its way to me even as I type this…)

You may have noticed that I’m not always the world’s cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:

If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you’ll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn’t see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now… maybe it’s just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol’ grin every time I watch it… and I’ve watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I’m ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go…

The first summer I worked at that movie theater job I’m always yammering on about was amazing. It was amazing for a lot of reasons: I had my first “real” job, I was positively goofy about this particular girl I happened to know, and I was making friendships with a posse of guys I’m still friendly with nearly 20 years later… it was simply one of the best times of my life. But one of the biggest reasons the summer of ’89 was so great was that the movies that were running in the background of all those coming-of-age moments were great, too. I’ve never done the research, so this is entirely subjective on my part, but I can’t think of any other summertime movie season that has been so chock-full of flicks that were both (a) immensely successful and (b) so damn good (or at least so really damn enjoyable, which isn’t necessarily the same thing). The line-up for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day period that year included: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Dead Poets Society, The Abyss, License to Kill, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally…, and probably a dozen more I’m not remembering right now. There were just so many titles coming out that summer that caught my — and everybody else’s — attention, and we at the theater were all so aware of what was coming up. I miss being so plugged in to the scene. Or to any scene, really. Every weekend brought some new wonder, some new zap of electric anticipation for both us theater-drones and the patrons queuing up in the lobby. It was an exciting time to be working in the movie industry, and to be a movie fan.

However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon who’s always going on about how much better things were back in his day, it’s been one long, slow downward slope ever since. I still reflexively get excited at the approach of the summer season, but year by year, summer by summer, the ratio of disappointment to awesomeness has been creeping upwards. Worse, it’s getting to the point where the upcoming releases aren’t even that interesting to begin with. (Of course, this problem isn’t confined to just the summer months; The Girlfriend and I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and sometimes two or three times, but over the last couple of years we’ve scaled back to about once a month. And it’s not because we’re all that busy — although we are — it’s mostly a function of how few flicks are coming out that we really want to see…)

Let’s examine this summer’s schedule (which officially kicks off this Friday with the release of Iron Man) and see what catches our eye, shall we?

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