A glance at the front page of the Washington Post website before retiring last night had four stories pegged to the new Indiana Jones movie: an archaeologist complaining that the Indy movies are (omg!) not an accurate portrayal of the profession; the wacky backstory on antiquities from Afghanistan on display at the National Gallery of Art; a Reuters story from Friday about Russian Communists calling for the movie to be banned because it is (omg!) not an accurate portrayal of Soviet agents (plus, Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett are second-rate actors, serving as the running dogs of the CIA); and the transcript of a Wednesday online chat with Post feature writer Hank Stuever about his earlier article, “Indiana Jones and the Meaningless Void.”
With more than 100 reporters, editors, photographers, artists and other journalists taking early retirement packages to cut costs and reduce the newsroom staff by at least 10 percent, it is almost as if the Washington Post is jumping on the Indy bandwagon the way Jones would leap on a truck the villains are using to transport some rare treasure — expressing a subconscious desire for the grizzled adventurer to swing in on his whip and rescue them from the Temple of Mammon. They can take comfort in a paraphrase of French archeologist Rene Belloq — if they bury their heads in the sand for another thousand years, the paper will be priceless.
More interesting to note the article in today’s Washington Post Style and Arts section about the Recount movie. It’s a blatant piece of Democratic political propaganda, especially viewed in light of a Washington Post article earlier this week which gave it a fair review but also specified that it is told from a Democratic perspective and is thus biased.
Interesting now that Indy is battling Communists, the movie gets panned.
I’d pay money to have an honest-to-Stalin apparatchik refer to me as a capitalist running dog.
No, really.
SGTTed,
Overall, the movie has gotten good reviews (see RottenTomatoes). And there’s a Joe McCarthy subplot that goes nowhere but seems to be included as a comment on the current political climate.
2:30 in the morning I had to hear a twenty minute rant on how bad it was. The gist was it was entertaining but it sucked. Bad guys too Scooby Doo cartoony is mostly what I remember. Oh. Also said it looked low budget. I find that hard to believe.
“Rene Belloq”
I saw the as “Rene Balrog”
Then I realized he’s French.
HA!
Not an accurate portrayal of Soviet agents?
What, they didn’t kill enough peasants?
Like I give a rats’ ass what the inheritors of the gulags and the pogroms and the purges and the deliberate starvation of their own people have to say.
Suck it, commies, sick of you!
But now I’m going to have to see the movie to see whether all the panning is really leftist umbrage or not.
“Suck it, commies, sick of you!”
Ummmmm…
“Commies” is passe. They have long since changed their name to “Greens”.
Another point worth mentioning is the political POV of the archaeologist himself selected to write this dyspeptic and dull piece. After deploring the whip-and-fedora image of archaeologists (generally a bunch of scruffy, bearded second-raters who divide their time between drumming up funding or tenure and trying to seduce their generally overweight students–I should know, since I’ve been on a ‘summer dig’), he then slyly went on to trash the branch known as ‘Biblical archaeology’ by declaring that recent finds had succeeded in debunking the notion of large-scale kingdoms for David and Solomon–and that this was now generally accepted. This simply isn’t true. The palace ‘stables’ that have been discovered and assigned to their eras have been deemed insufficiently large to serve as the seat of a large kingdom or military entity–and that’s about it, evidence-wise.
Why does this matter? Because the existence and bondaries of the ancient Jewish kingdoms are a major part of the argument over the very existence of modern Israel; leftists in academia, particularly European ones (but an increasing number of israelis as well) are dedicated to whittling the phsyical evidence of their history to as small a size as possible.
Comment by Hope Muntz on 5/25 @ 12:17 pm #
Scratch a lefty, find a fascist.
the notion of large-scale kingdoms for David and Solomon
What do they reckon would qualify as a large-scale kingdom in a remote desert 6000 years ago?
Archaeologists basically come in third behind reporters and lawyers, AFAIC.
I sometimes watch documentaries on the subject just to see how much crap someone can make up in 45 minutes, and I don’t have court TV so I have to settle.