Tag: #RaidersoftheLostArk

  • There’s an Eclipse, Ya’ll

    I was trying to think up some non-cliché shit to say about the Eclipse, but then I gave up. So, I’m not trying to say cliché things, but at the same time, I’m not trying to avoid it either.

    That having been said…

    The kid’s school is letting all of the students out early so they can see it, and I’m going to join her and her class. Here in New York City, I believe that we are getting a 90% coverage. Not sure what that will be like. It could be something, it could be nothing. Don’t know.

    But if you go looking for me, I will be the guy looking at the other people who are looking at the eclipse.

    I seem to remember that there was a partial eclipse in the Dallas area during the early 80’s. My older brother made some sort of viewing box so we could see that a part of the sun was being blocked. The other thing I remember about the eclipse was being warned not to look at the sun, as it will blind you and do all kinds of awful stuff. I think my brothers were trying to scare me. It worked. I was afraid if I looked at the sun my face would melt like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

    This time around, I think we’ll have spotty cloud cover, so we might not get a chance to see anything.

    Not that I’ll be looking.

  • Personal Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Part 3)

    This is a series, as I showed this movie to my daughter for the first time over the weekend, and I will share her reactions to it. This might be the last part…

    Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite action movie, in case you missed that from the past two days. Over the past weekend, I showed the movie to my daughter, who is now at the age that I first saw it way back in 1983/84. It clearly is very natural to want to share things with your child that you hold as important, and I also think it’s equally normal for children to want to learn about what their parents think is important. For my daughter to understand me better, she does need to know about Raiders, MST3k, and The Beatles. (Books are a completely different subject, as the kid is just now learning how to read, so we are several years from that subject.)

    As we finished Raiders on Saturday night, and after she told me the melting faces scared her, I knew that she would have questions, as she is a very curious six-year-old. What she asked me was: “What is the Ark? Why does it kill people if you open it? Why did ghosts come out of the Ark? Is it magic like the Infinity Stones? What are the Ten Commandments? Why did the Egyptians hide the Ark?” With these questions, I discovered a very glaring difference between my childhood and my daughters; at her age, I was well versed in Bible stories, and my kid has no idea what is in the Bible.

    I was raised in a VERY Catholic home, and when I was a kid, I went to Sunday school, CCD, and had my own illustrated children’s Bible. I said my prayers with my mother at night, and would even “read” Bible stories from a little red Gideon’s Bible, though I was just repeating stories I had memorized. With this background, when I first saw Raiders, I saw the Biblical implications all over the story. When my daughter watched the movie, none of that was apparent to her. It was just a magic box that you shouldn’t look at when it’s open.

    My wife and I have made a conscious choice to not raise our daughter Catholic. In both of our lives, religion has played a divisive role, didn’t necessarily prepare us for living in this world, and front loaded us with so much guilt, which we are still working through. For me, I really dislike how the Catholic Church, and most religions honestly, treat women, and I don’t want to raise my daughter in a faith tradition that makes her a second-class citizen in the eyes of God.

    I wasn’t expecting that religion would be the final conversation I would have with my kid after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I am glad that it happened. I am happy that we started talking about what different people believe, we talked about the traditions and history of Judaism, and what the Old Testament and the New Testament are. I want her to make her own decisions when it comes to religion, and they only way for that to happen is for her to ask questions.

  • Personal Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Part 2)

    This will be a series, as I showed this movie to my daughter for the first time over the weekend, and I will share her reactions to it.

    Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite action movie, in case you missed that from yesterday. This weekend, we decided it was time to watch the movie with my daughter. She is six and a half, which was about the age that I first saw Raiders. I had a few reservations about showing the film to her, and was also curious how she would react to a movie that has no CGI in it.

    Now, we are a nerdy, sci-fi/fantasy media devouring family. We have a video of our daughter at about six months old, totally mesmerized by the opening of Doctor Who, so we started early with this kid. She has watched all the Star Wars movies, all the Marvel Movies, the Batman movies (1989 to 1997,) she saw the new Star Trek, and Star Trek II. I feel that we have done a good job of allowing her to see movies that we feel inspire her imagination, and, with the exception of the Batman movies, show that doing the right thing is the right thing to do.

    About a year ago, at the start of the pandemic, I showed the kid the first ten minutes of Raiders, more or less to gage here temperature on the film. She wasn’t too impressed. I just chalked it up to that not everything I like the kid will like. Then over the weekend, as we were trying to find a movie to watch, the kid brought up that Raiders was my favorite movie, and she wanted to watch it. (I do have a Raiders poster in the office, and I own an Indiana Jones Fedora, but I’m not obsessed or anything.)

    This time around, she got into it pretty quickly, though she did think Indy had a lasso, and not a bullwhip. Some of the reservations I had were about the amount of violence in the movie. Unlike all the other action movies we had shown her where the violence is bloodless, characters in Raiders bleed when shot and punched. I would say that Spielberg’s Nazi rule was in full effect with my kid. As Spielberg said, no one feels bad if a Nazi gets hurt or killed. As for the stuntman/practical effects, she was totally on board; from the snakes, to the plane, to the truck scene, she was all in. I won’t lie, that did make me feel good that my kid hasn’t been warped by CGI.

    And then the melting face part came. As the scene started and the Angel of Death appeared, my kid didn’t make a sound. Nazis get shot by God lightening, she was silent. Faces melt and heads explode – she didn’t even cover her eyes. I thought, oh well, this must look fake to her. When I was a kid, it scared me shitless. My kid sat silent all the way to the end. When the credits started to roll, she looked at me and asked, “They just put it in a box and stored it away?” I seemed to remember asking my brothers the same question. Before I could answer that question, she added, “I don’t want to go to bed. The melting faces scared me.”

    Score one for the old special effects.

  • Personal Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Part 1)

    This might be a series, as I showed this movie to my daughter for the first time over the weekend, and I will share her reaction in a follow up post.

    Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite action movie. Even though I knew about the movie from my older brothers telling me about it, and seeing clips on TV, I didn’t see the whole movie until it was on cable; I’m sure it was a free preview as my parents didn’t get the extra movie channels. I know I saw it before Temple of Doom came out, which would means I saw it before the summer of 1984, so I was either 6 or 7. What I can remember about watching it for the first time, was the feeling of having no idea what would happen next! Just being totally sucked into that movie.

    And that has become the bar that I judge all action movies by. The older I get, the lest often it happens, but when I land  on a movie where I can’t figure it out, or I get sucked in to the point that I don’t know what will happen, I get to relive that experience of sitting on the edge of the couch wondering how Indy will stop that truck full of Nazis and get the Ark back.

    Much has been written about Raiders, but I think it is important to point out that this movie was still early in Spielberg’s career, which I feel like he still had something to prove, With the help by the great cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, there are shots using lighting, shadow, and depth that are pretty arty for an action movie. Sadly, action directors seem to have moved on to prefer spectacle, I am sure due to the success of Raiders, and have lost touch with using image, through action, to forward the story. If you can remove an action sequence from a movie, and it doesn’t change the plot, then your action scene is meaningless.

    As I watched Raiders again this weekend, which was like visiting an old friend, I put my focus on the stuntmen. All of those guys hanging off trucks, being set on fire, climbing, jumping and throwing punches. The practical effects that had a human connection. It’s an authenticity that movies struggle to have today. Don’t get me wrong. I like that planets can collide, and worlds can be dreamed up that are breathtaking in their artistry. But, if you are going to have a guy get dragged behind a truck, I want to see a stuntman do it.