Tag: John Williams

2017 Movie #49: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

2017 Movie #49: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

When I was a child, my parents would take me to the library every week. I would always pick out a couple of movies on VHS (remember those?) to watch on the weekends, and inevitably there were certain movies that wound up in my rotation, movies that I would check out regularly and watch obsessively, movies that shaped me as a consumer of film and television. One of those movies was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and to this day it remains one of my most beloved movies of all time, a movie that I can watch any time and never gets old to me.

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2017 Movie #39: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

2017 Movie #39: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

If The Adventures of Tintin isn’t the finest or most inspired work of Steven Spielberg, it’s proof positive of his sheer mastery of the art of film. Spielberg’s adaptation of Tintin is interesting, if nothing else, for its visual style, an exaggerated realism that Hergé surely would have approved of, with characters that seem to leap off the page and into the screen. The flourish and style that defines The Adventures of Tintin is nothing short of impressive.

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2017 Movie #36: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

2017 Movie #36: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

A lot of people, some of whom I respect, really hate this movie with a passion. To them, the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series is an abomination that shit all over their collective childhoods.

My view of things is a lot more conflicted… First, much as the original Indiana Jones films are classic, iconic, even masterful, works of art, I’m not one for the argument that a new work of art should change how I feel about something I love. Raiders of the Lost Ark, to my mind, is about as close to a perfect action film as I could imagine; no amount of problematic storytelling could change that.

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