Raiders of the Lost Ark has always struck us as a perfect film. We've just never been able to find ourselves anything other than blissfully hypnotized by the thing, and we've never been able to find a single thing that we would change about it.
So we're gonna do what we can to stick our fingers in our ears and go "la la la" at the end of May, because boy howdy, does the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sure look crummy. We love Ray Winstone and Cate Blanchett, but man oh man, Harrison Ford sure seems to be, er, taking it easy. The filmmaking looks like classic Spielberg-lite -- going for the easy reveals, the dumb self-references, and the most Goldbergianly implausible ancient ruins. And are they actually gonna set a comedically poor car chase in the same warehouse that supposedly houses the Ark of the Covenant? We're thinking they might.
We'd also heard there's a real possiblity that alien artifacts figure prominently in this movie -- a rumor that seems at least slightly confirmed by the appearance of a magnetic box labeled "Roswell, 1947" about 3/4 of the way through. Which is weird, because from what we can glean from the leaked X-Files 2 trailer (which looks great) -- the ET's aren't showing up opposite Agents Mulder and Scully. How did that switcheroo happen exactly?