I cracked and went to see the new Indiana Jones film this afternoon. It's one of those odd things in life. You know it won't be good. But still you can't resist going to have a look. Lucky old Lucas, Spielberg and Ford, who will make billions because of people's fondness and loyalty to the brand. Even when all their friends tell them it is a disappointment that will slightly sour their memories of the first films. We still go! George Lucas has made even more money from Star Wars. Though I only bothered with the first one of the new ones. There is a law of diminishing returns. Another Indiana Jones may come, but less people will be inclined to see it.
It wasn't as bad as I had anticipated, but it was still not good. Time passed. It would have passed in any case. And maybe quicker. It was kind of OK, until it went into aliens and stuff. The nuclear bomb bit was good. But they should have let it lie.
I was sitting next to a woman though, who, in my opinion, had the worse sense of humour in the world. An honour she shares with a lot of people. But the things she laughed at, were from the true, correct, comedy perspective that I am lucky enough to have, are just obvious and hack and rubbish. She loved those bits. My guess is she'd love the stand up of Peter Kay.
In the adverts before the film she found the most rubbish bits amusing. For example, in that Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad with the airport vehicles racing each other, which is quite a pleasing idea, there is one really rubbish bit, where it attempts to be too funny and shows flames shooting out the exhaust of one of the cars, as if it is a hotrod. This is shit. It's a step too far. It spoils the whole advert for me. It's the fact that non-racing cars are racing that is what is amusing. To make them like racing cars spoils it. The woman to my right though loved that and laughed and said something along the lines of "Priceless".
In a terrible Daily Mail advert where men and women battled against each other in two armies, sending across things that their sex supposedly liked to combat the opposition - men like footballs and model cars apparently (even though louds of us don't) and women all like small dogs and oh God, you get the idea. Horrible shit. But then both women and men like the Mail on Sunday so the battle of the sexes can be suspended for a bit. If I met a woman or a man who liked the Mail on Sunday, that would probably be one of the only things that might make me attack them. At the end of the advert a small pampered dog rides by on a remote control sports car. This isn't funny. It's a cheap juxtaposition of images. The woman laughed.
I was coming to hate her and all she stood for and worried that she would ruin the film for me. There was a "and that was just the teachers" style joke in one of the adverts and I was astonished to find that she didn't find that funny, so maybe there was hope for her.
She didn't laugh much, if at all, at the film, which goes to show how really bad it was (because I didn't laugh at much either, so the humour was neither correct, nor crowd pleasing). And Indiana Jones should be funny, at least to someone. But it wasn't. It was mainly just a bit confusing and disappointing, like George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford had made a display of all the things that made them great and then all done a wee all over it. Just a small wee, but still enough wee to tarnish what went before. And then they'd come and taken fifteen pounds off of everyone who came to see it and crammed it into their money filled pockets while laughing. Insisting that watching them all wee together was worth that kind of money.
And amazingly the top tickets at the Leicester Square cinema showing this film were £19.50. I don't want to sound like an old man, but twenty quid to go to the cinema?!! I bet it didn't cost that much for me and all my friends to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And in those days everyone involved in the film was younger and could do proper forceful wees that were worth watching!
