Knowledge was their treasure.

[starlady]

I can tell you two people who had a great time at "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull": Steven Spielberg and me. That's right, I remembered to see Indy IV today and damn it was awesome. I honestly don't know what people were complaining about--there were maybe two crappy lines, but seriously, it was just as good as the (two good) old ones, with refreshingly little digital effects in the action sequences, seriously, it was just good. The New York Times wanted to feel again what it did in 1981 with "Raiders", but for the 21st century? Whatever. The 20th is still plenty interesting. I mean, clearly, you know, a lot of it was sort of Spielberg enjoying himself (Indy survives the Plumbbob test in a refrigerator! motorcycle chases in Yale Library! the whole ending!) and Lucas getting his kicks too, particularly in the opening sequence and the fight in the malt shop (shades of "American Grafitti", anyone?), but Spielberg is a master and I don't know how you couldn't have enjoyed the movie. I was feeling sort of sad all day, and the movie totally made me feel happy. Though to be honest, they sort of had me when I walked into the theatre and the "Raiders" theme was playing. It sounds good, but of course it doesn't have much interesting in the string part.

I read TRC 192 in the bookstore today and HOLY CRAP CLAMP WHY DIDN"T YOU SHOW SHAORAN SR'S FACE!!!!! Also, the promise to run turned out to be completely un-ominous. What was ominous was Yuuko on the last page. And Watanuki was there too, looking lost. Apparently he and Shaoran are the same age after all. Given what the Kei drama CD says about them, I shouldn't be surprised.

Here is a book meme I stole from Spike.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, add an strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole Couldn't get past the first chapter. What an awful book.
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Kind of a stupid list (clearly ripped from someone's grasping book club. Oh well). Also, I'm a bad multi-culturalist.

Comments

[nokiirat.livejournal.com]

I liked IJ IV, too. It was corny, but fun.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I would say "knowingly corny," if I were pressed to use the term "corny," but it's certainly way less corny than the actual 50s sort of movies Spielberg based them off of. Though, yes, corny I suppose.

[hisui-ryoshi.livejournal.com]

Aliens. That's all I'm saying. I think it was really good and Chris and I enjoyed it, but I think the aliens were a bit of a stretch. I'll still take it though. And own it.

[spacevlad.livejournal.com]

Indy IV I thought was a decent summer popcorn flick, but I didn't really like it as an Indiana Jones movie...it just didn't seem to fit well in the Indiana Jones universe me to. I'm not gonna hate on it like some people, but I was a little underwhelmed. And could they have made the crystal skull itself look a little less like the cheap plastic prop that it was?

PS, interesting note...remember how there was a first draft of the script, but then Lucas rejected it and re-wrote it himself? Supposedly that first draft didn't have the character of Mutt in it at all! This might of been a very different movie indeed.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Originally Indy's father and brother were going to be in the fourth one, too. And the original story treatments for movies 2 and 3 were very different as well, but Karen Allen refused to join up and they had to tell different stories instead.

I can honestly say that I grew up watching "Raiders" and "Last Crusade" (actually, Indy in "Crystal Skull" reminded me a bit at times of my dad, which I think is directly related to my dad watching the movies so often when I was growing up), and "Crystal Skull" seemed pretty Indiana to me. But hey, it's a free country (the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI notwithstanding). :-)

[neocloud9.livejournal.com]

I really liked Indy as well. I didn't find it any different from the other films, at least in tone. I think the difference probably stems from the fact that I didn't see the original three in theatres, seeing as I...wasn't born yet. ^^;;

But I've been a huge Harrison Ford junkie ever since I saw Blade Runner, so...

I liked it a lot. <3 Glad to see someone else did.

Honestly, whatever happened to suspension of disbelief?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I mean, for me, one of the pleasures of the movie was how Spielberg and Lucas updated a completely cliched 50s B-movie plot (Aliens inspiring ancient civilizations!) and made it able to pass within hailing distance of credibility. Part of it is that I love Spielberg. I'm not sure he's ever made a bad movie.

[neocloud9.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

OMG, your icon! *splorfles* XD

[sparowhawk.livejournal.com]

Yay! I was hoping you'd get a chance to see the movie. I actually saw it again and find that its more enjoyable the 2nd time round. Making it just that much better.