ninme

The Times - The good, the bad and the Russians
Russians are the latest to feel stung by being cast as Hollywood villains

When members of the Russian Communist Party complain that in his new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford is dogged by an evil KGB agent played by Cate Blanchett, it really makes you think. What it makes you think mostly is: who on earth complains about being portrayed by Cate Blanchett?

One problem for Hollywood is that it is running out of villainous stereotypes. Native Americans, the staple of the western? Politically incorrect. The inscrutable Chinese? Tricky when we are trying to woo China into becoming a liberal democracy. An inscrutable Japanese? That was easier in the days before Japanese corporations owned half the studios in Hollywood. When the French fell into the frame (in The Matrix Reloaded and Mission Impossible and Oceans 12), Paris Match bridled: “A smoker, not very clean, vain, cowardly and unfaithful, the Frenchman has come to embody the depraved morals of old Europe as evoked by George Bush.” Iranians moaned at how Ancient Persians were depicted in 300, a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae.

But did the Romans whine when they were portrayed as brutes in Spartacus? No. Nor, more significantly, did the British actors - Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov - who played all those icy Roman senators. Why not?

Because the British know that villainy is where the artistic gold lies. Anthony Hopkins was voted all-time screen baddie by the American Film Institute for his role as Hannibal Lecter, leading a legion of villains such as Alan Rickman, Steven Berkoff, Christopher Lee, David Bowie (yes, playing Pontius Pilate) and even Richard E. Grant - men with such toffish British accents you wonder why Labour election campaigners in Crewe aren’t stalking them. Why do they crave such roles? “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture,” said Hitchcock, who knew who usually stole the cinematic glory.

When Russians twig that, they’ll be a threat not just to archaeologists but to Hollywood itself.

Indiana Jones review to follow.

Update:

Indiana Jones review follows.

So, it’s very good, and it’s very Indy, and the motorcycle chase was really up there with the Nazi convoy taking the Lost Ark away, and the fight just preceding that was hilarious, and Shia LaBeouf was really good (let’s hope he keeps himself from going the way of the last young guy cast in one of these went (that is, River Phoenix)). Everything else I have to say I’m going to hide so highlight to read it.

The thing with the “saucer men” was a little… ehhh… But then sitting there I found myself thinking, “I guess it was too much to ask for him to stick to the religious stories but it would have been nice to do another one,” when I thought that he didn’t do ALL religious stories, he did the one about the Thuggee cult in the middle, and they’ve all been about the sort of paranormal reality-of-the-world’s-greatest-myths sort of thing, like the Ark having powers the Nazis want, the Thuggees able to take the heart out of a living person with the chest sealing itself up after and the glowing rocks and the rest of it, the Grail having the ability to keep a sweet old grail knight alive all those years and the aging voodoo it did on Julian Glover, all complete with chase scenes, booby traps, red-lines-tracking-Indy’s-progress-on-maps, and lots of bugs. So it wasn’t, technically, outside of the Indiana Jones Tradition. In fact it fit right in. In fact there was very little else they could do since so many people have been saying aliens taught ancient cultures how to farm for ages (although, technically, that makes it a modern myth and I’m not enough an expert on pre-Columbian South America to tell you if it was an ancient one as well), except go back to Egypt and lord knows they’ve done that to death. I mean, I guess there’s some stuff they could have done in China or East Asia, or maybe the Middle East (hah, never mind), but I can’t think of anything with the sort of supernatural stuff like you find with the grail. Anyway it ended up being sort of Indiana Jones cum Doctor Who cum The X-Files, which was all a little strange, but hell it’s still a good movie. As for Indy ending up married at the end, I found that a little disappointingly end-of-legend, but I guess when you’re an older guy you can’t really kiss the girl at the end and let the audience assume a happy ending after that.