I admit it: I had as much fun as anyone on Twitter when Disney announced a fifth Indiana Jones movie earlier this week. And can you blame me? The only interesting thing about the last one was its willingness to confront the character’s aging out of action-hero viability, and when the new one opens on July 19, 2019 Harrison Ford will be 77 years old.
And no, I will not make a joke about whether he’ll survive the production. Of course he will. Ford walked away from a plane crash last year and survived the Millennium Falcon’s attempt to eat him on the set of The Force Awakens the year before that he’s a tough son of a bitch. Trust me on this.
So, sure, we’re getting another Indiana Jones movie. And Steven Spielberg will direct it, and George Lucas will be shut out of the production process so we don’t get another Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Those all sound like good things. And after the successful revival of Star Wars, no one can be surprised at Disney shaking another beloved Lucasfilm property back to life.
But … well, do we need this? Does every property need to be revived for a new generation? Star Wars is a no-brainer – it’s a cosmic mythology that can grow and change, introducing fresh characters and letting old ones gracefully bow out. But the Indiana Jones movies are based on a character, and that character is rooted in a more realistic physical world. Okay, various deities are real and there are aliens, sort of, but Indy himself has no superpowers. He’s not even immortal any more, after crossing that big barrier at the end of The Last Crusade.
I’m sure there are millions of people who grew up with Raiders and its progeny who can’t wait to see how an older, creakier Indy fares in the 1960s, presumably searching for an ancient Mesopotamian tablet that holds the key to stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Crystal Skull also demonstrated that Communists make poor stand-ins for Nazis as Indy’s foes who’ll be his primary antagonists in the new movie? East Germany? Spielberg just did that in Bridge Of Spies.
Another thing that worries me about a fifth chapter is the fact that after the Grail and the Ark, there just aren’t that many truly invaluable artifacts left to chase down. And maybe the problem with Crystal Skull was that Ford himself seemed to be sleepwalking through most of it he hadn’t found whatever it was that reactivated him as Han Solo in The Force Awakens. Maybe he’ll still be energized when the time comes to shoot this thing. Who knows, right?
So, okay. Bring on the new Indiana Jones movie. I will brace myself for a dud while secretly hoping everything works out. It was a good strategy for Star Wars, after all.
***
In the more immediate future, the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema is hosting this month’s Doc Soup Sundays screening this weekend, presenting Jean-Luc Leon’s A French Forger on March 20 at 11 am.
It’s a study of Guy Ribes, who occupies a curious position in the world of fraudulent art: he doesn’t copy any specific work, instead duplicating the styles and textures of a given artist and sending them out into the world. (He calls them “oafs”, which is a weirdly appropriate term.)
Leon’s documentary finds Ribes endlessly fascinating, and so will you unlike someone like Mark Landis, the compulsive creator of fake masterworks seen in the recent Art And Craft, Ribes is a fully self-aware subject, and his gift for stylistic mimicry is remarkable. The movie doesn’t shy away from his frauds, but it also admires his genuine talent.
Tickets are $16 ($12 for Bloor members), and AGO curator Kenneth Brummel will be on hand to conduct a post-screening Skype Q&A with Leon. I don’t often advise getting up early on a Sunday, but this will be worth it.
