One thing I really liked was a piece of music you hear in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You hear it when Indy and his father have gone to Berlin to retrieve the Grail diary, as they’re surrounding by rallying, book-burning Nazis. I would hear that music and think: “I love that! It is awesome! John Williams surely composed a truly enjoyable piece in imitation of the kind of music heard at these events.”

But John Williams didn’t do anything of the kind.

See, a week or so ago I watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, an extremely important movie that I embarrassingly had only seen in excerpted form up to that point. So I’m watching it, and what do I hear? That music from Last Crusade! It isn’t an awesome pastiche of Nazi music. It’s real Nazi music! And I’ve been talking about how great it was!

Needless to say, my very perception of reality was shaken.

Moviegoers in search of political satire have had a rough time these past few years, as Hollywood has backed away from the genre due to America’s contentiously divided electorate. Sure, the electorate has always been divided, but rarely with as much venom and animosity as we have seen in the 2000 era.

It’s not so much about policy or government anymore as it is about culture. Pickup trucks vs. Hybrids, Beer vs. Lattes — we see these divisions everywhere in America, and once you make politics personal, some are easily offended.

Enter Bud Johnson, the pickup-driving, beer-swilling underachiever who doesn’t much care about anything. Hollywood has put it’s faith in him, thinking that perhaps his story can ease some of America’s political pain.

Bud is played by Kevin Costner, who hasn’t been as funny and charming as he is in Swing Vote for decades. Only his performance in Field of Dreams compares in terms of downright likability — and we do like him. Costner’s Bud doesn’t care about his job, his friends, or even his (broken) family, all that’s left of which is his adorable little daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), but we somehow manage to care about him.

Maybe it’s the pure bipartisanship of his apathy, but his “loser” ways are completely endearing. And his delightful daughter is, of course, his polar opposite: hyperinvolved and ultrapassionate about not just politics, but civics, the economy, the world. It’s because of this that she registers Bud to vote, frustrated by his acerbic lack of interest in the election, and thus seals his fate.

Through a voting error, Bud’s vote ends up not being recorded — but they do know that he voted. And after the electoral college results in a tie, the world is waiting on one little county in New Mexico to decide the next President of the United States: Bud’s county. Then, Bud’s county results in a tie, leaving only one option — Bud must recast his vote, and decide who will lead the free world.

Sure, it’s unlikely. But consider that the 2000 election was decided by fewer than 600 votes in Florida. In New Mexico, it was just over 100 votes that decided the state. Unlikely, but not impossible.

What results is a media and political maelstrom swirling around Bud’s life as he prepares to cast his vote. And so begins the satire-fest. Everyone wants to know what he’ll decide.

The media hounds him for any tiny soundbyte or opinion that might be a clue as to how he’ll vote — blowing everything he says monumentally out of proportion. The politicians react, campaigning directly at him, and selling their political souls in the process. Republican candidate Kelsey Grammar endorses gay marriage after Bud says he doesn’t care what two grown men do on their own time. Democratic candidate Dennis Hopper rails against abortion when Bud says that he doesn’t like it.

In this way, and through some very clever and hilarious faux-campaign commercials, the movie lays bare our political process for what it is: one, long, media-obsessed popularity contest, with voter manipulation and false-choice gimmickry as the orders of the day. And not only does it make politicians lie, the movie teaches us, but it also makes regular people believe in the wrong sorts of things for the wrong sorts of reasons.

But the film is also bipartisan, and bends over backwards to prove that it’s not lobbying for any one side over the other. While that might be it’s greatest strength at the box office, it’s also its greatest weakness in terms of effective satire. Without a clear target on which to train its sarcasm, the film ends up targeting politics, the media, and America as a whole, and that sarcasm essentially turns into cynicism.

As politicians are made to be stupid, self-important fools, and the media portrayed as cutthroat and unprincipled, the movie takes on the same air of arrogant apathy that Bud was displaying at the outset of the movie As a result, as he learns to care about “the system,” the audience is duped into disliking it more and more.

But, in the end, the film is not about political satire, and that’s why so many political wonks are finding it to be callow and dissatisfying cinema. I never got the impression that politics was the objective, though. The objective, clearly, was about having hope for the future, and doing what you can to make that future better.

Sure, it’s gushy. But so was Sex in the City, and at least this movie has a point.

Who cuts off that horse’s head, anyhow? Think about it. It appears that Tom Hagen is the only person on the Family payroll out there at the time, right? But it seems highly unlikely that a consigliori generally and Hagen specifically would be so directly involved in an action like that. So who? Is it someone we’re supposed to know? Is it actually Hagen? Or is it just some nameless muscle they hired once Hagen got out to Hollywood? Tell me guys, you’ve got to tell me.

The cereal pieces, they’re basically Coco Puffs. That’s fine by me, because Coco Puffs are truly tasty, as all right thinking people are well aware. Amongst these chocolatey nuggets are marshmallows in four distinct shapes. Here’s what the box says the marshmallows are meant to represent, followed by what they actually look like.

Indy’s Hat - Brown bell? Dung heap?
Temple of Akator - Yellow triangle
Torch - Brown triangle with lumps
Crystal Skull - Actually, this pretty much looks like it’s supposed to

I just ate two bowls, and rather than stop I think I’m just gonna keep eating and eating until the whole box is gone. If I could, I’d eat nothing but Indiana Jones cereal for the rest of my life.

But of course, that won’t be possible. It says right on the box that this is a limited edition, and this kind of awesome tie-in cereal never lasts forever. So if you want the chance to eat Coco Puffs with weird little brown things meant to be torches, or look at Harrison Ford’s sexy sexy face while you eat, now’s the time to do it. Snatch up this wonderful thing while you still can. Don’t miss this opportunity to ingest just a little bit of history.

But this one was just a little too good to pass up. Cult leader Tom Cruise was called out by celebrity shrink Dr. Drew last week for his unrelenting zeal for Scientology.

Drew had this to say:

“Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood — maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.”

Hey Dr. Drew — it’s not that hard. Scientology is a religion for profit. You pay for your membership. So becoming a leader in it is tantamount to becoming an executive at a major corporation. Get it? Still, the good Doc has a point. Cruise always struck me as quite the lonely, emotionally confused guy. It makes sense, then, that he would be attracted to a “religion” whose main selling point is the bashing of psychiatry.

Speaking of which, Cruise’s lawyer Bert Feilds was quick to tow the traditional “Psychiatry is Nazism” line from Scientology:

“This unqualified television performer, who is obviously just looking for notoriety, is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them,” the lawyer said. “He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”

Want more on Scientology’s view of Psychiatry? Check out this now-infamous video of Tom Cruise on the Today show:

See, I’m re-reading I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, Ebert’s pretty excellent collection of reviews of shitty films. In it, he has this to say about a movie called The Doom Generation. He gives the movie zero stars, which is just fine by me because it is indeed terrible, but just read this and bear with me.

“[Director Gregg Araki] wants to make a blood-soaked, disgusting, disturbing movie about characters of low intelligence and little personal worth, but he’s not willing to cop to that, and so by giving them smarmy pop-culture references and nihilistic dialogue, and filling the edges of the frame with satirical in-jokes and celebrity walk-ons…he’s keeping himself at arm’s length. Hey, if we’re dumb enough to be offended by his sleazefest, that’s our problem; Araki is, you see, a stylist, who can use concepts like iconography and irony to weasel away from his material.”

Did you read that?  Did you read “blood-soaked, disgusting, disturbing movie about characters of low intelligence and little personal worth?” Did you read “smarmy pop-culture references” and “satirical in-jokes?” Did you read “use concepts like iconography and irony to weasel away from his material?”

Now that you’ve read that paragraph of the reasons The Doom Generation deservedly got zero stars, I want you to consider this very important fact: Roger Ebert gave Pulp Fiction a full four out of four stars and included it in his “Great Movies” review series.

In one case these things make a movie bad, but in another they make a movie great? Something isn’t right here.

(HINT: The thing that isn’t right is the four star review of Pulp Fiction.)

It’s by no means great, but it’s pretty okay. If you go to the theater wanting to see an above average action-adventure movie, you’ll come away satisfied. If you go to the theater wanting to see a movie that’s as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you will probably be disappointed.

I’ll start by discussing some of the flaws—and unfortunately there are a few—so we can get them out of the way and move on to the good stuff. Most of the worries I had when I imagined what the movie would be like turned out to be justified. Indy (Harrison Ford, if for some reason you didn’t know) was often too extreme in the things he did, more like a superhero than the regular guy we’d come to know before, achieving his goals through equal parts resourcefulness and desperation. There was far too much lame, goofy humor, just as I knew there would be. Spielberg and Lucas both have shown, as the years have gone on, an inexplicable and ever-growing fondness for inserting scads of flat, silly attempts at jokes into otherwise serious movies, and they do it here a lot. (This should come as a surprise to no one; even Last Crusade suffered from this, and it’s only gotten much more extreme over the past two decades.)

And then there’s the problem so many movies suffer from these days, especially those that bear the stain of involvement from George Lucas: fakey-looking creatures. Among the fakey-looking creatures are some gophers that act like they were taken right out of Caddyshack, and I hated their brief moments on the screen more than anything else I’ve ever seen. But the particular bummer in the world of fakey-looking creatures as it applies to the Indiana Jones movies, is the essential “gross animal scene.” You remember them from the other movies, the snakes and the bugs and the rats. In this one we’re given some oversized, man-eating ants with a look that stretches suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. If the crazy supernatural stuff in the Indy movies doesn’t convince us, that’s okay—we know all that stuff is a trick. But something we loved about the other films was knowing that Harrison Ford and John Rhys-Davies really were surrounded by snakes or that Kate Capshaw really was shin deep in creepy crawlies. That feeling of excitement is missing from the analogous scene in Crystal Skull.

On the other hand, here’s something I was sure the movie was going to piss me off by doing but that I was relieved to find didn’t happen. I was sure that giving Indy this young pup of a sidekick, the self-styled tough guy Mutt (Shia LeBeouf), would inevitably lead up to a scene of Indy announcing, Danny Glover style, that he is too old for this shit. He’d then pass the torch to the new guy, who would go off and take care of the adventuring while Indy lived out his retirement years in blissful serenity. Much to my surprise—and delight—this scene never came; in fact, the movie ends with a visual statement that Henry Jones, Jr. will still be Indiana for a long time to come.

Of course, Mutt does turn out to be Indy’s son, which everyone has known would turn out to be the case since they first heard about the character. The fact that everyone saw it coming does not make the development any less pointless, unfortunately.

Despite my gripes (I even have a few more, but I’ll let them go), most of the movie is an enjoyable ride, certainly better than most action movies even if it isn’t as good as the other Indy flicks. The movie gives you everything you came for; in it, you’ll see plenty of thrilling stunts, adrenaline infused action sequences, exploration of dangerous temples, and patented Indiana Jones riddle-solving. An extended chase over land and water in a South American jungle is the standout action set piece, provided you ignore the moments where Shia LeBeouf transforms into Tarzan, which I intend to do. Everybody jumps from one vehicle to another and drives over cliffs and does all the stuff we want to see in a movie like this. There’s even a swordfight between Mutt and Cate Blanchett’s evil Soviet doctor that has them parrying and riposting while standing on the back of speeding automobiles, and that me like much much. A scene near the end of the movie that has Indy and his traveling companions running down a rapidly disappearing spiral staircase strikes just the right note, as well—fun in the grandest Indiana Jones tradition.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes a while to get going. The entire opening sequence in Nevada left me flat, and while a motorcycle chase shortly after that was pretty exciting, the movie doesn’t take off until Indy arrives in Peru and begins his search for the Crystal Skull and its associated Kingdom. Once it starts to move, though, it barrels along at a fair clip, providing the roller coaster ride we’ve all been promised without ever lagging or repeating itself so that the action becomes tedious. It keeps you entertained throughout, which is all it sets out to do. So it’s a fine way to spend two hours, and it’s mostly a good movie. The problems that arise in the course of the film aren’t grievous enough to pull this one down into the Realm of the Lousy, but they are noticeable enough to keep it from being as great as it might have been.

If you don’t like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you will also totally hate:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24655970/

And they even get a Jar-Jar Binks joke in there. As we all should.

Recently, the producers of Hollywood blockbusters have decided to use the prestigious, artsy fartsy international awards show to showcase their… let’s say, more mainstream projects. A few years ago The Da Vinci Code got totally owned by critics at the press screening, but they’ve kept it up, all the same.

So it’s heartening to see that the festival’s snobby audience had a fairly positive, if calculated, reaction. Here’s a snippet from French reviewer Alain Spira, from the magazine Paris Match:

“It’s good. It’s a product that is polished, industrial, we’re not getting ripped off in terms of quality.

You know what you’re going to see, you see what you get, and when you leave you’re happy.”

When you leave, you’re happy?!? That’s the very best kind of review a movie can get! Okay, maybe in France it’s kind of a drawback. But everywhere else, that’s exactly what I want to hear. Because let me tell you, leaving happy is the opposite of what happened to me in the past year as I saw most other other big budget stinkers, including Transformers and Iron Man.