The Icepick Cometh

Can't endorse the new Indiana Jones movie, which we saw at the drive-in last weekend while The Baby more or less slept in the back seat (Iron Man, the second half of the double feature, was much better, and since I dug out my Black Sabbath CD and started playing "Iron Man" in the car, The Baby has taken to saying "Ionman" — but I'm digressing again).

It's not that the new Indy is particularly bad, though it's not good, or that it wastes Karen Allen in a comeback role (someone on Gawker said, "Oh, that's what a MILF looks like"), or that it manages to rip off the first X-Files movie, Back to the Future, and Spike Milligan's old crazy guy from the Bastille from History of the World, Part I, while forgetting how much fun the old Indiana Jones movies could be (though Harrison Ford looks like he's having tons of fun without having to lift the undernourished Calista Flockhart around). It even wastes a pretty good premise of Indy getting older (it takes place in 1957), if no less adventuresome, proving for the fourth time in nine years that George Lucas, God bless him, should be nowhere near a laptop (somehow, he didn't write the screenplay, though Steven Spielberg does a pretty good George Lucas imitation in directing — that's not a compliment).

No, it's merely because St. Jimmy is upset that Too Short isn't in it, as Lord Jim misidentified him. He meant Short Round, and the actor who portrayed him also played Data in The Goonies. He is alive and well (though he used to be called "Ke Huy Quan" and not "Jonathan Ke Quan," as Babble calls him, but jeez, he turns 37 this year — not very funny).

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UPDATE JUNE 10: I should say that the motorcycle chase through Indy's New England college was pretty cool (and at least they weren't on skateboards, which the Back to the Future-like scene preceding it seemed to be leading to).

Also, He-Man seemed to enjoy Shia LaBeouf's performance, so the movie was not without redeeming value.