I put my nephews on the Internet today, in this post at AppScout. I asked permission first since my dad took the pic (I offered zero compensation) and from their parents ("as long as they're fully clothed" I was told). Check it out to see if you want to fumetti up your pics.

Via Cory at (where else?) BoingBoing: Astaire does Jackson. It is pretty damn impressive, even tho Fred always reminds me of someone's grandfather dancing, no matter what age he is in the footage.

[[Josh and Jeremy: Don't read this until you see the movie! That goes for anyone who wants to avoid SPOILERS.]]

So the fourth (and mostly definitely last) Indiana Jones flick debuted last night. It is no surprise to say that it is not full of surprises. Everything that could potentially be a big shocker for the fans leaked out a long time ago, so that left us with 1) how good are the fights and chases (very, very) and 2) how well did they resolve everything at the end (completely).

The Good:

• They didn't waste any time with an opening not related to the main plot, a switch from the previous three films, which, while surprising, worked out just fine.
• The warehouse from the end of Raiders -- which I'd always pictured being in a basement in Washington D.C. for some reason -- is actually in Nevada! I sat a bit stunned when I saw it, and whispered to my wife, "They're after the Ark!" and thought that the whole alien plot had been mis-information. Turns out it wasn't. But the cameo by the Ark of the Covenant, ignored by the KGB, was welcome.
• That the studio kept secret that Mac (Ray Winstone) was a bad guy was the only big surprise I got out of the film. I'm glad he was, cause he wouldn't have made a very interesting side-kick. Also explains why they didn't bring back Sallah -- he's no double-agent. Tho he is a kick-ass dwarf.
• Rocket sled. Atomic bomb test! Refrigerator! And not a broken bone at all. Classic.
• Giant mechanical ancient ruins. While they've been done to death since Raiders (stupid, stupid National Treasure), no one does them better than Spielberg.
• Sword fight between moving cars, giant ants eating humans, Russian's cutting down the Amazon rain forest to make a road: all good.
• Interplay between son and dad. Indy's always had a side-kick (Sallah, Short Round, his Dad), making it is his son is a nice way to close the series.

The Bad:

• Did we need to wait through the teenagers in the 50's jalopy racing the army caravan through the desert? I suppose it's better than the credits taking up time in the actual opening.
• Inconsistent magnetism.
• The threatening FBI guys. That scene set up a lot but went nowhere. Yeah, it got Indy "fired" and got Jim Broadbent (who was wasted) to quit, but big deal. Like Mutt couldn't come riding through the college campus to find Prof. Jones for help? The feebs never make another appearance, thus also wasting the talents of the Janitor from Scrubs.
• The name "Mutt." I appreciate the irony that the kid is named Mutt when his dad is named after the family dog, but I don't see myself wanting to go see Shia LeBouf in a few years in "Mutt Williams and the Lost City of Golden Amazonian Nymphets." (Okay, I would, but not for Mutt.) Mutt Jones would be worse.
• I know he's older and all, but Indy just cutting into mummified remains willy-nilly in the conquistador's tomb seemed out of character. All I could hear in my head was River Phoenix yelling, "It should be in a museum!"
• Monkey-like vine swinging. I guess Mutt and the Primates (oo, that's a good name for a band!) had the shared hair-do to bond over, so that must make it alright.
• Marion: She didn't get to do much, but admittedly, it's hard to beat her drinking scene in Raiders. Karen Allen's face lift had her looking like a kewpie doll throughout. At least Harrison Ford's botox injections settled throughout filming, so he got some lines back in his forehead. (Time yet for the Hollywood backlash against plastic surgery? Anyone with me?)

Lucas is right; people are going to see extraterrestrials (would it have killed them to make it look more like the alien in Close Encounters? Or E.T.??) in their Indy film and balk -- I know at least one guy who has already expressed disdain for that aspect. I wonder if I would have had I not known ahead of time...

Still, seems silly to be able to suspend disbelief for a universe of super-natural things like face-melting Arks, guys pulling still beating hearts out of chests, and thousand-year-old knights guarding the Holy Grail and not have room in your heart for the existence of crystal-boned, extra-dimensional hive-minded EBEs running a Mayan culture.

But monkey-swinging? Nah.

I just got spam from James Carville on my gmail account. He addressed it to "Dear ELWIN" (with the caps).

I'm on the Cornell campus-to-campus bus, heading home from NYC. I just spent a couple days in the office, mostly to do some face-to-face meetings about some relatively complex up-coming stories I'm working on. And having dinner with my friends, who kept me out until 12:30 last night eating Korean food. Yum. Now, hopefully, I'll get some writing done since I don't have a book to read and this Internet connect isn't going to last forever...

About frakkin' time:

From TV Guide:

Hey You Guuuuuuyyyys! PBS is powering The Electric Company back up starting in January.

The 1970s-era educational show -- whose regulars included Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby -- starts production on new episodes this week and is geared, as always, to the six-to-nine year-old set.

No doubt in my mind -- the most important TV show in my life up to around age 7. Maybe i didn't love it as much as, say, Adam West's Batman, but it was more important. The Electric Company helped me learn to read.

UPDATE: EW sez, while the old EC was sketches, "the new [The Electric Company] will be more plot-driven, centering on a group of kids with superheroic, word-altering powers."

blah. I take it back. Don't bring the show back.

It makes me a little sick to embed a video from Fox News, but my brother is in this one. For about 2 seconds. he's the bald cop getting into the car. Otherwise, this is an actual balanced story about Nerf guns used on campus for playing Humans vs. Zombies. Apparently, it can be done!

I promised my friend Bill, who should by now be back in Iraq, ready to spend 12 to 18 months in the Green Zone, that I would blog all about Iron Man, as well as the other big summer movies that he won't get to see until the illegal DVDs are with the troops.

My opinion is little different than many others: this is probably the best adaptation of a Marvel Comics superhero to date. Probably only Spider-Man 2 is better, and even that's iffy if you take exception with some of the liberties in the story of Doc Ock. (For my money, there's still no greater scene of super-heroics in history than watching the unmasked wall-crawler on the front of the runaway elevated train, trying desperately to stop it from crashing.)

Iron Man started first with a good, funny script (you can't go wrong with jokes about Operation: The Wacky Doctor's Game) that worked in two of Shell-head's rogues gallery members (hard to tell if you don't know the comics, but the Afghan war-lord that kidnaps Tony Stark is part of a group called "The Ten Rings" and he's either there to represent or work for The Mandarin). Iron Monger is a little more obvious. It's a good trick since Iron Man doesn't exactly have a memorable villain line-up when compared other Marvel heroes. Only Thor's bad guys are lamer, but at least he's got Loki.

Second, they cast the film with real actors. I suppose this was harder to pull off 25 to 30 years ago, and that's why movies like the original Punisher and Captain America sucked -- okay, it didn't help that the rights were owned by companies with no talent for making movies -- but Tim Burton changed all that when he made Michael Keaton into Batman. Suffice to say, Robert Downey Jr. is fantastic. (And Gwyneth Paltrow as a red-head? Oh my yes. Though really, when do we get a super-heroine movie that doesn't suck? Have Elektra and Catwoman ruined the chances forever with the fickle Hollyweird studios?)

Third: Great effects. Of course, CGI is much easier for armor than it is for living things. That's going to hurt Incredible Hulk later this summer.

Fourth: Fanboy lip service. Toward the end of the film, a running gag coalesces into the mention of one word (which I won't give away here) that ties the film into another Marvel Universe staple, which had at least geek in the audience (not me, I'm happy to report) exclaim, "Oh, Shit!" And that was with joy. Those of us who knew to stay through the credits and see the cameo at the end got an even bigger tie-in; it will drive the uber-geeks wild with its promises about the future of Iron Man as a franchise. (I'm here to say right now [SPOILER], there will never, ever be an Avengers movie. Not like the fans want. We're never going to see Robert Downy Jr. at Tony Stark and Ed Norton as Bruce Banner (with an equally big name Cap and Wasp and Hawkeye, etc.) on the same screen with a bunch of other guys playing super-hero. Not. Gonna. Happen. The expense of paying the stars alone is too much for any studio. Maybe with unknowns? Not even then. They just tried it with Justice League from the distinguished competition. Didn't work. Won't happen for Marvel, either. But that's what animation is for.)

The lip service doesn't help them make a better movie, of course, but pandering to the base never hurts the word of mouth.

All in all, Iron Man is a great way for the summer movie blockbuster season to kick off. Hulk not withstanding, the rest of the summer has a lot of promise with Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, Wall-E, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, and even X-Files: I Want to Believe on my must see list already. (Maybe not The Happening: in the theater watching the trailer with a few hundred college students, the trailer got an unintentional laugh when the title was revealed. Probably not what ol' M. Night's looking for.)