Journeys Through Forests, New Friends, Old Friends, Indy 4, Getting Married Movie Style

Yesterday was one of the more interesting days I've had in a while. First, a few friends and I went hiking through Forest Park. I've included some pictures here. I've lived close to Portland almost my entire life, yet for some reason this park has escaped me, until now.

Forest Park is nestled right against downtown Portland. My friend, Gabe, lives close by so this week and last we, and a few others, have gone exploring. This park has it all: tall old growth trees, cathedral like canopies, beautiful streams and ponds, a castle like ruin called Stone House, salamanders, slugs, and hollow trees. It's a quiet sanctuary from Oregon's metropolis which is less than a mile away.

Afterwards I hung out with Gabe at his place. Not long afterwards, Gabe's girlfriend, Ariana, came over. They were nice enough to let me have dinner with them, and afterwards the three of us went to a movie called "Run Fatboy Run" about a man named Dennis who, five years after leaving his pregnant girlfriend at the altar, decides to become a more prominent part of her -- and their son's -- lives again by competing against her new boyfriend in a London marathon. I hope you don't feel spoiled by me telling you that in the end Dennis completes the marathon and wins back the respect of his son, and the heart of his ex-girlfriend, who he still loves. I will discuss this movie again later on because it was still fresh in my mind when I saw a midnight showing of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" a few hours later.

After the movie was over I said goodbye to Gabe and Ariana and walked around the corner from Gabe's apartment to my friend Mike's place.

Mike and I are both avid Indiana Jones fans and he had invited me, and our friend Bryan, to a midnight showing of "Indiana Jones." I had actually known Mike since the second grade and I've been friends with Bryan since kindergarten. It looked to me that the majority of the audience at the Indiana Jones midnight showing were mostly high school kids. So that would mean that Bryan and I have been friends since before many of these people were alive. And Indiana Jones had been around before either of us were alive! That in itself is a sobering thought.

. . .

I wrote all that on May 23, now it is June 16 and I am finishing this post. I promised earlier that I would discuss Indy 4 when it came out. Now all is said and done and almost all my friends have said they hated it because of the aliens or whatnot. The aliens didn't bother me, really. I wish they weren't computer animated, and that they would have made a puppet or had a really skinny guy in an alien costume, like in the X-Files. That would have been fun. But before I talk about what really struck me as disturbing about Indy 4, I'm going to say what I did like about it, for the record:

I thought the Russians made great bad guys. They looked almost just like the Nazis. The uniforms were a different color and they spoke Russian instead of German. I'm guessing the average Indy fan can't understand a lick of either language so who cares, right? Other than that they were practically interchangeable. It occurred to me that by setting the movie in South America during the 1950s they could have easily brought back some Nazis because that's where all the Nazis were at that time. But they probably wouldn't have been able to show up out of nowhere and point their machine guns at Indy like the plot required the Russians to do a dozen times or so.

I liked that the villain was a product of the Soviet mind control and telepathy experiments. That was a very nice touch.

The quicksand scene was probably the single greatest scene of Harrison Ford's career. This is the second:



I liked that they brought Marion back almost thirty years later. She wasn't the Marion we remember, though. I would have liked it even more if she would have gotten into a drinking contest with the Russians.

I liked that Indy survived a nuclear explosion in a lead refrigerator. I know a lot of people complained about this, but really, how else are you going to survive a nuclear explosion? And it's even more plausible than . . . well, I'll get to that later.

The flesh eating ants were cool.

Now I am going to talk about what really disturbed me about Indy 4, and I'm going to talk about some plot points in detail, so if you haven't seen Indy yet don't say you weren't warned.

About three quarters of the way through the movie we discover (along with Indy) that Shia Labeouf is really Marion and Indy's love child. You see, Indy and Marion were about to get married, but Indy left her at the alter while she was pregnant. At the end of the movie, Indy wins her back and they get married.

Wait a second! I had just seen a movie a few hours earlier where the exact same thing happens! It was called "Run Fatboy Run." Is this what Hollywood is teaching us these days? That in the end it really doesn't matter if you are a chubby English bloke or Indiana Jones himself, you can still leave your pregnant girlfriend at the alter, but you will be able to win her affection again?

Now what is really more realistic? That these lessons Hollywood is teaching us about how to treat your fiance are true? Or that in order to survive a nuclear blast simply insert oneself into a lead refrigerator?

If a nuclear blast is like hell, with fire and dead and melting things and all that, I suppose one could say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.