ScreenJunkies usually time their Honest Trailer series to coincide with the release of a film on DVD, but I don’t think Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull released anything today and I’m too lazy to look it up, so I like to imagine they just saw some low-hanging fruit rotting on the vine and decided to take a baseball bat to it. I’m fine with that. I could’ve done without the Karen Allen disses. Ha, she looks less good than when she was an ingenue 30 years ago! What a stupid bitch!  But as always, they make some great points, even about an often-parodied movie. The sound effects, the gophers, the constant reminders of Indy’s age – and worst of all, the CGI shots. I’d honestly forgotten how bad most of those were.

But again with the Nuke the Fridge thing. People, people: I know “nuke the fridge” sounds catchy to say, but nuking the fridge wasn’t even in the top 10 worst things about that movie. Unrealistic, of course, but at least it was kind of creative. The waterfall sequence was a thousand times worse, as was the monkey army, as was LeBeef not being able to find Indy a rope when he was stuck in quicksand and then throwing him a giant snake instead. My God, there’s so much wrong with that sequence, I don’t even know where to begin. And even that’s assuming I skip over the part where they thought their movie needed a quicksand scene. I choose to remember the eighties as an entire decade of people stepping in quicksand and complaining about anchovies on pizza. What were we talking about again? Oh right, Indiana Jones. Years from now, the question of which is the worst scene in this terrible movie full of bad scenes will be the subject of much heated debate among historians. Guys with weird hair on the History Channel will claim Spielberg and Lucas couldn’t possibly have made a movie so bad without having been possessed by aliens. “Do you have any proof that they weren’t possessed by aliens? What other explanation could there be? Can there be any doubt that the sucking on display was other-worldly?”

As Vince touched on earlier, Shia LaBeouf sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter where he talked about a wide range of showbizzy-style things, including his fractured relationship with Steven Spielberg due to his harsh quotes about the last Indiana Jones film (“It brought me freedom, but it also killed my spirits because this was a dude I looked up to like a sensei”), his feelings about his new film Lawless (“I fought for Lawless. I didn’t jump onto anyone else’s coattail and ride their wave”), and working with director Lars von Trier on an upcoming film (“[He]‘s dangerous. He scares me. And I’m only going to work now when I’m terrified”). But the quotes that are getting the most play in the news are the ones he made about working in the studio system, for reasons I think you’ll pick up on very quickly.

“There’s no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist,” he says. “You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, and he’s f–ed. There’s no way for him to exist in that world.” [...]

“These [Voltage Pictures] dudes are a miracle. They give you the money, and they trust you — [unlike the studios, which] give you the money, then get on a plane and come to the set and stick a finger up your ass and chase you around for five months.”

So, um … yeah. Fingers. Butts. NEWS.

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"Look at the kitty over there, George, do you see the kitty? If you're a good boy you can go pet the kitty, George."

George Lucas is currently busy traveling across the country as part of his it’s-okay-to-see-me-as-a-human-being tour, which is actually a brilliant PR move, but we’ll get to that later. First, a bit of pointless minutiae about Indy 4. A few years back, the internet quickly swooped on “nuke the fridge” as an easy shorthand for everything that was wrong with Indy 4, even though that scene wasn’t even the tenth dumbest that happened in that movie. Previously, Spielberg had said it was his idea, telling Empire “Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.” Now, in a lengthy NY Times profile, George Lucas says the idea was his, and I believe him, because slug people aren’t capable of guile:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”

In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

Was there also a dossier about using a snake for a rope? About surviving six trips down a waterfall in a row? About Shia Labeouf being able to lead an army of monkeys through the trees? Let’s not split hairs, that whole movie was really dumb. But back to the George Lucas world tour. He’s been busy painting himself as an old-fashioned romantic, too naive for this mean, modern world, but determined to keep up the fight for the downtrodden. It’s hard not to admit that he’s been partially successful.

Lucas’s films are relentlessly — and to some, maddeningly — old-fashioned and naïve. “If it’s a popcorn movie,” Lucas told me, “it needs a lot of corn.”

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Among people who cover movies for a living, kissing Steven Spielberg’s ass and bashing George Lucas are almost equally popular. So it’s not that surprising that when people talk about Indiana Jones 4, they tend to blame all the worst stuff on George Lucas, even though Spielberg has sole directing credit. (Personally, I blame everyone from the grips down to craft services for not jumping in to stop that piece of sh*t. That whole crew are like Anne Frank’s neighbors, if you ask me.). But according to Spielberg, who recently sat down with Empire, the moment people frequently point to as the worst of the film — the nuke the fridge scene — was actually his idea.

“I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathise with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”

“The gopher was good. I have the stand-in one at home. What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, “nuked the fridge”. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”

“I sympathise with the MacGuffin people, but y’all gopher haters kin kiss mah ass, nah mean?”

People picked up on the nuke the fridge thing because it was a catchy phrase, but I wouldn’t even consider that worthy of being in the top five dumbest moments of Indy 4. There was the scene where Shia LaBeouf flies into a tree and ends up swinging through the treetops with his monkey army, there was the moment when Indy got stuck in quick sand and they threw him a snake for a rope, there were the fire ants, the raft that went over the waterfall like six times with an 80-year-old man in it with no consequences other than wet hair, etc. etc. Trying to assign blame to Lucas over Spielberg is like arguing about whether Himmler was worse than Goering. I’m still pissed that everyone accepts that it was a terrible movie now with no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s still tracking 77% recommended on RottenTomatoes. SEVENTY-SEVEN F*CKING PERCENT! Among people who review films for a living! All this means is that you won’t be able to trust the reviews for War Horse in the next few months, because a person who couldn’t recognize that Indy 4 was a terrible film when it came out has lost all credibility in regard to Spielberg. TO THE QUICKSAND WITH ALL OF YOU! REMOVE THEIR SNAKE ROPES!

That's an actual toy that people wasted $175 on.

Yesterday, news hit that actress and filthy rich woman Gwyneth Paltrow had saved a woman’s life on 9/11 because she almost hit her with her Mercedes, causing the woman to miss her train that would have taken her to the World Trade Center, where she worked on the 77th floor. So because of a complete coincidence and terrible female stereotype reinforcement, Paltrow gets to pat herself on the back while idiots call her a hero. I bring this story up because now George Lucas can do the same.

Last weekend, Janice Harms of Clara City, Minnesota was answering nature’s call, when her house exploded, sending her flying from the bathroom to the kitchen. Surrounded by flames and imminent death, Harms crawled into her refrigerator and hid there until she was discovered by rescue workers.

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