Friedman Provides Spielberg Insight on NPR
27 May 2008 Friedman Provides Spielberg Insight on NPR
Lester Friedman, chair of the Media and Society Program, was interviewed by NPR journalist Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr on Tuesday, May 27, regarding Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Author of the book, Citizen Speilberg (University of Illinois Press, 2006), Friedman noted how Spielberg uses a recurring theme of families torn apart and brought back together in his movies and reveals two painful experiences from which the director draws inspiration for his work. Spielberg is as interested in those characters [from broken homes] as he is in the roller coaster ride hes about to provide you, explained Friedman. And thats what his imitators lack, quite frankly. Friedman joined the HWS faculty in 2005. He earned a B.A. from Alfred University and both an M.A. and Ph.D. from Syracuse University. A link to the audio is below.
NPR Indiana Jones Another Hit for Spielberg Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr May 27, 2008 Listen Now: Indiana Jones Another Hit for Spielberg. Once upon a time, there was a hero named Indiana Jones, who tracked down a Lost Ark, conquered a Temple of Doom and went on a Last Crusade to find the Holy Grail. Now, nearly a generation after all that, hes off to the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Its the Cold War 50s, not the pre-war 30s, and just to make that clear, director Steven Spielberg puts Elvis Presley on the soundtrack, a hot rod in the desert and a slightly grizzled Harrison Ford in Indys fedora. Grizzled but still agile, lets note. In his first 20 minutes on screen, Dr. Jones hes an archaeologist-professor, remember survives a free-form drag race, a shootout, a battle of wits, a magnetized shootout, a swing through the roof-rafters of notorious Hanger 51 and a skin-blistering jet-train ride across the desert. And an atomic blast. Having returned with a suitable bang, he can finally take a moment to acquaint both the audience and a motorcycle-riding, leather-jacketed sidekick named Mutt with a few plot details. Legend says that a crystal skull was stolen from a mythical lost city in the Amazon, he explains. Supposedly built out of solid gold, guarded by the living dead. Whoever returns the skull to the city temple will be given control over its power. So the old grave-robbers going to return something, eh? Well, isnt that enlightened. Actually, who cares why Indy is doing anything, as long as he does it at high speed and at enormous peril to everyone concerned? Its family-friendly peril, of course: Spielberg may be the only filmmaker around who, after a character is saved by stuffing himself into a refrigerator, would dispatch another character to say, Dont you know climbing into refrigerators is dangerous? Gotta love him for that. And for getting Shia LaBeouf to stop playing with Transformers and start mimicking Brando in The Wild One, for encouraging Cate Blanchett to make her Russian agent a sort of proto-Bond Girl, and especially for bringing back Karen Allen, still as spunky and radiant as she was in Raiders of the Lost Ark. All of this as they traipse off to have Close Encounters of the Rube Goldberg Kind in a temple where towers snap together, doors pull apart and staircases retract into walls at the very sight of a bullwhip. With Spielberg preferring real stunts over digital ones, it mustve been great fun to film all this. If its a bit less fun to watch, well, expecting Indys derring-do to have the urgency of what he derring-did almost 30 years ago may just be wishful thinking. Particularly considering the form of these movies, which are themselves a little like Rube Goldberg contraptions all gears and stunts and plot points clicking preposterously into place. This time, the clicking seems more efficient than joyous, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not unlike the other two Raiders sequels: Its inventively conceived, capably managed and amusing enough to please the folks and this includes legions who are already hooked.