Turn Back Time

So the Supreme Court released their final rulings of the year on Friday. The other recent decisions had lulled us into thinking they could be reasonable, but now they've killed affirmative action in colleges, allowed anti-LGBT+ discrimination as free speech, and struck down Biden's student loan relief. So awful, and on the last day of Pride Month! But apparently Biden announced a different way to provide debt relief. I hope it works. I did sign up to the plan but I didn't hear back after it was paused for the court case.

Meanwhile I saw the new Indiana Jones movie last night. It was fun and full of adventure, about a fictionalized Antikythera dial made to aid in time travel; it's like a compass pointing you to a "fissure" storm/place that you can travel through. The goddaughter Helena was an interesting character, and she brought along a streetwise kid as her sidekick. Indy does a lot of stunts, but they still address that he can be slow and achy at his age (and with his history of injuries). So the younger characters get exciting action too as they help. The movie was somewhat long, and I felt they could have cut the Tangier rickshaw & car chase shorter, as well as the underwater dive where I couldn't really see what was happening anyway. If they tightened those scenes up, it would have improved the pace and running time. I read some guy online repeatedly calling the movie "bloodless" but that's wrong. The undercover Nazis in the movie kill 3 or 4 innocent bystanders and friends in almost every location; I was appalled by how many people died, and why Indy didn't say, "We can't risk involving anybody else" after all the casual murders around them. Just because we didn't see some Nazi's face melting off doesn't make the movie bloodless.

I enjoyed the references to past movies in the Indy franchise. His Egyptian friend Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark has emigrated his family to America. People also mention Jones's wife and son from the fourth movie, and there's a callback to a kissing scene between Indy and Marion in the first movie. The whole franchise is on Disney+ now including the Young Indiana Jones adventures, which I had been catching up on lately. (Yes, Crystal Skull was weird, bad, and also had too long chase scenes; you can fast forward through it so you can just see the stuff about Indy reuniting with Marion and finding out about his son, who's also nicknamed after a dog.) I was initially disappointed that Marion and the son had been written out in the new movie, but characters do slowly start to explain what happened to Indy's family since their previous happy ending in the 1950s. So we get some emotion and grief rather than just casual dismissal, like they don't matter.