From Paris (Texas) to Cairo (Illinois) to Athens (Georgia)

This is my attempt to catch you up on two cities and a movie, all in one confusingly titled post.

The Paris, Texas part is the movie. On the plane from Rome to Cairo -- and I guess there's a fourth city if you include Rome -- I watched The Wrong Paris on Netflix, that having been one of two movies I quickly downloaded in the airport when I thought it was likely Egypt Air did not have screens on the backs of the seats.

Not only was I right about that, but this was a plane from another era entirely. The first class seats were only slightly wider seats with only about double the leg room. So instead of three seats on one side, there were two. And there were screens -- but they were the communal screens, the ones that lower from the ceiling, which was our only way to watch movies on the plane before maybe 20 years ago. 

So I actually could have watched a movie on this flight. They handed out wired disposable earbuds for us. But I wasn't paying attention when the movie started, and it's just as well as it is not a movie I could even place from its images. Only when I happened to notice their intro video to the movies they conceivably offer on Egypt Air -- on our flight out of Cairo, earlier today -- could I retroactively identify as The Salt Path, a movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs (I thought that was her but couldn't be sure). This was released this year, so would have worked well with my desire to accumulate films I can rank for the current year. Having never heard of it, though, I don't regret having missed it. (Our flight to Athens today was too short for a movie, but had an episode of the TV show Superman & Lois playing.)

Anyway, before I get too sidetracked, I'll tell you a bit about The Wrong Paris because it does tie in nicely to our trip and is crucial to the strained logic of the title of this post.

The Wrong Paris is about a young woman living in Texas (Miranda Cosgrove, who at age 32 is at least ten years older than this character is supposed to be) who works on a farm but has dreams of going to art school in Paris. She doesn't have the money, though, because she spent some of her savings helping her grandmother (Frances Fisher) with medical bills after a fall the previous year. So she tries to go on a dating show set in Paris in order to just stay behind once she gets booted off of it, taking care of some of the expenses she can't currently afford.

Only the producers of the dating show have pulled a bait and switch on the contestants, and this dating show is set in Paris, Texas, which is less than an hour from where she lives. 

I have always liked Cosgrove from the little bits of her show I Carly that I've seen over the years, and she's transitioned effectively to an adult star, albeit one with a low ceiling. She can definitely appear in the Netflix movies that Lindsay Lohan doesn't appear in for the next few years. 

And in truth, I liked The Wrong Paris more than that, giving it an actual recommendation in the form of three stars on Letterboxd. The director, Janeen Damian -- Michael's sister -- directed the aforementioned Lindsay Lohan in last year's Irish Wish, and she's already gotten much better than that at making this sort of movie. It certainly helped pass the time on the plane, and I did not hate myself in the morning for watching it.

Oh and it did tie into our trip, of course, because we were in Paris. It's been more than two weeks ago now -- jeez, closer to three -- but we were there. And this movie does get there as well, spoiler alert.

The idea of American towns named after foreign cities did get me thinking, though, and that gets us to the rest of the title.

There is a town in Illinois called Cairo, but they call it "Cay-Row," because of course they do. It is Illinois' sothernmost city and it has a population of 1,733, according to Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, Cairo, Egypt has a population of nearly 10 million itself, and 22.8 million in the larger metropolitan area. I think we saw each and every one of them spilling through the streets or peddling something near our hotel, if not driving by in cars or on mopeds, honking their horns constantly.

Someone mentioned Cairo, Illinois to me recently, so I did think of it as we were landing in one of the largest cities in the world.

Nothing particularly cinematic happened to me in Cairo, though there were two movie theaters within an easy walk of our hotel. Only one of them was showing a western film, and that was The Conjuring: Last Rites, which you will remember I already saw in Barcelona. So interesting as it might have been to see a movie in Egypt, and it wouldn't have cut into any of my duties, I did pass on it. 

I also had occasion to think of Raiders of the Lost Ark while at the Egyptian Museum, as there was mention of Tanis, which is where the ark is discovered in Spielberg's movie. Unfortunately, dragging my kids through museums on this trip only results in a very glancing interaction with any of the knowledge stored within them, so I didn't get to go down any sort of an Indiana Jones rabbit hole while looking at all these relics.

Then today it was on to Athens -- Greece, not Georgia. But we all know there is an Athens Georgia, as that is the birthplace of R.E.M. and The B-52's, among others. And they do pronounce that one correctly.

Since we only just got here about four hours ago, I can't tell you what wonders Greece will have in store for us, but we'll be here for the next -- and last -- nine days of our trip, so I will have plenty of time to tell you later.

The extremes of Temple of Doom

I've always thought of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a movie of extremes. 

Its violence was so extreme that it prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating. Kate Capshaw's annoyance level was so extreme we all hated it her afterwards. And a third one, because you have to use the rule of three if you want to use this sort of paragraph structure in your persuasive writing.

Well, I've watched Temple of Doom for probably the third time overall, but very likely the first since the 1980s. Funny how well I remembered it for having only seen it twice, so maybe I did see it three times back then, or at least caught portions of it on cable in the background. Or maybe it was just so extreme that the parts that resonated with me really resonated with me. Then there was also the fact that I used to play the Temple of Doom video game, which likely increased my familiarity with the material beyond mere viewings.

So you wouldn't be surprised to learn I have a bunch of new thoughts prompted by my latest viewing, starting with these extreme elements and then going from there.

1) It doesn't feel as violent as I remembered. In 1984 I was ten going on 11, and I'm pretty sure I saw Temple of Doom in the theater -- there would have been no reason not to, since I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater three years earlier (at least twice, in fact). The violence did not make as much of an impact on me at that time as the room full of bugs, particularly that long creepy crawlie that disappears into Capshaw's neckline. (I'm sure in that one particular shot it was a wig attached to a dummy.) But over the years, I've used my memory of the way a new rating was spawned by the movie to indeed think of it as some sort of brutally graphic film.

Well, I didn't really find it that way at all. For my money, there's nothing in this film nearly so horrifying as the face melting of the Nazis at the end of Raiders. The body count seems lower than Raiders, and the sheer physicality of the close quarters fighting is far less bone crunching and flesh smacking. If I just think of the blood that flies in Indy's epic Raiders smackdown with the big bald Nazi -- even before the plane propeller shreds him to pieces -- I can't find any equivalent of that here.

I think instead of the pervasive sense of violence throughout the film, as Raiders has, concerned parent groups were specifically reacting to the scene of human sacrifice and Mola Ram removing the heart from his victim prior to it. Interestingly, although that scene was obviously a main talking point on the playground back in the day, it didn't disturb me the way the bugs did. If it had killed the man, it might have been a lot more traumatizing to me. But instead I thought "Okay! You don't need a heart to live!"

2) Kate Capshaw is not as annoying as I remembered. If you had asked me to characterize Capshaw's performance throughout the film, I would have said that she is literally whining and carrying on in her every single moment on screen. That's how extreme the depiction of her as a brat and a wimp and a coward felt to me back in the day. (A coward who can speculatively reach her arm into a hole filled with bugs to save her two companions, but a coward nonetheless.)

There's a fair bit of that, sure. It didn't offend me as much this time. Maybe I saw more of the Capshaw that Steven Spielberg saw in this film, that prompted him to eventually propose to her. They've just celebrated their 30th anniversary.

The thing that did strike me, though, was that this is never a role they would give to a woman today. Although Willie is not helpless -- she stands up to a few thugs, plus she saves them from the room that was going to spike and squish them -- she's a bit too damsel-y, and way too much of an ass. A performance like the one Capshaw gives, which is actually quite deft in terms of physical comedy, would be singled out as misogynist in 2021. If you want a character to be the butt of every joke in a film, it has to be a man today. That's not a criticism, just an observation of how things have changed.

One thing that's for sure is that Willie has absolutely zero back story. She's a lounge singer working in Shanghai. She's originally from Missouri. That is literally all we learn about her in the whole film. And part of that is because ...

3) The whole movie is basically one epic wrong turn. Whereas Raiders of the Lost Ark involves planned voyages to specific parts of the world for very specific reasons, a la a James Bond movie, Temple of Doom feels like one big episode of improv inspired by escaping from various jams. If I'm not mistaken -- certain exposition might have gotten past me while I was drinking margaritas on Friday night -- the only reason they even end up in India is because they have to use a raft to escape from Lao Che's plane, which its pilots had already abandoned. I can't recall what their actual destination was supposed to be after leaving Shanghai. The whole Mola Ram adventure, then, is just sort of picked up on the fly. (Incidentally, wouldn't it have been easier for the pilots just to kill Indy and company while they slept, rather than having to parachute out and destroy the plane?)

Because of this, the movie has a curious feeling of never giving viewers their bearings. We come in on Indy's Shanghai adventure much as we do with the cold open in Raiders, which is one of the best parts of that film -- and which again likens it to a Bond movie. In that case, though, the opening South American adventure is only there to introduce us to the character, and has nothing to do with his eventual quest for the ark of the covenant, either in terms of the two ambitions being related to one another, or in terms of physically getting from point A to point B in the plot. The Lao Che diamond and the Sankara stones don't have anything do with each other either, but by one adventure bleeding directly into the other, geographically, we never have a chance to pause and receive a heaping dose of exposition that orients us within the plot.

Not only is there the impact on Willie, who is basically just a beautiful and whiny cypher, but there's the impact on Short Round (Ke Huy Quan). We don't know anything about why Short Round is Indy's companion or how that came to be. And because he's not properly introduced, he too can strike us as nattering and annoying, like Willie. If The Goonies hadn't come along a year later, in which I thought Quan was very effectively used and became beloved to me (and I've seen that movie about 15 times), I wonder if I would have always thought of him as nothing more than the annoying pipsqueak from Temple of Doom, who does things like try to avoid blame for causing the ceiling to lower on them rather than figuring out how to get out of those jams. 

4) The oddness that this is a prequel. If you happened to be looking away from the screen when the title "Shanghai - 1935" comes up at the beginning, or if you forgot or never knew that Raiders takes place in 1936, you'd watch the whole movie without realizing that this is a prequel to Raiders. It's a curious choice that I never understood, and still don't. (I'm sure I could google it and there would be an answer, but I'm content to leave myself in that state of not knowing.)

A couple odd things result from this choice. One is that you can't really worry about whether Indiana Jones will make it out of any of the scrapes he gets in. A worry for the fate of the protagonist is key to the tension any film tries to create, even if most savvy viewers know that the hero is not going to die, or at least not at this juncture of the movie. Because this is a prequel, we know for sure that Indy is going to survive all the scrapes.

We don't know that about Short Round or Willie, though we probably have our suspicions, knowing that Steven Spielberg tends to be a populist filmmaker. However, it does raise a couple interesting questions about their fates. Presumably Indy got too annoyed by Willie or fell out of love with her, if he ever was in love -- this looks more like a relationship based on intense circumstances, the kind Sandra Bullock talks about in Speed. In any case, she's certainly not around when he connects up again with Marion Ravenwood in Raiders.

That's not too surprising, James Bond goes through women quickly and easily enough. (There, that's the third Bond reference in this piece.) Since relationships are supposed to be monogamous, you have to end them if they aren't going well, unlike with friends where you can just see them less. 

But whither Short Round? Even the most perverse of us would not suspect he was killed between Indy's adventures in 1935 and his adventures in 1936, and for the sake of Indy's health, let's just hope that was a quiet year. But he was jettisoned at some point because he certainly does not accompany Indy on his trip to South America to find the idol.

I suppose the most likely explanation is that Short Round was a China-based companion, who happened to get dislocated to India for their remaining adventures while they were escaping Lao Che's thugs. (This even though the actor is of Vietnamese heritage. Still today we don't properly distinguish Asians from each other in casting.) So when they defeated Mola Ram he just went home again, ready to assist should Indy return to that part of the world. 

5) Flying heart is ool kavort. The gibberish I just wrote is what I always thought Mola Ram was saying in the Temple of Doom video game when he starts throwing flaming hearts at you on one board. It was one of those young person jokes that took on a life of its own, such that I still remember it today.

Why I would have thought it was "flying" and not "flaming" is good question, though the hearts are both airborne and on fire, so I guess either would work. How I came up with the imaginary words "ool" and "kavort" is also a mystery.

Even at the time I remember friends saying the line was really "Soon Mola Ram will rule the world," which certainly makes more sense. In watching the movie last night I realized, when the line is actually spoken by Mola Ram, that it's really "Soon Kali Maa will rule the world," Kali Maa being the large statue that presides over the fiery human sacrifice pit.

6) Dan Aykroyd? I had no idea Dan Aykroyd was in Temple of Doom until I noticed his name in the credits. Naturally then I had to go back to the start of the movie and find his scene, which is about 15 seconds long and occurs when our trio of heroes are boarding Lao Che's plane to escape Shanghai. He's kind of like one of the men Bond (fourth reference) always has planted in exotic locales to help him with logistics, like Q. It's easy to miss Aykroyd because you never get a close-up of his face, though his voice is certainly recognizable once you realize who it is you're actually watching.

Because he helps them get on the plane of a man who means to kill them, it made me wonder if Aykroyd's character is supposed to be betraying them all along, or if he has also been duped by Lao Che. Since his character appears so briefly and is given such little narrative consequence, Spielberg et al may never have even asked that question. The characters might as well have just gotten on the plane without any help.

7) The Obi-Wan Club. Again something I never knew, unless I knew and forgot, was that the name of the club in Shanghai is inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. (I laugh at myself for having written "from Star Wars." What other Obi-Wan Kenobi is there?) 

For half a second, when I googled it, I thought this was a real club, and that made me wonder if the inspiration was the other way around, the Star Wars character taking his name from the club. Then later I realized I had landed on an Indiana Jones Wiki page, which discusses parts of the movies as though they are real parts of world history rather than cinematic inventions.

And speaking of that club ...

8) The Busby Berkeley opening. I had forgotten about the cheeky way this opens in Willie's performance of the lead song from the musical Anything Goes, which I actually acted in as a thespian in my younger years. I mean, I certainly remembered that the movie opened in the club, but just how much of the musical number plays out before we see our hero gave me a sense of how delightfully unexpected the choice was. Audiences must have thought they stepped into the wrong movie, as suddenly a Busby Berkeley-esque song and dance has supplanted the expected opening moments of an escapist adventure about a swashbuckling archeologist. The fact that the title for the movie they're supposed to be seeing does appear -- in the same Raiders font, bisected by the blonde lounge singer singing the song -- must have just made the effect all the more weird.

Incidentally, the set piece that follows -- Indy and Willie going after the antidote and diamond, respectively, as fleeing club patrons unwittingly kick them across the floor -- is still a triumph of execution. Temple of Doom may have some things going against it, but its set pieces are not one of them.

9) Speed round. Monkey brains! Indy taking down a whole rope bridge with just a few hacks from a sword! The world's longest and most serpentine mine cart track! Touching someone's skin with a flaming torch as a way for breaking their hypnotic state! There's a lot in this movie.

And how did someone manage to fill an entire room with bugs and get them to stay there, anyway?

I should have a tenth, just how I should have had a third in that paragraph near the start. Nobody's perfect.

I enjoyed my viewing quite a bit, even though I have never totally "liked" this movie, especially when contrasted with the two movies around it. Though it's light years better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so it's got that going for it. 

And I think I'm now going to watch those other two movies -- The Last Crusade and Crystal Skull -- as each are movies I've seen only once. How could I have seen The Last Crusade only once? I'm not sure but it's true. I'll look to correct that in the coming months, as well as reevaluate just how bad Crystal Skull really is. 

I never meant to see: Exorcist: The Beginning

Well it looks like I'm just creating new periodic features on my blog left and right these days. I created a new one yesterday, and a Devil's Night screening last night inspired me to create another new one today.

This periodic series will be called "I Never Meant to See," and it will highlight films that were thrust into my path quite unwittingly. In an age when we have so much choice about what to watch that we rarely have to settle on something just because "it's the only thing on," it's become increasingly rare that we need to see things we hadn't otherwise planned to see. It seemed interesting to me to explore how we end up watching movies we wouldn't have normally sought out.

First up is Exorcist: The Beginning.

I love love love William Friedkin's The Exorcist, but I've never seen any other films in the Exorcist series and suspected there was really no reason to. Exorcist: The Beginning came my way because I recently received it as a birthday present. A friend who also regularly reads my blog (hi!) gave me this and another DVD that I really hope he got out of the cheap bin (just because I hope he didn't spend too much money on me). The other DVD, Traffic, was, I believe, the serious half of the gift -- an excellent film I have probably praised to him before, which he correctly surmised I did not already own. I don't want to sell Exorcist: The Beginning short by calling it the joke half of the gift, and he certainly didn't describe it as such after I opened the present. But let's just say this movie has less of a logical impulse behind it, given that he and I have rarely discussed horror, and I don't think we've ever talked about the original Exorcist and my love for it. Besides, it's directed by Renny Harlin, who has become something of a Joel Schumacher-style punching bag in cinematic circles.

I hope my friend isn't offended if I admit that I decided to watch it while carving my jack o'lantern last night. Hey, what can I say, multi-tasking is a part of our everyday lives these days. Even with movies I'm really loving, I pause them regularly and sometimes do other things. I knew it would make an ideal companion to my exercise -- something that would fit the Halloween theme perfectly, but would probably also be okay only to be receiving 87% of my attention at any given moment.

I remembered that there had been an Exorcist: The Beginning, but so little was it still on my radar that I couldn't remember how recently it was released. It could have been anywhere from 2002 to 2008, I figured. The release date was not immediately evident from a cursory scanning of the box, so it wasn't until I started watching it and made a general assessment of the age of Stellan Skarsgard that I put it closer to 2002 than 2008. As it turns out, it's from 2004.

My first impression, and one that ended up lingering, is that the movie may owe more to Raiders of the Lost Ark than The Exorcist. In fact, I'll include an asterisk in my writing for every direct link to Raiders. The Beginning follows the story of Father Merrin, the character played by Max Von Sydow in Friedkin's movie, as a younger man who has strayed from the church. He's now an archeologist*, and is involved in a dig for a buried religious artifact* -- actually, a church that has no business being here as it dates to an era before Christianity was known in this region of Africa. He's no longer a priest as a result of events involving the Nazis* in World War II, which are revealed to us as we move along. People who enter this subterranean chamber* continue to have strange things happen to them, signs of possible devil possession. And in a climactic scene, he even tells a character "not to look at or listen to"* any of the devil's lies.

Sorry, by synopsizing the movie by only showing its Raiders connections, I didn't give you a very good synopsis.

For much of the running time, the movie is a lot less scary than it wants to be. Yes, there's some disturbing stuff -- in one memorable scene, an African woman gives birthday to a stillborn child that's basically a rotting baby corpse covered with worms. But there's also some stuff that's just plain ridiculous looking, like a child being attacked by digital hyenas that just don't cut it as organic parts of the environment. The problem really is that you feel a mounting impatience as you wait for what you know is coming -- a true devil possession that resembles, in some form, the possession of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist. A variety of isolated and generally disconnected images of horror aren't really enough to sustain us in the meantime.

What turned the movie -- which is well executed in most respects -- from a mild thumbs down to a mild thumbs up is, in fact, the climactic devil possession requiring the exorcism. It gives us what we're expecting in terms of iconic imagery from The Exorcist, and here uses CG effectively to add to it. One of the scariest elements of The Exorcist is the devil's dialogue, not only the horrible and uncensored content, but the sound of that voice (or several voices) coming out of that body. The Beginning understands this part of what makes The Exorcist scary, and has a good amount of fun with it in the final 10-15 minutes.

More than anything, I'm glad I saw Exorcist: The Beginning for the same reason I wanted to create this new periodic feature on my blog. There sheer quantity of movies in existence means that many of them necessarily disappear into the ether unless we go out and grab them. And because I have a generally democratic concept of what I'll watch -- really, I'll watch almost anything -- sometimes it's nice to have random movies thrust back onto your radar, when they should have long ago been gone from it forever.

I mean, if I'm going to accomplish my stated yet admittedly impossible and also ridiculous goal of seeing every movie that's ever been made, I can't be forgetting about movies like Exorcist: The Beginning, now can I?

Happy Halloween everyone.

Testing #1

It was only by reloading my Flickchart rankings earlier this year that I was able to reach the following conclusion:

Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite film of all time.

I won't say it caught me surprise. But I'm also not a guy who goes around telling everybody how great Raiders of the Lost Ark is. Everybody already knows that, so you'd be wasting your breath, but I figured my favorite movie would be something I'd talk about a bit more than I actually do. I have one friend who wears his Raiders love on his sleeve, so much so that it's one of the primary things people know about him. He's the first guy you think to contact whenever you hear any new news about Raiders, or even anything about Harrison Ford.

Well, apparently, I should be that guy, too. After all, it's got to mean something if you have Raiders ranked first out of 3,270-some-odd movies, doesn't it? (I've seen about 50 more than that, but not ranked them all yet.) Is it possible that a movie so honored and so beloved could be kind of under the radar, even to the person who honors and beloves it himself?

Another example of my under-the-radar favoritism of Raiders: It's been at least five years since I've even seen it. About five years ago was when I started keeping track of the movies I revisit at the time I revisit them, and it's not on my list. I do have a clear memory of rewatching the movie with my wife, whom I've only known since the end of 2004, and I'm pretty sure it was while we were living together, which started in early 2006. So possibly as much as five-and-a-half years between viewings of my favorite movie of all time.

So, it seemed wise to figure out if Raiders really is my favorite movie of all time.

I'd like to say that I planned this test, but I didn't. As a Father's Day present, my wife got us tickets to see an outdoor screening of Raiders in a park in Beverly Hills, at which there would be a dozen food trucks present. It was to be one of the last in the summer season of Outdoor Cinema Food Fest, in which different classic films are shown in different venues around Los Angeles, each time with the use of an inflatable screen (pictured here), and each time with a host of food trucks present to feed us. (I don't know about where you are, but here, food trucks are in.) After two months of anticipation, the night finally rolled around on Saturday night.

Not without its challenges, however. For one, on Thursday night, I started feeling symptoms of a sore throat. I did my best to ignore it and was not significantly limited during the day on Friday, but by the time I got home, I knew I'd have to cancel plans to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes with a friend that night. Instead I watched baseball and most of Robert De Niro's 168-minute The Good Shepherd, feeling increasingly miserable as the evening went on. After a couple false starts in getting to sleep, I finally did, and felt better after a decent night's rest.

But as Saturday wore on, I knew the symptoms were not gone, and they started to intensify as afternoon crept into early evening. I was determined to go despite the fact that I had resigned myself to feeling miserable at some point, and knowing that this is not what any doctor would advise. Plus, my teeth were starting to hurt from all the lozenges I was sucking -- incessantly sucking, despite the fact that they did so little to ease the pain.

Then there was the flea attack. That's right, our son may have picked up fleas from daycare. (Or, they may have gotten in some other way, but daycare seems like the easy culprit to blame.) In any case, we saw some earlier in the week and did a bunch of vacuuming and laundry to combat them. Then my wife spotted another on Saturday morning, so the full assault was on, as we left nothing unwashed. This meant trips to the laundromat to make use of their front-loading machines, and general chaos around the house.

So I was a bit unsure whether the circumstances would allow me a focused consideration of the merits of Raiders of the Lost Ark as my favorite movie of all time. Then again, this would be the first time I'd seen it on a big screen in 30 years -- almost exactly 30 years, since Raiders was released on June 12, 1981, and I saw it some time during its theatrical run, which probably lasted a couple months. (It was on a trip to Illinois to visit our grandparents, which must have been during our summer vacation from school. I saw Raiders with my grandfather while my sister saw Annie with my grandmother. Wait a minute ...)

Can I stop here for a second to tell you that I just blew my own mind? I just looked up Annie, and saw that it was not released until 1982. That means that my first viewing of Raiders was not during its initial theatrical run, but when the movie was re-released a year later. Mind = blown. I'd always just assumed I'd seen it when it was first out, but given that I was not yet eight years old, it doesn't surprise me that I missed it in 1981. A year later, I was mature enough, apparently, to handle all the violence that left my grandfather wincing next to me, like he was the one getting punched and smashed over the head with a bottle of whiskey. It makes me wonder ... what other movies did I first see on their re-releases? Today's kids don't have to ask themselves that ... if they saw it in the theater, they saw it on its initial run. Case closed.

Anyway, yeah, I wasn't missing Raiders for a little pain in my throat and a couple fleas.

Given our circumstances, I did question the logic of arriving three hours before the movie was set to start, which is what time the gates opened to get into the softball field where the movie was being shown. Turns out, we needed that time to get settled, listen to a couple bands and wait in line for the food trucks -- not to mention all the various things we had to do to prepare our son for bed. (His presence was a complicating factor I haven't even mentioned to this point. Since it was my Father's Day present, I assumed my wife would take him off to shush him if he began crying and disturbing our neighbors.)

We ended up getting gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches from this one truck, then later, just before the movie was about to start, I picked up a venison burger and some grilled chicken sliders for us to share. (I did not, however, purchase anything from the aptly named Indian truck called India Jones, pictured here -- and yes, I believe that's its name even on nights it is not accompanying screenings of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) We'd brought our own drinks and some chippy things, but I also picked up my wife a Mexican Coke.

Our son was still awake when the movie finally started at 9 -- after a screening of a pilot for the ABC TV show Revenge, followed by a couple technical difficulties -- and was letting out a comical array of gleeful shrieks. Better than tears, I guess, but you can bet I was glad when we were able to calm him down by rocking him in his car seat.

Oh, so I suppose you'd like to know what I thought of the movie.

First, a couple things I noticed:

1) Alfred Molina! I either had forgotten or never knew that Alfred Molina was the "You throw me the idol, I throw you the whip!" guy at the beginning.

2) For some reason, I had been operating under the misconception that Indiana Jones taught at a university in England. Denholm Elliott's accent was certainly to blame, but I wonder why I assumed that Indy was on his turf rather than vice versa. And I figured that the government bureaucrats who visit Jones at the beginning had just flown to England for the occasion. Of course, this time I noticed that his plane starts in San Francisco before making several hops that ultimately lead to Nepal.

3) The pacing. This movie just doesn't stop. For possibly the first time I considered just how tight Lawrence Kasdan's script really is, how much character development he gets across through so few scenes and such a small amount of dialogue. Consider Marion Ravenwood, perhaps one of the greatest female characters ever written (with a performance to match from Karen Allen). We only really get that one bar scene in Nepal to learn everything we need to know about her -- she's a spitfire, she carries a gleeful resentment, she's a romantic deep down, and she can drink toe to toe with any man. Then as soon as the action is transported to Cairo, it's only a few minutes later on screen that she's "dead" -- or so we think, anyway. I remember thinking of this as a tremendous loss to Indy, but she's only been on screen for maybe 15 minutes by that point. Truly incredible.

Okay, so, is it #1?

It has some flaws, but yeah, why not? And maybe only because I can't think of another movie that should obviously be there instead. I mean, if I'm looking at Flickchart, I could promote Back to the Future from #2 to #1, if I really wanted to. But Back to the Future is not a flawless film either. Even Back to the Future has got that agonizing question that gnaws at you: "Why didn't he just go back an hour earlier, rather than ten minutes earlier?"

No film is perfect. But Raiders is about as close as it gets.

Oh, and in case you're wondering ...

It quickly became clear that we hadn't brought enough blankets, and that the grass gets dewy pretty much as soon as the sun goes down. So I was a bit cold and a bit wet for most of the night. And I've still got my sore throat on Monday -- in fact, it kept me up most of the night last night.

But it was worth it. Worth it to see my favorite movie -- yes, I'll say it -- on the big screen.

For the first time in 30 -- er, make that 29 -- years.