Word: doom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Things get worse in the mountaintop hostel; the men who descend to the village to buy provisions are beaten up regularly. Yet no one thinks this strange; no one seems to be afflicted by a foreboding of doom. The book ends flatly, without the customary distant rumbling of a world's end and with no sense of cautionary exhortation by the author. Any such message-that tribalistic savagery is mankind's eternal, bone-bred evil, perhaps-would be excessive. Appelfeld simply and affectingly bears witness, and in the end, his sole, muted voice is more effective than...
...Griffith could have written this: always begin your movies with a bang. Or, as in Temple of Doom, a Chinese gong. This one is rung to signal the beginning of tonight's floor show at the Obi Wan Club in Shanghai, 1935. Presenting Miss Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and her pan-Asian chorus line in a delicious rendition of Cole Porter's Anything Goes-in Mandarin Chinese! At a nearby table, Professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is haggling for his life with a trio of Chinese gangsters: the diamond in his possession in return for a vial containing...
...main plot, about the search for a sacred stone stolen by a coven of Indian thugs and used to augment sadistic black-magic rituals in the bowels of the temple of doom, need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that the new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders. If you enjoyed seeing skeletons rise on spikes, or Indy snap his trusty bullwhip around a steel-willed woman, or the two of them trapped in a cave with uggy crawling things, you should be amused to see them again. Again you will savor...
Again you will slip easily into the care of some expert masseurs, now stroking, now pummeling, as Temple of Doom heads for a climax that is a literal cliffhanger...
Snaking through the movie is a familiar Spielberg theme: the disappearance, and then the welcome return, of children. It illuminates his three most personal movies (Close Encounters, Poltergeist and E.T.) and affirms his belief in movies as a Mechanized Fountain of Youth. Toward the end of Temple of Doom, Indiana leads hundreds of enslaved Indian children out of an underground quarry and into the light. Spielberg means to be another kind of Pied Piper: leading grownups into the darkness of a moviehouse to restore, for a couple of hours at least, the innocence of childhood in all its wonder...