9/23/09 - All Taste is Subjective vs. the Netflix Recommendation Contest

http://www.slate.com/id/2229225/

Read this interesting article on Slate.com by Farhad Manjoo on the phenomenal success of Netflix's contest to improve their movie recommendation algorithm. Manjoo approaches the success of the contest from a business/tech perspective, which is interesting in and of itself, but to me is secondary to the fact that contest winners did in fact improve the algorithm by the goal of 10 percent, which is an amazing achievement when the nature of the problem is contemplated.

It reminded me of the initial article I read on the subject in the NY Times, which can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?_r=1

The Napoleon Dynamite problem laid out in the article is a fascinating one to me, since it speaks to something that I (and, I think, most people) experience in a visceral and day-to-day way. That is, most of the time one can be confident that in recommending a book/movie/album/work of art to someone if one enjoyed it, assuming that the recommendee will also enjoy it, but there are a subset of cultural artifacts that personally connect to one person that repel other people for seemingly no predictive reason. And often, these books/movies/albums/songs/what have you are the ones that the person doing the recommending feel a particular protectiveness/affinity for.

For example, I have spent the last two years recommending Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to various friends of mine that are avid readers, only to be met with one of two reactions: 1) a refusal to read the book because it's too big and impossible to carry around OR 2) complaints that the book starts slow and is too long and only gets good toward the end.

I am sympathetic to both of these reactions. The book is really long, and it's heavy to carry around. And, I can see the criticism that it starts slow. But, here's the thing. I don't agree at all. My experience of the book was basically 800 pages of solid rapture. But I have no idea how to set expectations for people when I'm recommending the book. I know that I love it, and if there's a chance that someone else who likes to read will have anything close to my reaction, I want to facilitate that experience. But at the same time I haven't talked to anyone that I've recommended it to that has reacted the way that I have.

The thing is, though, is that the book is hardly some obscure, difficult work. It won awards, it was on the bestseller list, it got great reviews - I'm not the only person by a long shot that enjoys the book. But at the same time, I love Jane Austen and I love dark fantasy, so it's possible I'm just uniquely in the sweet spot for Susanna Clarke's artistic aims.

Point being is that it's kind of exciting and kind of shiveringly terrifying that these sorts of questions are being algorithmized (if that's a word) with increasing success. I'd like to think that there's an unquantifiable part of art that accounts for the way that some works divide people.

The polarizing movies listed in the Times article above are described by the writer as "culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify". It made me wonder what other works across genre falls into this classification. My reactions to the listed movies w/the Napoleon Dynamite problem below:

I Heart Huckabees - loved it.
Lost in Translation - loved it (know many people who hate it)
Fahrenheit 9/11 - loved it
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - have not seen
Kill Bill: Volume 1 - loved much like a child loves his/her blanket
Sideways - loved it, had extended argument with a good friend who thought it was total pap.

9/21/09 - Into The Wild

Watched Into The Wild over the weekend. I haven't read the book but now I'm basically a ravenous slavering book-craving monster after watching the movie. I thought that the movie had its flaws but the central tragedy is really present throughout.

I immediately put the book on hold at the library, but in the meantime sought out the Outside magazine article that Jon Krakauer originally wrote. In the year after I finished teaching, when I started really getting into non-fiction after a lifetime of exclusively reading fiction, Krakauer was one of the authors that gave me the entryway. He's justly famous for the harrowing Everest disaster account Into Thin Air, but it was his also-heralded followup to that book, the true-crime and Mormons tour de force Under The Banner of Heaven, that really sunk the claws in me. Both books I thought were exceptional, but what Krakauer accomplishes in Under The Banner of Heaven is a riveting mix of social history and individual tragedy.

So it's somewhat surprising I didn't pursue him back to Into The Wild then. I think it's because, having dabbled benignly in outdoor pursuits, the tragedy of McCandless's short life was too painful to look at directly. Even through the fictional prism of the movie I find it a tough pill to swallow. I can only imagine the loved ones in my life had I disappeared only to die inglourious and alone - but then, that's a sharper realization now that I'm older.

As Krakauer observes about his own younger self, regarding a similarly foolhardy Alaskan expedition that he took when he was McCandless's age:

"At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts."

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

1/5/09 - Slumdog Millionaire vs. City of God

So I think I can turn in any sort of cinephile card -the 3 movies I've seen in the last 6 months are:

Iron Man The Dark Knight Slumdog Millionaire

I'm leading a populist revolution, baby! I refuse to watch your movie until it has reached critical mass - this just wasn't the year of taking fliers. So there's your top 3 of the year, by virtue of elimination. I just saw Slumdog Millionaire, and, after I had successfully separated out the movie I had just seen from all of my flashbacks to watching City of God, sat down with a set of conflicting set of reactions.

One, I loved the movie. The visuals and the music especially came in such a vivid wash that the movie grabs hold from moment one. The tight shots, the chaotic speed of the story and the rush of images, and the beauty of even the most terrible images (the bathtub filling with money, people of fire, piles upon piles of refuse), all form a sort of vortex of visual storytelling. As some movies do, Slumdog Millionaire vividly reminds the viewer that movies can tell stories in ways that no other medium can; larger than life images in a rush can provoke vertiginous feelings and reactions that words on a page, or images on a smaller screen, just can't.

And Jamal is an appealing protagonist, the movie is ultimately an emotional rush (upward), and really, despite some crushing imagery of poverty and entrapment and violence, is ultimately a fell-good movie. Wedded to the delirious tension of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". So I've got no complaints with the movie per se; I highly recommend it.

And yet...

And yet it's hard to shake the feeling after watching it that the movie falls apart a little bit the further it goes on and the more one thinks about it. The chief flaw is that the central relationship is the least interesting one of the entire movie. Jamal and Latika are stand-ins for the Platonic idea of love, that of the two halves that are meant for each other, against any and all logic. Their ability to find each other in all of the madness throughout the movie is beyond preposterous, the fact that his phone call to her basically kills his brother is treated as some sort of karmic balancing of the scales when really it's just florid narratively and kind of dumb, and centrally, the idea that they love each other from age 5 until their first kiss outside the studio after Jamal's just won 20 million rupees...it sits uneasily with the purported social realism of the earlier parts of the movie. By the end of the movie we've shifted from hardscrabble reality brought brilliantly to live to a kind of fairy tale Never-Never Land, which rings false narratively and tonally. It's the way I felt at the conclusion of The Kite Runner: for such a messy social landscape, the central narrative sure features a lot of neat melodrama-style conclusions; the bad characters either repent or are killed or otherwise stymied, the good characters are rewarded. It's a feeling of aesthetic dishonesty in a way - a happy ending that doesn't quite jibe with the images of people on fire, the death of Jamal's mother, and the terrifying whirls of the abandoned child's life in Mumbai.


City of God came to mind while watching the movie, because what links the two is that both portray a life of poverty in a crowded city through inventive visual styling (and pointedly chaotic editing). Where they diverge is in tone and ultimate narrative goal - City of God is a social portrait, not a fairy tale, but it's a social portrait from frame one until the curtains drop. Rocket, the protagonist, falls in love when he is young and innocent too, but his lady love falls for Bene, the stylish bon vivant gangster who keeps Lil Ze in check for a lot of the movie. This is no fairy tale; it's life. I've got no complaints with the fairy tale of Slumdog Millionaire, but it makes the early scenes seem cheaper and more manipulative to find out that they are in service of a boy-meet-loses-gets-back girl story. City of God is messy in form and content; about nothing so much as the danger, excitement, and terror when poverty whittles away the basic rules of human nature.

8/31/08 Playing the self

I never used to watch much TV, but with the advent of Netflix and TV on DVD I've been conducting a kind of one-show-at-a-time cream of the crop skimming, picking up only those shows that have been close to drowned in critical plaudits: Six Feet Under, the Sopranos, Firefly, the Office, the Wire.


One thing that this TV viewing has done is given me new appreciation for the difficulties successful TV actors face when making the move to film. This was something I never did understand when I was younger, when I didn't really watch TV, when magazines like Entertainment Weekly would publish breathless articles about "Can Jennifer Aniston escape Rachel?" Big deal, I thought. Plenty of movie stars just play variations on a theme - it's not like Tom Cruise really disappears into the skin of his characters, unless those characters are tightly wound yuppies in need of comeuppance/life lessons/just a little lovin'. Harrison Ford, Schwarzenegger - surely if movie actors can get away with the same persona, then TV stars wouldn't have such a hard time. Plus, if they could actually act then, well, theoretically the sky's the limit.

What I failed to account for, though, was the way that the longevity of a TV series lends deeper and deeper imprints of a character in a way that movies do not. It's a cliche at this point to label televsion novelistic (in its best forms), but what is true is that some of the unique strengths of book-length narrative are present in long-running TV series. It's interesting to me that Hollywood is always adapting novels to the screen, when really movies are the narrative equivalent of short stories - in fact, the list of great movies adapted from short stories is a longer one than you would think:

In The Bedroom

Memento

Brokeback Mountain

The Birds

Rear Window

The Shawshank Redemption

etc.

Of course, there are plenty of duds in the bunch, but what's notable about those movies, as with other movies adapted from short stories, is that they don't have that curious truncated sensation common to movies adapted from novels. Adapting a full-length novel to film is by necessity transforming one form of narrative to another - cuts are required, mandatory, characters are lost or assimilated, plot is compressed - obviously, because a novel that may span centuries with multiple protagonists (Everything is Illuminated, say), becomes a Cliffs Notes version of itself by necessity.

Television, though, can work with the same long build and payoff of novels, when it is operating on all cylinders. Characters can cycle to the forefront and leave, long time periods can be explored, in general there is just so much more time available that the narrative universe is much larger and expanded - longhand to shorthand of the movies. Because of this long build, and the deep imprinteur the fictional universe can leave, actors in television series become much more locked in as their characters. Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones, but only for a grand total of 6-8 hours of screentime. Contrast this with, say, Josh Holloway as Sawyer on Lost: at 4 seasons of 22 episodes a season, that's ~100 hours and counting. In the popular perception, it's much more difficult to wrench one's mind around the fact that Holloway is NOT Sawyer than it is to accept Ford as NOT Indy.

This makes it difficult to watch prodigiously gifted actors like Isiah Whitlock, Jr. of the Wire appear in bad TV commercials - a work that has a purity of artistic voice and vision should be able to fully own Sen. Clay Davis, not share him with Virgin Atlantic or whoever. If anything, Whitlock should get the cream of the crop - let him work his way out of the Clay Davis groove with something meaty, not at the level of the Mac Guy. Such are the vagaries of the life of the actor, but it seems cruel for TV actors to be punished merely by the medium in which they work.

7/31/08 - Modern Classics vs. Old Classics.

The other day my friend Jen and I had a long discussion over IM about 'modern' classics vs. 'old' classics. With some minimal editing, here's the bulk of the conversation.

Jen: have you seen a streetcar named desire

Jeff: no
i've read it though
way back in the day

Jen: i have similar feelings towards that movie that i do to [The Maltese Falcon]
i realize that its good, and can see some of the ways in which it was really groundbreaking for that time, but only really am enjoying it bc its supposed to be a classic

Jeff: yeah
that was how i felt as well
it's kind of like listening to run-dmc

like, guys you don't have to end every rhyme the exact same way you know
but they don't know
b/c everybody's just feeling out the medium

Jen: yeah
i havent listened to enough run dmc to say i agree but i believe you

Jeff: the "first of its genre" is always kind of strange

Jen: yeah, but streetcar wasn't necessary 1st in genre

Jeff: true
i guess i should say groundbreaking work

Jen: yeah, just classics in general

Jeff: not always
but often

Jen: yeah
not always
i think i can watch some classics and enjoy it just as being good

Jeff: agreed
and sometimes it's hard to reconstruct something where the achievement was something new
that has since been copied

Jen: but some i watch and think, would i have known this was good had someone not told me. Have you seen the apartment?

Jeff:no
romantic comedy?

Jen: 1960 best picture with Shirley MacClaine
it was referenced in mad men, and now i want to see it
Billy Wilder

Jeff: hmm
never saw it
psycho
a classic that i enjoyed

Jen: example of you can enjoy
yes
i agree

Jeff: pride and prejudice
wuthering heights

Jen: as movies or books?

Jeff: books

Jen: oh there are TONS of books
im talking movies

Jeff: movies i find harder

Jen: yeah

Jeff: esp pre-70s

Jen: yeah

Jeff: but what's considered classic
like is the Godfather considered modern?

Jen: just old i guess

Jeff: or classic?

Jen: haha
its classic but im speaking about old classic

Jeff: you're talking about something that's old enough to where the dominant style was different than what's done today

Jen: yes i think so

Jeff: so like the 70s classics fit
godfather
apocalypse now
would those be "classics" or modern movies?

Jen: mm, i dont know
i think they are modern classics
and then there are old classics

Jeff: my theory is that those fit as modern b/c those styles have been appropriated by modern movies
in terms of directorial style
and in terms of looking at the director as the "author" of the movie

Jen: and classics are just critically acclaimed, or ones that everyone thinks you should see

Jeff: so you're drawing a distinction between one set of classics and another
where one "feels" older
right?
and the others are more modern classics
all can be considered classics
because they're widely critically/popularly acclaimed
but there's a distinction between "modern" classics
and "classic" classics
all I'm saying

Jen: yes
im saying for 'classic' classics
or old classics
modern classics i get
usually always
90% of the time
old classics, maybe 45% of the time
ok maybe 60% of the time
by get i mean enjoy and appreciate

Jeff: and my theory behind that is that modern classics are made in the same cinematic style/vocabulary/aesthetic as movies today

Jen: yes

Jeff: i.e. director driven

Jen: you think before they werent director driven?

Jeff: naturalistic acting
directors used to be just kind of hired guns
they weren't really considered the "author" or the movie

Jen: hm, i dont know if i agree

Jeff: example - who directed wizard of oz?

Jen: im thinking more like sunset blvd, citizen kane
very director driven

Jen: i dont know who directed wizard of oz without using wikipedia.

Jeff: gone with the wind?

Jen: but i also don't know who directed shakespeare in love. or chicago.
i dont know directors that well

Jeff: a good point
the theory that the director is the auteur of the movie, that the director's creative vision is the driving force, was first developed in the '50s
which is relatively recently
but think of the way that we discussed christopher nolan
and his body of work the other day
we talk about directors as though they're the authors

Jen: but you dont think that can be done with old directors?

Jeff: whether or not you know who directed one
you can retroactively apply it, but think about what that means from a business/creative standpoint that they weren't thought of that way

Jen: now youre arguing the director is now the 'author' of movies
the main creative force
you dont think its always been that way?

Jeff: well think about the difference between the way movies are made now
and under the studio system from the '20s to the '50s
where studios would produce movies with their stars, writers, and directors tied to long-term contracts
in that case the director is still the main creative force maybe, but the real power lies with the studio and the producers
but obviously movies are highly collaborative
so there's also been evolution of acting
towards more naturalism

Jen: yes
so this is the reason why i like movies more now?

Jeff: i think it's a factor as to why the style of what you're thinking of as "old classics" seem so alien
for me that holds true
like if a movie's made after about 1969 or so, it may feel like a 70s movie, but it feels "modern"
or an 80s movie will feel dated, but still modern
but movies made much before that feel like they're made with a different cinematic/acting/writing aesthetic vocab.
so i'm just speculating that that may be what you could be reacting to also
in your 90/60 % split
Star Wars
totally modern feeling
Jaws
same

Jen: 70s though
so you think the cut off ist he 60s

Jeff: it's somewhere in the 70s
i guess
i just know that the 70s was the rise of the American auteurs

Jen: so godfather is 72 (im using wiki now)

Jeff: Spielberg, Altman, Francis Ford Coppola
etc.
and my theory is that it's their influence that really marks the modern film vocab.

Jen: one flew over the cuckoos nest is 75
which seems in old classic genre
director influence?

Jeff: yeah director influence
godfather you would say old classic or modern classic?

Jen: modern classic

Jeff: so 72 at least would be the cutoff then
but obviously those styles were new at the time
so you'd expect there to be plenty of "old classics" littered throughout the 70s
i doubt you'd find many (or any) in the 80s that would feel like "old classics"

Jen: hm i see

Jeff: like psycho i still enjoy just as much as a modern movie
but it still feels like it's on the other side of the divide

Jen: what year is that

Jeff: ‘60

Jen: hmmm

Jeff: The Excorcist – ‘73
Carrie – ‘76
i would pinpoint those as the first modern horror movies

Jen: yes

Jeff: also
until 64 all movies had to meet the Hays code
basically the industry censorship agreement put together in the 30s
spelling out what was morally acceptable
so the modern rating system was implemented in '68

Jen: yeah so there are a lot of other factors besides directors

Jeff: totally

Jen: camera technology
sound technology
costume
make up
speech

Jeff: for sure
but i think those are less of a factor
b/c think about the diff in those from a movie made in the early 80s to today
both feel "modern"
but camera, sound, costume, makeup, speech - all different
that's what i think the puzzle is
b/c there's clearly a line in there somewhere
where "modern" shades into "old"
that's more about aesthetics and less about technology/costumes/slang/etc.

Jen: but how much of this is colored by the decade when we were born
our earliest memories of modern movies were in the 80s

Jeff: totally

Jen: so if you asked my dad this, he might not draw the line at the same place

Jeff: very true

Jen: or ask a teenager
whats modern
i dont know if it would make it to the 70s

Jeff: right like a teenager today would probably feel anything without CGI is dated

Jen: yeah, like star wars is probably way too old
looking
i think the 1st harry potter CGI is terrible

Jeff: haha yeah CGI can get horribly abused
BUT pre-CGI will feel dated, but I bet for teenagers now what will feel even more dated are movies without the rapid-fire cutting
think about how long the shots were in the first batman compared to the dark knight

Jen: interesting

Jeff: i wonder though b/c we've all seen lots of movies and then saw CGI come onto the scene
i wonder how a modern teenager would feel about Raiders of the Lost Ark

Jen: classic
and i feel modern

Jeff: a good argument then that style/aesthetic is more important than the technological prowess on display
but we have no way of knowing without access to a teenager

Jen: must get access to teenager

Jeff: haha yes

Jen: for experiments
movie perceptions

6/19/08 Iron Man = awesome

I'm late to the bandwagon, I know, but I saw Iron Man last week and it's awesome. And its success as a movie ties back to the basic unsatisfying-ness of Indiana Jones that I attempted to outline a couple of weeks ago. I cried out for the necessity of a light tone in a summer blockbuster, and lo and behold this gem of a movie was sucking up box office left and right quite in front of my ignorant nose. Brilliant.

Well, the fact that a whole lot of people went to see it doesn't necessarily indicate quality or not - sometimes popular success has a lot to do with quality, and sometimes it doesn't. Especially when it comes to summer blockbusters, attendance is in some ways simply a function of obligation - we all know that summer movies are when Hollywood pulls out all the high-dollar smoke and mirrors, and the movies tend to accrue self-propelled momentum, like so many gargantuan snowballs starting avalanches. My friend Andrew once tried to put his incredulity re: this phenomenon into words, as he was attempting to grapple with the massive success of "Jagged Little Pill" (Alanis). He attempted the futile task of asking himself who the hell kept buying this thing once it had reached tipping point? Like, who was the 18 millionth person to buy "Jagged Little Pill", after it had already sat perched atop the charts for a year or more? Who was that person that had somehow not fallen into those 2 most obvious categories: 1) people who heard one of the ubiquitous singles and thought to themselves: "I simply must own whatever album this bewitching Canadian chanteuse is plying her her trade upon" or 2) "This blows. I can't wait until this pap is off my damn radio."? There were people who only decided to check the album out after single #13.5, simply because at that point it had accrued enough cultural momentum.

Also, that Santana album with "Smooth" on it.


Well, when it comes to Iron Man, I'm that person. I caught it at the tail end of the run, based on word of mouth from my friends and parents. I caught the steadily building opinion from those I talked to that this wasn't just a movie to go see because it's June and June = time for things to blow up at the movie theater; rather, this was a movie to go see because it was, well, quality filmmaking.

And it is. I had an inkling it could happen to me going in, but I can only imagine those lucky souls on opening weekend who saw the movie and felt it began to dawn on their brains: "This isn't just impressive...it's...good...I'm laughing...empathizing...hmmm....processing..." A wonderful moment that I half-experienced, since I had been led to expect it.

In any case, why? This a movie that promotes not a vague sense of being impressed, but warm feelings of affection, but superficially it should do no such thing, being as it is Marvel comic adaptation #29323, directed by Jon Favreau. "Swingers" was great, but nothing in it really suggested future deft big-budge filmmaker for JF. Ah, but the Rosetta Stone could lay within the souls of Mikey and Trent, because what "Iron Man" brings in spades is tone. Tone, tone, tone.



Not for Favreau the leaden weights of expectation and history that so burdened Indy 4. The guy made a movie that is, despite the clear accumulation of special effects/set peices, quite light on its feat. The summer movies that stick are the ones with that fizzy but satisfying tone, where it's a genuine pleasure to step into the universe to get away from the sticky, oppressive heat outside for a few hours. Iron Man has that quality, a certain fleetness/lightness that keeps it fun to be around. Part of it is Robert Downey Jr.'s impressively charming turn as Tony Stark, part of it is the way Stark's character is written. He lives a life of aspirational fantasy; the zillionaire playboy whose enthusiasm for living rubs off on the audience. The trick that the screenplay pulls off is that Stark remains a fixating, enjoyable presence even as his motivations morph from the fizzy highs of women, cars, and money (easy things to glamorize) to Doing Some Good In This World (much harder to glamorize, but with Downey Jr. and a lot of silent movie-style comedy grafted onto neat-o robot special effects, Favreau's working with a few aces up his sleeve).

Downey, Jeff Bridges, and Gwyneth Paltrow all register as warm, real presences, no matter that the fit neatly into their prescribed categories as protagonist, antagonist, and romantic interest. Their interactions carry the relaxed, inviting bantering energy through some of the tenser and more effects laden sequences. It's a hard balance to make a light, funny summer movie with stakes that feel high enough the audience mentally throws in with the designated good guys, but Favreau sticks the landing.

5/30/08 The Virtues of Leaving Well Enough Alone

So, the new Indiana Jones movie kind of sucks. Not terribly surprising, but still kind of deflating, in that the bell curve of youth as it applies to art was monumentally reinforced. Better no sequel at all than one so bereft of purpose and life.

It bears asking the question, though, especially in light of the new one's disposable crappiness, what makes the "original trilogy" stick where so many other summer blockbuster rollercoaster type movies disappear into the ether as soon as Oscar season rolls around? What makes a good summer blockbuster so hard to pull off?

I don't mean a successful one, because a blockbuster, by definition, should bust blocks. Financially it should do well, which Indy 4 is assuredly doing. So did Transformers, and so did Independence Day, etc. etc. for all the summers stretching back to (as far as I can figure it from critical readings) Jaws or Star Wars (the popular ones to blame). So in that measure, it's a success. But I have a hard time imagining that it will stick to the heart the way that the original set of Indiana Jones movies, or some of the other time-tested blockbusters have.

First, to tease out some critical opinion from anecdotal experience:

Critical opinion: "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is awesome, "Temple of Doom" is bad, and "Last Crusade" is passable. "Raiders" is the one that gets the essential nod, with the other two more or less dismissed as inferior reworkings.

Anecdotal experience, based on my own opinions and a bunch of friends that I've talked to: "Raiders" and "Last Crusade" are both awesome, which some favoring one and some favoring the other. "Temple" is still pretty sweet, but not as good (although one friend of mine says it's her favorite of the three. Overall vibe is that all three are of a piece - episodes varying in quality from great to greater, but still fundamentally of the same tapestry.

I think the gap between these two readings has to do with the the fact that critics are steeped in film, so the first movie gets lauded as a witty reworking of old B-movies and its cliffhanger/serial nods play off of the critical knowledge of the form. The 2nd & 3rd hit the law of diminishing returns - they don't do anything new, or new/old, like "Raiders". This reading is I think dependent on the fact that critics and cinephiles watch such a huge amount of movies that formal elements get foregrounded as the movies pile up in the brain. As an English major, I find it much easier to see narrative twists and turns coming simply because I've spent so much mental effort dissecting what various narratives are and what they attempt to accomplish. For that reason, when I'm reading I sometimes get overly caught up in the formal accomplisments/lack thereof in a book, as opposed to questions like, "is this fun to read?", or "is this compelling?". So because Indy 2 & 3 just followed the stylistic outlines of "Raiders", critics didn't find as much formal meant on the bone to chew on. For the average moviegoer (i.e. someone like me, not steeped in cinema), the appeal of the 3 are of a piece.

So the enduring appeal of these blockbusters is not, I don't think, necessarily a testament to their formal appeal, although all three are of course well-made. No "summer blockbuster" can really succeed without dynamic and memorable action scenes, and Indy has them in spades. Speilberg's facility with visual action is widely acknowledged, and since in Indy he really lets himself go for broke without regard to thematic/logical constraints, you get the setpieces only possible when a director with A-List skills goes B-List bananas.

But empty setpieces do not an enduring movie make. They're a prerequisite, but they have to be hung on the more difficult part of the equation. Enduring appeal goes back to a landing that's hard for a blockbuster to stick: tone and character.

Character first:
Indiana Jones in THE archetypal American action hero, but he is also a very specific character. In some ways, he's similar to James Bond, the aspirational ideal of British culture (or, the aspirational ideal of British culture as seen through the lens of American culture). Whether UK or US though, Bond is an urban ideal - he's the ultimate "city" hero.

Bond dresses well. He drinks expensive upscale drinks. He's constantly jetting off to places like Paris from places like London. Uniform: tuxedo. He's all about the no-strings-attached sex.
His gun is small, easily concealed, the PPK that you could carry into a tastefully appointed lobby in Manhattan (or London, or Paris, etc.). His one-liners tend to the debonaire and the double-entendre, and aspire to the tartness of prime Oscar Wilde. He is the modern, cosmopolitan city as action hero. And he has endured with incredible longevity as a character and idea. The idea, though, is more prominent - which is why it's been fleshed out by such a range of actors. Bond is very much style personified. As a person, we don't really have much of a sense of the particularities of his personality.

Indiana Jones dresses functionally. He goes to grimy, dangerous places. He's about sex, but can't help but feel the strings. Uniform: Fedora. Whip (American West nod). He gets beat up a lot, but also delivers a fair amount of beatings. He doesn't take himself too seriously, but always Gets The Job Done. These are all Bond-ian ideas, style as substance. But many things about Indiana the character are recognizably human (much credit goes to Harrison Ford's portrayal, as well). He has a tense relationship with his father. He doesn't like his name, and gave himself a nickname. He has to deal with girls in his classes that have crushes on him. His best friend is someone who complements him (Marcus Brody, the ur-academic). Many of these character traits are specific to Indiana Jones as a character, not as a style of living, but they intersect perfectly with the style as well - the rumpled, wisecracking American Hero.

The character semi-holds up in the new movie. Ford has aged well, and plays Indy well, but the screenplay is leaden. There are no memorable wisecracks a la "No Ticket", and with the plot a convoluted mess involving aliens and lacking the simple economy and visual/verbal wit of the first three, Indy the character is mostly stuck giving exposition and giving ground to the 4 other characters he spends most of the movie with. The clunkiness of the dialogue prevents Ford from deploying his natural charisma, so crucial to the character. Because, fundamentally, Indy seems like the kind of guy it would be an absolute joy to be around but for all the danger & Nazis and whatnot, and in the new movie this doesn't hold true. Not because he's old, because if anyone is made to age into Connery's crusty, hilarious old guy dynamic, Indy is, but because the screenplay leaves him absolutely high and dry.

Which speaks to the other element that the first 3 had in spades, missing in the new one: tone. The earlier ones are playful, witty, and light; with just enough shadings of gravity and danger to ensure that the events of the plot don't seem weightless. Too often summer blockbusters are so bloated by their budgets and and the amount of work it takes to pull them off that they are engulfed in a kind of destructive humorlessness, or are so silly and light that nothing sticks. The original Indy trilogy strikes the perfect sweet spot between wit/danger/excitement/fear/laughter while being liberal with the set pieces.

This tone is perfectly summed up by the tank chase in Last Crusade. An incredible chase scene, impeccably choreographed, capped by the tank plunging off the cliff. Adrenaline stimulated, audience on the thrill ride. But then: quiet wit, as Indy unwittingly joins the crowd mourning him, removing his signature fedora to honor the fallen, a joke light and witty enough to fit in with the best of Chuck Jones.

The new movie has no such moment, no such balance of light and ballast. It's all just chases for the sake of chases, or jokes for the sake of jokes, the resurrection for no good reason of a character who was last seen literally riding off into the sunset. A character synonymous with celluloid exuberance forced to go through the motions.