indiana jones

Chris Knight's avatar

 

It was on May 14th, 1944 that a little boy was born in Modesto, California.  Growing up he was a restless young man, with no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life.  He finally settled on being a race car driver.  But a near-fatal car crash a few days before graduating high school put a damper on that idea.

Our hero eventually decided he wanted to go to college.  He enrolled in a junior college and studied everything from anthropology to sociology to literature.  While there he began experimenting with filmmaking.  He then ended up at University of Southern California, choosing to continue his studies in cinematography.  And he discovered that he enjoyed it, a lot.  A series of student films followed, and many of them gained notice for their groundbreaking and breathtaking visuals.

The young lad graduated from college and tried to enlist in ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Word is breaking loose at this hour that Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones game has finally been revealed…

Coming later this year it’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  Looks set pre World War II aka the “golden era” of the saga.  As for the “MacGuffin” of this particular adventure, there are hints of in in the trailer that went live a little while ago.

So let’s take a look at it!

I’m not much of a video game player anymore (though I still want to eventually finish Fallout: New Vegas) but this might tempt me to get a new console.  Well, of course a new BioShock game would make me want that even more 🙂

...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

This is… THE greatest thing that I have seen in a very long time.  These kids are… wow.  They are amazing!  They were able to pull off what a lot of us thirty and forty years ago were only able to dream of doing.  I know my best friend Chad and I used to plan out our own Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.  How when we grew up we would be the next Lucas and Spielberg.  I like to think a little of that carried over to when we were making our films fifteen or so years ago.  Still a bit of childhood magic left.

But these kids, the young men and women of Oliver Springs Elementary School in Van Buren, Arkansas were not content to wait that long.  No, they went all out and they did it now.  It took them two years of fundraising and planning ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

I was seven years old when Raiders of the Lost Ark first came
out.  That film more than any other impacted and steered the direction
of my life.  The day after seeing it I had volumes of encyclopedias
opened up on the floor and the family Bible along with them.  I wanted
to learn all about the Ark of the Covenant and ancient Egypt and World
War II and the Nazis.  All heady stuff for a kid in second grade!  What
can I say though: my childhood interests were pretty atypical.

I
think Dad was pretty impressed though, that a movie could stoke a
youngster’s intellect like that.  And I know that Dad was impressed with
the movie too.  When we see Jones board the seaplane that is going to
take him west to Nepal, Dad leaned toward me and told me what kind of
plane it was and that ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

I’m hearing very mixed word about the upcoming motion picture Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  I seriously want this to be a good movie.  Raiders of the Lost Ark is my all time most favorite film and I found something good in each entry of the franchise.  I even thought that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was pretty good: all you need do is keep in mind that Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make a homage to the “flying saucer B-movies” of the Fifties, that they fondly remembered from adolescence.  Do that and it’s a perfectly fine movie.

But I want Dial of Destiny to be good because seeing an Indiana Jones movie in the theater together was something Dad and I did with every chapter of the series.  This will be my first time seeing a new Indy movie without him. I ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

I cannot begin to imagine what the Star Wars saga – and a lot of other movie and TV franchises – would have been like had it not been for Ralph McQuarrie.

He started out at Boeing, and then was hired by CBS to create animations of the Apollo program as NASA was preparing to land a man on the moon.

Some years later McQuarrie was approached by a filmmaker named George Lucas, who was planning a movie about a galaxy far, far away and needed to populate it with a unique assortment of heroes, villains, robots and spaceships. And had it not been for McQuarrie’s visual conceptions, what was at the time merely “Star Wars” might never have been picked up by any studio.

But thanks to Ralph McQuarrie, it was. And in addition to creating the looks of Darth Vader, Chewbacca and R2-D2, McQuarrie would ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

In 1973, around the same time that he was putting ideas together for what would become the Star Wars saga, George Lucas came up with a rough outline for “The Adventures of Indiana Smith”. Nothing came of it until a few years later, when Lucas was vacationing in Hawaii… and happened to run into fellow director Steven Spielberg building a sandcastle on the beach in Maui. It was Spielberg who suggested changing the name from “Smith”, and Lucas thought up “Jones” instead.

Four years later, their new hero swashbuckled onto movie screens and forever into popular culture…

Raiders of the Lost Ark came out thirty years ago this week, on June 12th 1981.

Incidentally, this is my all time most personal favorite movie! I could literally watch it all day, all week, and not get tired of it. No other film ever influenced my life more. Raiders of the ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

So sayeth Harrison Ford, adding that he’s already getting in shape and that work on a new Indy movie has progressed further than most of us have suspected…

“The story for the new ‘Indiana Jones’ is in the process of taking form,” Ford told France’s Le Figaro. “Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and myself are agreed on what the fifth adventure will concern, and George is actively at work. If the script is good, I’ll be very happy to put the costume on again.”

Others may disagree, but I thought last year’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a fine addition to the Indy mythos. That and that it was as good a homage to Fifties B-movies as Raiders of the Lost Ark was a tribute to the Saturday serials of yesteryear. With that in mind, I’ll gladly welcome another Indiana Jones movie (and maybe even ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Abuna Pauolos, patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia, has announced that tomorrow will finally see the revealing of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, which his church is said to have guarded for centuries.

According to those who adhere to the legend, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had a son named Menelik I, who eventually came to Jerusalem as a young man and spirited the real Ark of the Covenant away (with Solomon’s blessing).

It is there, in that land which in ancient times has been called Aksum and is today known as Ethiopia, where the very Ark of the Covenant which contains the Ten Commandments that G-d gave to Moses is said to be kept in this chapel, with a lone guardian tending to it night and day for as long as he lives…

(According to some reports, the Ark guardians don’t live anywhere near ...

Read more