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Dear God: You really are going to mount a quixotic defense of Temple of Doom, aren't you?

I'm afraid so. Most people hate it. I sort of love it. In fact, if I feel like spinning an Indy movie in the background in the years to come, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be the last 40 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Mind you, I'll be the first to admit that Temple of Doom has deeply embedded problems, and that there are popular reasons for disliking it — even hating it. The dialogue is ham-fisted. (I invariably cringe during the "What are you — a lion tamer?"/"I'm allowing you to tag along" exchange. "A lion." "Allowing." A homophone! I get it!) It's surprisingly brutal in the middle. In women's-lib terms, Kate Capshaw's scream-queen Willie Scott is such a step backward from Marion Ravenwood that I'm mildly surprised NOW didn't picket the screenings. (The future Mrs. Spielberg, God bless her, got handed a terribly written role — Willie's the shrieking Jar-Jar of the Indiana Jones series.) And let's not even get into the film's retro-colonialist overtones (which I find sort of perversely funny, but still). And the film is so different from its predecessor — confined largely to one locale, not as sophisticated or quest-driven, and very nearly Satanic in its depictions of evil — that it really couldn't help but let viewers down. And the bad blood persists to this day: Several people who knew I had this DVD box a week early made a point of expressing their jealousy — but also invariably went out of their way to slam "the second one."

Still, despite all that, I managed to find not one but two DVDJ staffers who absolutely adore Temple of Doom — and we gave the platter a spin, in the dark, on a flat-screen HDTV with six-channel sound. And we three geeks arrived at the following list of reasons to love the flick:

1. That unimpeachably awesome opening fight over the diamond and antidote, which contains tributes to classic musicals and Hitchcock and just absolutely rocks the house;

2. Ke Huy Kwan as Short Round, who — despite being handed cute-kid dialogue that includes the lines "Hold onto your potatoes!" and "You call him Doctah Jones, DOLL!" — is quite possibly the most likeable and least obtrusive child sidekick in movie history. Check out the wonderful, genuinely warm give-and-take between Kwan and Ford as they play poker or exchange hats;

3. That "Nice try, Lao Che!" visual gag;

4. Harrison Ford's terrific performance — arguably his best as Jones. I love how Indy stars out as a total greedy asshole, with strong shades of Bogart in Treasure of Sierra Madre, and how there's a distinct character arc as he evolves into a Pied-Piper/holy avenger;

5. The movie's look — again, the best in the series — with its striking wide-angle close ups of Indy's face and strong use of reds and shadows. Temple of Doom is a manual on how to use color in film, no joke. (As one DVDJ staffer [who, BTW, owns the original July 1984 issue of American Cinematographer devoted to Temple of Doom] put it, "This movie contains Spielberg's busiest frames, and it's all beautiful. It's a pornography of cinematography");

6. John Williams' score, which is among his very best — expanding richly on the original and adding wonderful themes for Short Round and the slave children;

7. Vampire bats! Severed thumbs!

8. The matte paintings of Pankot Palace, which are among the best matte paintings ever;

9. The sexy, playful, totally '80s, beautifully edited cat-and-mouse sequence where way-horny Indy and Willie are trying to out-wait each other, only to have the flirtation interrupted by a Thuggee assassin. (How can you not love the way that thug steps out of that wall mural?);

10. The super-icky, super-taut bug-tunnel and death-trap set piece, which is a perfect transition between the palace and the Temple of Doom and which very nearly kicks the ass of the Well of Souls sequence (it certainly makes your skin crawl more) and features that great closing gag where Indy grabs his hat as the door's closing;

11. The way the movie shifts so abruptly into scenes of human sacrifice and child cruelty. I'm sorry, I just love what a cinema bomb Spielberg and Lucas drop here: Yes, the horror's laid on a bit thick, but come on — how totally cathartic are those last 40 minutes as a result, when Indy snaps out of the Black Sleep of Kali and dishes out the hurt to faceless Thuggee goons?

12. That little 1940s tip of the hat Indy gives to that cobra statue as he's stealing the stones — a perfect Bogart moment;

13. Amrish Puri as Mola Ram — by far the scariest and most depraved villain in the series. He's mindlessly scary like Orcs are scary, you know? As one fellow staffer put it, he looks like what Abe Vigoda would look like if he were a sadistic Indian child molester;

14. The way Indiana Jones doesn't just look drugged when he's in the Black Sleep of Kali, but instead looks like he's really into all the sadism and blood, like he's actually tapped into some dark part of his personality that was there all along;

15. And, best of all, the movie's final 40 minutes, which are inventive and cathartic and full of righteous fury and pain and thrilling action — it's Lucas and Spielberg working out all their action-geek demons without apology, and God bless 'em for it. I mean, has any movie ever piled one action sequence on top of the next so successfully? That voodoo conveyor-belt fight followed by the mine-car chase followed by the water tunnel followed by the dual-swordsman tango followed by the rope-bridge blowout? With all kinds of semi-perverse shots like the one where both Indy and Short Round are beating the crap out of age-appropriate foes?


Really. The movie's aged well. Better than you might think. Give it a second chance. It's total geek crack.

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