Club Jade

The official crop of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reviews are growing, and so far, so good – 80% on Rotten Tomatoes!

Fox News caught up with George at Cannes and he says there’s a strong possibility for sequels. With, as many have been contemplating, Shia LeBeouf in the lead. Oh, George, you crazy diamond.

Next up, The Clone Wars and why it’s not being released by Fox:

“No one wanted it,” he told me. “Every studio rejected it, including Fox, and I’m very loyal to them. They have right of first refusal. Eventually I brought it to Warners. It’s the first time that three components of the studio have acted together. It’s very exciting.

…Every studio? Huh.

• The Brits really love them some Star Wars wedding: The GFFA-themed marriage ceremony of Bramwell Brightey and Tamsyn Lofts showed up in both The Guardian and The Sun today.

• Could Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull beat Revenge of the Sith at the box office? That’s the magic of inflation!
• No jail time for drunken Vader attacker. Shocking!
• The Force Unleashed is “greatest Star Wars story that we’ve ever told in a video game,” says LucasArts’ Cameron Suey. Better than Masters of Teräs Käsi? That’s unpossible!
  

With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull coming out in less than ten days, crystal skulls are popping up across the newscape:

• CNN gives a brief overview of the real-life crystal skulls and their role in Mayan mythology.
• Crystal skull stolen from New Age store in Claremont, California.
• An interview with Lester Holt about his upcoming Sci-Fi Channel special: Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls (Sunday May 18, 9 pm).
• and completely not skull related at all: a review of the demo version of LEGO Indiana Jones.

Karen Allen talks up her role as cult icon to iF Magazine and and about her role as Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark & Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: “How can you go wrong when you meet a woman in a bar in Nepal and she’s drinking men under the table, yelling at large men in Nepalese and ordering them out of the bar, and when she first sets eyes on Indiana Jones, she socks him in the jaw?”

Reviews of IJ&KotCS have started to appear online:

• USA Today sums up the online reviews
• AHN talks about some of these ‘leaks’
• Review #1 on Aintitcoolnews.com (may contain spoilers)
• Review #2 on Aintitcoolnews.com (may contain spoilers)
• Review #3 on Aintitcoolnews.com (may contain spoilers)

The LA Times looks at the re-release of the first three Indiana Jones DVDs, as a retrospect on Spielberg’s filmmaking.

This one is old school camera-in-the-theatre bootleg, not semi-decent quality like the Polish The Clone Wars one, but you can watch it over at io9 regardless. It’s quite a bit more descriptive than anything we’ve seen thus far, so if you’re spoiler-free or want to wait for the real thing, best sit this one out.

Like no one saw this coming: the second trailer for Indiana Jones and the Crystal King of Skulldom will be coming out on Paramount’s Iron Man on May 1 (which is being pushed forward 4 hours – from a midnight show to 8 pm showings). And the most important news about the Indy IV trailer: It’s 1 minute and 49 seconds. Apparently, they plan to stretch the whole movie out to 2 hours, 20 minutes.

NPR talks to real archaeologists about the most famous fictional archaeologist/treasure hunter. The Arizona Republic looks at Indiana Jones and the need for nostalgia.

Want to see Indiana Jones and the King Skull of Crystaldom before opening day (and can’t afford to go to Cannes)? There’s going to be a charity screening on May 18 in Oklahoma City.

and what’s the latest at StarWars.com about Indiana Jones?

• A quick look at the official commemorative Indiana Jones magazine, available on StarWarsShop.
• The tour of the Young Indiana Jones DVD sets covers the last chapter (but not the last disc. Disc 9 – Hollywood Follies – After working on Broadway, Indy heads out west to Hollywood and works with John Ford, Irving Thalberg and Erich von Stroheim and gets some tips on stunts from Wyatt Earp. Companion documentaries cover von Stroheim, Ford, Thalberg, and the Hollywood moguls.

It’s official: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be screening (out of competition) at the 61st Cannes Film Festival next month.

Given how little breaking Star Wars news we’ve had out of New York Comic Con, it’s not too surprising that we didn’t get a full panel report until now… Check it out at Cinematical. EW also includes it in their roundup.

Now they’ve posted an interview with Harrison Ford. They touch briefly on Star Wars and Han Solo, but nothing we haven’t heard before.