Romancing the Stone
Well well, Robert Zemeckis, notorious second fiddle to Spielberg, does a better Indiana Jones than the real deal, much superior to Temple of Doom and even Raiders. That wasn’t on my bingo card.
The protagonist is a romance writer so sensitive, she cries when writing her own books. That’s not exactly right, she might have a cold. Just like Jules Verne, she writes about far away lands, the distant past, all while barely leaving her apartment.
Even meeting her editor in a bar is a struggle, having to deal with all those boorish men. The only men she deals with are the ones in her books.
Apparently her sister is the extrovert. Her husband was killed in Colombia and she was kidnapped by American goons, the tall guy obsessed with crocodiles, and Danny DeVito as the aide de camp. They want the map the husband was killed for, a way to reach the location of an unknown treasure. Danny DeVito wants to go back home, fuck that big score.
There’s another faction searching for the treasure, a local guy with many job descriptions, official pull over institutions, and enough chutzpah to kill the protagonist’s superintendent in New York City. He’s a one-man state-sponsored intelligence agency, proving fodder for the Monroe Doctrine.
As our protagonist is misled by the mysterious government guy, the muse of our protagonist comes out of the jungle to find his car totalled by her bus, while the government dude is shooting at him. Nice intro.
She needs to save her sister, so the muse’s services are hired, for a small price. As they run through the jungle, they start to bond, turning an escort to Cartagena to an escort to her heart.
They get the stone, without ruining the map. But afterwards, the stone jumps around for many other people. All the factions eventually touch it, bu it’s eventually eaten by a crocodile. In the climax, the muse tries in vain to save our protagonist, but our protagonist has learned enough and disposes of the military guy herself, after her signature move from the books fails horribly.
Yes, she’s the protagonist, so she saves herself. The dude throws away the crocodile with the jewel, but she could take care of it. If a woman writes the story, it’s just the way it happens.
She gets back home and writes the plot of her new novel, while the muse found the crocodile and the jewel and got his sailing boat, driving it all the way into NYC to fetch her and “sail” into the sunset.
Not only The Mummy is a better Indiana Jones, now there’s this. Do ignore the sequel.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.