For those of you who can't get enough of Indiana Jones talk

Indiana Jones Returns, to Steven Spielberg’s Delight - New York Times

Getting tired yet of my linking to material on the new Indiana Jones movie? If so, just skip this.

The article above discusses the series generally, and makes some good points about the Spielberg action style. He has, fortunately, never been into the frenetic cutting of action scenes, an annoying feature of nearly all action movies now. (The same can be said of nearly all dance movies of the last few decades too.) Spielberg is nice enough not to diss all action movies that take that approach, but he's being too kind. It rarely works for me, as it reduces the realism and impact of action when you can tell you are watching a stunt that was repeated umpteen times to allow for all those edits from different angles.

The article also notes this about what remains one of my all time favourite movie sequences:

The perilously long and complicated opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” for example — in which a song-and-dance number (“Anything Goes,” sung in Mandarin) turns into a wild slapstick action scene involving a diamond, a poisoned drink and an elusive vial of antidote, and ends with Indy and his companions jumping out of a plane in a rubber raft — delivers that sort of giddy, mildly deranging stimulation. The staging and the cutting have the “can you top this?” audacity of a silent comedy, and the timing is slyly impeccable: it’s about the length of a Keaton two-reeler.

"Temple of Doom" remains my favourite of the series. For me, it struck exactly the right tone of wit and slapstick humour to offset the action and any violence. Ripping the heart out of a chest never bothered me; it always seems to have been intended to have been revealed as a magic trick anyway. (On the other hand, I always felt that Raider's more serious tone made the impalings and other violence too intense for much of the potential audience of under 9 year olds.)

As for "Last Crusade", it has always struck me as a particularly uninspired in terms of both script and direction. As with the 3rd Star Wars, many of the action sequences were so obviously re-hashes from the first movie of the series, it was very disappointing. I have re-watched it recently, and it remains quite a dull experience.

I always have felt that it was odd that both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series peaked in the middle, yet friends and critics at the time were a little disappointed with the second instalment. Later, it seems opinions were revised of Empire Strikes Back, so that virtually everyone now agrees it was the best of the the lot. Temple of Doom may also be a bit better appreciated now too, I suspect.

So it's fingers crossed for the new movie, but expectations may yet be dashed.