From Alex Balk’s Tumblr:

I haven’t seen it anywhere yet, and I’m wondering why more people aren’t talking about how this summer’s new Spielberg movie, Indiana Jones and The Latest Terrible Movie Title From George Lucas, will change the dynamic of the presidential race. I have to believe that if the movie does well it’s going to seriously help John McCain with undecided voters, who will figure, hey, if Harrison Ford can still handle all this action in spite of the fact that he’s 71 years old, so can McCain.

No, Harrison Ford is not actually 71, but he’s so close that this can’t actually be funny as a joke, so we’ll call it a serious line of cultural-political inquiry.

• The first trailer––really, the first bit of “official” marketing of any kind, because that sploogey Vanity Fair cover apparently doesn’t count––for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will premiere on Valentine’s Day, in front of prints of The Spiderwick Chronicles. Variety says it’s part of a trend of studios waiting until a quarter in advance to show glimpses of their summer tentpoles; it could also have something to do with the fact that Indy 4 just wrapped, like, last week.
• You know it’s an unremarkable weekend when both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter bury their Friday morning box offic predix (yay, slanguage!) stories under a handful of other headlines. Variety says it’s a draw between Fool’s Gold, and the “far harder to predict” Hannah Montana concert film. THR says the abysmally reviewed Kate Hudson comedy will “probably cop the weekend’s bragging rights.”
• Berlin deals: Lionsgate has purchased Bangkok Dangerous,  starring Nic Cage as “as an anonymous assassin who travels to Bangkok to handle four kills for an underworld crime boss, but whose conscience becomes his enemy when he meets a local Thai girl.”
• Blah blah blah strike story, blah blah blah “what does it all mean?!?!”

The whole Lucas/Spielberg Indy 4 cover made a certain kind of sense. It’s an epic narrative, the story of underdogs turned Hollywood royalty, and it’s also about the passing of torch from the star sphere of the 70s-80s-90s to the new generation, however annoyingly it may be embodied by Shia LaBouf. This kind of reification of Hollywood myth is the only way to pay Graydon Carter’s salary nowadays, even if it’s not something the average Christopher Hitchens reader really has much use for.
But why is Vanity Fair exhaustively covering a new Star Wars video game? To the point where they’ve not only posted a three-pager about the technology behind Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but a 14-page slideshow of stills from the game itself? Are they that desperate to win the Digg crowd, and if so, do they really think teenage gamers will become loyal customers after this issue reels them in? Was this a contractual thing––ie: did Lucas only agree to the Indy interview on the grounds that the game would get coverage as well? And if so, why didn’t he offer better quality images than the one screen-capped at right?

• Variety has a run-down on the ten films it thinks fans are most excited about sneaking at Comic-con. At the top of the list are Indy 4 and Star Trek 11; Cloverfield (or Monstrous or whatever it’s called this week) is conspicuously absent. In related news, Paramount has bought Iron Man an Audi, and Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Malin Akerman have been cast in Watchmen.
• Showtime has acquired broadcast rights to Nicholas Jarecki’s documentary The Outsider, which offers an inside look (ha ha) at director James Toback. The film, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 and had a brief theatrical run last year, will make its cable debut in August.
• Variety has a story on Sony’s massive 2nd quarter profits; The Hollywood Reporter’s got one on Disney’s.

For their latest Photoshop contest, Something Awful invited amateur image editing masters to revamp movie posters, to replace the title of the movie with an appropriate song title. My favorite is this take on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Imagine if George Lucas and Steven Spielberg actually adopted influences from DEVO. If Indy 4 was going to be anything like the Whip It video, I might actually care.

[Via BoingBoing]

I’m usually notoriously hard on spoiler Nazis. I know I’m in the minority on this–I recently found myself embroiled in a pseudo-hostile Twitter fight between John Brownlee and Joel Johnson because of it– but my theory is that if you care enough whatever is being spoiled, your investment should be able to withstand the revelation of a simple plot point.

Still, I think what Pete Vonder Haar is doing sounds intriguing. The FilmThreat writer has been intentionally avoiding reading set reports and watching trailers for new films, in order to preserve a sense of excitement for the film’s eventual release. Now, Vonder Haar is specifically attempting to avoid acquiring any pre-release information on the fourth Indiana Jones film, which is currently shooting in New Haven for a May 2008 release. “Call me a crazy insane crazy person,” Vonder Haar writes, “But I’d like to not know how the movie is going to end (or every major plot twist, or the big action sequences, or the climactic one-liner) before I actually go see it.”

In a great post at Movie Marketing Madness, Chris Thilk explains how Vonder Haar’s information abstinence stands in direct defiance of what the typical studio marketing campaign tries to achieve.

[S]ince ’surprise’ is in some people’s minds synonymous with ‘displeasure’ … the campaign creators, then, want the movie to feel familiar and safe so as not to scare anyone off. That’s why these casting announcements for the major flicks are broadcast far and wide, and it’s why studios on some level like Web sites that post spoilers. Those plot points reduce the odds of the movie being seen as an unknown quantity by the audience, upping the comfort factor as well as, hopefully, the subsequent desire to see the film.

So the studios are actually engineering a world in which the concept of spoilers–and the conflicting drives to either pursue or avoid them–becomes virtually meaningless. This makes Vonder Haar’s mission of interest on two levels: not only is it an effort on the part of a professional critic to recapture the enthusiasm of fandom, but it’s also a subtle form of protest.