Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is a known major fan, now you can add “The Green Knight” and “Pete’s Dragon” director David Lowery as a champion of Steven Spielberg’s 1984 sequel “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”.
This week Indiewire (via World of Reel) has been doing feature pieces on the best films of the 1980s, and to cap it off they asked a bunch of filmmakers from all over and ask them for their Top 10 films of the decade with a list that’s “ranked or unranked, annotated or not”.
Some just did simple listings, others however posted mini-essays regarding their choices. One of the latter was Lowery, who used it as an excuse to pick a bunch of films, with one of the longer comments reserved for the second Indy.
He calls the film a spectacle that isn’t particularly well regarded, but that makes it “all the more vital”. He explains his choice:
“Raiders Of The Lost Ark is perhaps the better Indiana Jones movie, but its goodness is of a pure and timeless sort, whereas The Temple Of Doom could only have been made in 1984, before it made PG-13 a thing, and in this particular moment of Spielberg’s career, when he was still willing to inject some of the best filmmaking he’s ever done with a mean and sometimes tasteless streak that is somehow as thrilling as any of the incredible set pieces he keeps one-upping himself with.”
The comments echo in the wake of Tarantino’s late last year to Reel Blend where he sung the film’s praises saying: “The movie is so f—— badass, it created a new level in the MPAA! Something Brian De Palma’s never been able to do as much as he’s tried!”
It also follows in the wake of the release of the fifth “Indiana Jones” film “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” back in June which marks the first of the series not directed by Spielberg. That film is coming to digital platforms on August 29th.
