Reeling Backward: "Labyrinth" (1986)

I had little interest in seeing "Labyrinth" when it came out in the summer of 1986. This despite the fact it was directed by Jim Henson in a similar vein of fantasy as "Dark Crystal," which I've always adored, and produced by George Lucas during his curiously underrated decade after "Return of the Jedi."

Adult-oriented fantasy was pretty much dead by 1986, subsumed by kiddie fare or laid low by diminishing box office returns. "Red Sonja" was a flop a year earlier, and "Labyrinth" was also a box office failure, grossing less than $13 million against a $25 million budget.

(That's about $59 million in today's dollars, which doesn't sound like a lot until you consider that year's #1 and #2 films, "Top Gun" and "Crocodile Dundee," were made for $15 million and $6 million, respectively.)

Despite being filled with puppets and explicitly aimed at children, it's a rather dark film with plenty of scary sections that likely turned off ticket-buyers. Even though Henson fretted about this and made efforts to inject more humor.

Time went on, and I still never got around to seeing it. The film's reputation grew and grew, one of the early examples of a movie being saved by home video sales and rentals. It became a particularly favorite among Millennial girls, and today even younger generations of mostly female audiences adore it.

(This probably didn't help my continuing reluctance to check it out.)

So I finally watched it along with my boys and am pleased to say I really liked "Labyrinth," bordering on love. Critics dismissed it as a visual spectacle with little in the way of story, and there's some truth to that. But the imagination is so incredibly dense, it more than makes up for the overly simplified fairy tale narrative.

To wit: a 16-year-old girl, Sarah (Jennifer Conelly), who resents her stepmother and baby half-brother, Toby, is challenged when Jareth the Goblin King steals the tyke and imprisons him in his castle. Sarah is given 13 hours to solve the incredibly complex labyrinth surrounding the castle or Toby will be turned into another goblin. Along the way Sarah encounters a menagerie of fantastical creatures, helpful and otherwise.

It's easy to see that this story is a mix of classical mythology and modern fable (notably "The Wizard of Oz"), and indeed author Maurice Sendak threatened to sue and shut down production because of the similarities to one of his books. Henson added an acknowledgement in the credits, and presumably some palms saw some grease.

The one thing I'm not completely wild about is David Bowie as the Goblin King. He wrote five songs for the movie and performed most of them, and I think at some point during the pre-production process someone had the idea of casting him, too. This despite the fact all the goblins and myriad other creatures are stunted little creatures performed by puppet masters, so why would their king be a fey, androgynous human who looks like he was the victim of the most vicious backcombing in history?

From what I've been able to learn, screenwriter (and Monty Python-er) Terry Jones and Henson repeatedly clashed and the script went through so many rewrites to the point Jones says it bears little resemblance to his work, even though he received sole credit. Henson was reportedly concerned that audiences found "Dark Crystal" too dark and unrelatable, so he wanted to cast a major pop star so they would have two primary human figures amidst all the goblins and trolls and dwarves.

It's also notable that in the story-within-a-story backbone of the tale, Sarah and the Gobin King are supposed to be in love despite their contest, and there's a beautiful dream sequence where they make moony eyes at each other from across a masked ball. I'm guessing someone realized a girl-on-felt-puppet romance wouldn't play well.

Bowie's songs are... OK, I guess, though none got me tapping a toe or humming a tune afterward. Though at least one of them, "Underground," charted decently at the time and another, "Magic Dance," was rediscovered after Bowie's 2016 death.

The most memorable is "Chilly Down," the only one Bowie does not sing himself. It's an encounter between Sarah and five red-furred creatures who refer to themselves as the Fire Gang, who can detach their heads and other body parts and play around with them. One of the members shows two long fingers, uses them to pluck out his own eyeballs, shakes them in his fist and tosses them like dice.

Unlike "Dark Crystal," the majority of the puppet work was achieved by humans wearing elaborate costumes with workable heads and limbs, with hand-held creatures as needed. The most significant is Hoggle, a dwarf with an oversized head who Sarah first meets outside the labyrinth while he's killing fairies with pest spray. He's quite arresting, with a knobby nose, age-spotted hands and huge, expressive eyes.

Brian Henson, Jim's son, provides Hoggle's voice while Shari Weiser performed inside the suit. He's irascible and peevish, but also acts as Sarah's guide and protector. Little does she know he's secretly beholden to Jareth, who shows up on a couple of occasions to browbeat Hoggle into thwarting Sarah's journey. He gives her a poisoned peach to feed her, causing her to fall into a forgetful slumber.

Jareth keeps getting Hoggle's name wrong, referring to him as "Hogwart," which makes me wonder if J.K. Rowling stole that name from the movie for her wizard's school (as she seemingly did everything else).

A couple of other, less consequential additions to Sarah's team are Ludo (voice and puppetry by Ron Hueck), a monstrously huge but gentle red-furred creature who has the power to command rocks, and Sir Didymus (voice by David Shaughnessy, puppetry by Dave Goelz), a one-eyed fox knight who rides a sheepdog as his steed. The two actually do battle when we first encounter Didymus, who is guarding a bridge in a swamp Sarah must travel through.

This place is the Bog of Eternal Stench, the place Hoggle fears more than any other, and the place Jareth keeps promising to banish him to. The bog is filled with whirlpools and geysers that continually issue forth farts and burps, and one step into the muck will leave you smelling terrible forever. Curiously, Didymus seems completely unaffected by the odor.

I was also entranced with a few other creature encounters. Sarah and Hoggle meet The Wiseman (Frank Oz and Michael Hordern), a wizened old creature who wears a large bird as a hat, and the two continually bicker, exchanging (not especially helpful) advice in exchange for donations. They also walk through a cave where the stones come to life into magic mouths uttering deep-voiced warnings to turn back, and Hoggle rudely cuts one off before allowing him to continue.

Then there's The Worm (Karen Prell and Timothy Bateson), a tiny worm in fine clothes who first gives Sarah clues how to navigate the labyrinth, pointing out some of the walls are just clever forced perspective illusions. However, he unwittingly sabotages her quest, telling her not to go left  because it's dangerous, only pointing out after she's left that it leads straight to the castle.

At several points in the story Sarah is forced to choose between two or more paths, including one where she's faced with a pair of guardians with heads protruding from above and below their shields, guarding doors leading to the path or certain doom. It's the classic conundrum of one who always tells the truth and the other who always lies.

She cleverly solves the riddle by asking one to say about the other, "Would he tell me that this door leads to the castle?" A similar encounter is with two living door-knockers. One has the ring passing through his mouth and can't speak well, while the other has it going through his ears and can't hear.

I also liked a plunge down a deep pit where she meets the Helping Hands, who break her fall and speak by using each other to form faces, including a working mouth.

Overall I actually enjoyed the more languid portions of the movie rather than the last act, where things speed up considerably and result in a lot of battles and derring-do. There's some clever stuff, like cannonballs that are actually tiny goblins inside ordnance, but it gets a little old fairly fast.

The deeper meanings of the tale are not immediately obvious, and subject to interpretation. The exact motivations of Jareth are mysterious, since all he seems to do is hang out in his castle with a bunch of goblins, occasionally breaking into song and dance. What he sees in Toby, Sarah's golden-headed baby brother, also remains a mystery other than growing his roster of minions.

The most likely answer is that the Goblin King is simply part of Sarah's psyche -- the portion of her that wants to remain a young girl who plays with dolls and makes pretend, and is scared of growing up and taking on adult responsibilities like looking after babies.

Connelly, just 14 when she was cast and dewy as a spring lily, is presented as completely innocent of sex, so having her fantasy lover be an androgynous  goblin (elf?) makes sense in that context.

I'm surprised at the lack of commentary on Sarah's acting ambitions. It's clear at the start at the story she is practicing the lines of a play, and in her room we see playbills and other newspaper clippings about a dark-haired actress that I first took to be Sarah herself. Upon second glance these are references to "Linda Williams," who must be her (presumably deceased) mother.

Jareth, who juggles crystals with visions inside them, offers Sarah to grant all her dreams if she gives up Toby. In the final scenes she is quite literally putting away childish things, including, it seems, of following in her mother's footsteps and stepping out onto the stage.

If so, this is a rather odd theme for a movie filled with flights of fancy and "hold onto your dreams" subtext.

Still, I have to say I found the experience of watching "Labyrinth" pretty magical. My boys loved it, which is surprising for a pair stubbornly devoted to all things Y-chromosome. I took care not to tell them beforehand it's a 'girls' movie' -- I knew which door to pick.

Reeling Backward: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008)

No, we're not reeling back very far this week. The fifth installment of the Indiana Jones chronicle was supposed to come out in 2020, but has been pushed back to the following year. That gives us a chance to look back on the mightily controversial previous one, 2008's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

It seems like it's been forever since that film, but if the schedule holds it will have only been 13 years since the last Indy movie, whereas it was 19 years between 1989's "The Last Crusade" and "Skull."

This seems like a good time to ruminate on the passage of time in film franchises and the aging process of actors.

There were a whole bunch of old jokes about the movie and in the movie, as star Harrison Ford was in his mid-60s when "Skull" was made. (The original trilogy roughly covered his 40s.) Pop culture was inundated with quips about him being the same age as Sean Connery was when he played Indiana Jones' doddering old dad in "Crusade."

In point of fact: Ford was several years older than Connery was, since in actuality the two actors are merely 12 years apart in age.

Ford will be 78 or 79 as they wrap up shooting of the sixth Indy movie, whose title is still a secret. Since all the movies have roughly tracked with the actor's actual age at the time they were made, it would seem the new one will be set in the 1970s.

Thanks to "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," the underrated TV series that ran from 1989 to 1993 (plus a few made-for-TV movies that were later re-edited into more serial episodes), the character's birth year is firmly established as 1899. Easy for me to remember, as it's also my paternal grandfather's.

George Hall played "Old Indy," the contemporaneous "host" of the TV show, who then would have been in his 90s. Notably, by then Indy had lost his right eye and wore a patch beneath wire-rim glasses. I'll be interested to see if this injury is explained in the new movie, sort of the way Ford's real-life chin scar was added into "The Last Crusade."

Astounding fact: When he stars in the next movie Ford will be older than Hall was when he played Old Indy.

Seeing "Skull" for the first time in many years, I was struck how frail Ford already appears to be in the action scenes. He actually moves around pretty well, including some jumps and swings he apparently executed himself. He even wriggles feet-first through a small opening between the cargo area of a truck and its cabin, looking relatively spry.

No, it's the punches where this Indy pulls his.

Old-school stunts have been a calling card of the Indiana Jones series, including plenty of fistfights. Punches are always accompanied by a signature sound effect that sounds more like a whiplash than the collision of flesh and bone.

Here we get the same aural crack while Ford's punching arms appear to be moving in slow motion. Indy's enemies -- the Russians this time -- still fly around the screen like they've been struck by a charging bull. The result is the fight scenes seem comically fake.

In general Indy subcontracts most of the heavy fighting to the greaser teenage character, Mutt Williams, in what is seen as Shia LaBeouf's breakout into adult roles. Of course (half-hearted spoiler warning here), about halfway through the movie it's revealed that Mutt is the son of Indy and his long-lost (or mislaid) lady love, Marian Ravenwood (Karen Allen, eternally radiant).

It's Mutt who takes on Irina Spalko, the sword-carrying scientist/kook played by Cate Blanchett in a torrid Ukranian accent that's just begging for a "moose and squirrel" reference. They duel with blades while each standing in the back of vehicles speeding through the Amazonian jungle in one of the film's signature scenes.

Spalko and Indy never exchange more than a few harsh words. Oh, I think she slaps him once.

Mutt first appears wearing EXACTLY the same outfit Marlon Brando did in "The Wild One," right down to the motorcycle and skewed riding cap. Once he and Indy start talking and he references his mother, I think most people guessed at his progeny. When Marian turns up as his mom, the cat's out of the bag and we're just waiting for the reveal to arrive. Mutt and Indy look nothing alike though there is a resemblance to Marian.

From this point on the movie (intentionally) becomes a hammy family sitcom, as the three exchange quips -- "Honey," "Daddy-O," "Junior" -- while fighting the rooskies and, in Mutt's case, literally swinging with the monkeys.

Ford's Indy has definitely mellowed at this point. He's not as excitable or egotistic. I enjoyed the part where they get caught in quicksand and Indy begins patiently explaining the difference between quicksand and a dry sandpit, emphasizing the difference in viscosity.

He's more pedantic professor than grim grave-robber these days.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is soon after meeting Mutt, when Indy tosses a line about having known "a lot of Marys" in his lifetime, and the young man leaps from the table, ready to fight a perceived insult of his mother. The Indiana Jones from "Raiders" or "Temple of Doom" would've quickly taken up the challenge, warranted or no.

Instead, he holds his place, looking directly but softly into the younger man's eyes. "You don't have to get sore all the time to prove how tough you are. Sit down. Please, sit down."

Pat Roach, the hulking wrestler who was Indy's punch-pal in the first three movies, had died in 2004 so Igor Jijikine was recruited to play the muscleman antagonist in this movie. He and Indy actually exchange a few good hits before the Russian is eaten alive by giant Amazonian ants. The CGI in this scene was attacked as hoky, but I think it still looks pretty good and certainly was fine compared to contemporary films.

With regard to the two biggest knocks against KotCS:

Yes, the "nuke the fridge" bit is ridiculous. Even if the blast didn't kill him the impact from traveling a few miles like being shot from a cannon would've. But plausibility has not been a hallmark of Indiana Jones movies.

I mean, in "Temple of Doom" an evil shaman reached into a dude's chest and pulled his heart out. Or take the scene where they're flying along in a mine cart, jump across a huge chasm and land exactly on the skinny rail lines on the opposite side.

Gimme the algorithms on that actually happening, perfesser.

On the space aliens revelation, I'm actually 100% fine with that. The film is set in the late 1950s, and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas explicitly said at the outset they wanted to do a science fiction  Indiana Jones flick. I mean, we see the incredibly elongated skull about halfway through the movie -- did you think thiswas going to end anywhere other than (not so) little spacemen?

Again, the first movies involved 1) the Lost Ark of the Covenant, 2) Evil demon magic, and 3) the actual frickin' Holy Grail. To those who loudly pshawed at lead fridges and aliens, I pshaw right back.

I'm genuinely curious what the forthcoming -- and, I've got to think, last -- Indiana Jones movie will hold. I can't imagine they'll try to present Indy as still being capable of even the scaled-down feats of KotCS. We've already heard Mutt won't be back, so is Indy going to recruit another stand-in for the boldest stunts?

They're also not going to kill him off, not without upsetting the established canon that has Indy living until at least the 1990s. There was a lot of talk a few years back about rebooting the franchise with Chris Pratt or someone else starring. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative, and perhaps even provided the final push needed for a fifth one starring Ford to get made.

Ford has joked about wanting to kill off all of his iconic characters, and he finally succeeded with two of them, Han Solo and Rick Deckard, just within the past few years. Curiously, he has never expressed similar thoughts about Indiana Jones, and in fact has been quite vocal about wanting to bring him back.

Indy's already older than his dad, so to speak, and is even senior to the eldest version of the character ever depicted. Whither Dr. Jones? Only time can tell, and how much can truly be left?