We had a long weekend here, and we ended up seeing the latest Indiana Jones movie. I was able to enjoy a lot of the various scenes when taken separately, but as a whole I mostly was left with a furrowed brow and a single question: “Why?”

Not “why did they make the movie?” but “why didn’t they take even a single day’s worth of work to plug the plot holes?”

If we could spot at least a dozen obvious plot holes to discuss in the car ride home, many of which could have been plugged with only a minor bit of script re-writing, then why didn’t they do it? Okay, so it’s hard to have a lot of respect for Lucas’s judgment after that last trilogy, but Spielberg generally knew what he was doing. It’s hard to believe that he’d have let so many obvious gaffes slip through when one, maybe two days’ worth of work on the part of a halfway-decent writer’s part would have fixed them. A script-writer’s time isn’t that expensive, especially compared to the rest of the costs on a film. It’s also hard to imagine Ford, a man who’s shown a lot of good judgment in terms of choosing scripts, not noticing the huge flaws in this one.

No, I’m not going to go into a long discussion of plot holes. I’m sure actual movie review sites have done that, and what’s the point? It feels like beating a dead horse. I just wish I understood why, because it makes no sense to me. No business sense, no logical sense, no sense at all.

Anyway, I haven’t posted in about a week or something like that, so I have a bunch of reviews to link to. Today’s is J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s Vengeance in Death—I had a yen for another good mystery after reading Mariah Stewart’s Mercy Street. If you’re looking for a particularly spicy romance, there’s Hard to Get by Alyssa Brooks. And finally, I HIGHLY recommend The Waiter’s upcoming Waiter Rant!!

I’ve always loved martial arts flicks. The problem is, these days they tend to use CGI and/or wire-work to enhance the wild and crazy stunts they portray. While I can enjoy a CGI or wire-work movie if that’s what I’m in the mood for, when I want to watch a martial arts flick it’s generally because I want to see just what the human body can do when it’s properly trained and pushed to its limits. CGI could turn anyone into a martial arts madman on screen—I want to be amazed by what someone can REALLY do.

Recently my husband and I started visiting some friends in Virginia for occasional movie nights, and it turns out that they’re huge martial arts fiends. They introduced us to some Thai movies, and we’re completely and utterly hooked. Our two favorites so far are Ong-Bak and Born to Fight. As expected the plot is flimsy and largely there to provide an excuse for the fight scenes, but that’s to be expected. Thai martial arts are amazing to watch, and the man who produced both of these films apparently feels that the way in which Thai films can distinguish themselves, since they don’t have the resources of Hollywood or Hong Kong, is through their death-defying stunts and unique forms of martial arts. Boy howdy is he right. These are incredibly visceral movies, and if you watch the ‘making of’ specials on the Born to Fight DVD you’ll see at least one stunt that came entirely too close to killing a stunt man.

Ong-Bak is particularly amazing for its chase scenes and its long fights involving Thai martial arts. Born to Fight takes a bunch of professional athletes (seriously: they used real professional athletes instead of actors) so that they could do jaw-dropping stunts and fight scenes that mixed athletics and martial arts. It’s every bit as good as watching an old-style Jackie Chan-style scene using props to their fullest. I can’t wait to see The Protector next.

Apropos of nothing, the latest reviews are of two J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts books: Strangers in Death (her latest), and Naked in Death (the first in the series).