Russian CP Wants Indy Banned

Something about this tickles me. It seems that the Russian Communist Party has taken great exception to the new Indiana Jones film on the grounds that it is not an accurate portrayal of history.

My my, anyone who pursues self-education in history by going to see Indiana Jones films is, erm, probably going to the wrong place. Try your local college.

If the Russian CP has been learning history from Indiana's previous outings, I am going to have to gently break it to them that there is not actually a 700-year-old knight guarding the Holy Grail, and neither does the Ark of the Covenant contain magic dust with the power to shoot out beams of fire and slay Nazis.

It's a fictional movie! A story! And I rather enjoyed it. It's exactly the same as its predecessors, though thankfully of the standard of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Last Crusade rather than the weak and sexist Temple Of Doom. It has the same delectable contrast between polite university corridors and wild truck chases, the same silly but fun action sequences in which every enemy bullet mysteriously misses its target, the same storyline in which the baddies make Indy find the desired relic for them only to fall for its destructive powers because their motives are less academic than his, the same just-about-plausible first two hours culminating in the fantastical climax.

Actually, at the start I had a tweak of worry that it was a mite cold-war red-bashing. But it goes on to knock the FBI's anti-communist witch-hunting as much as it mocks the Soviets.

But the most amusing thing about this news story is, I think, the Russian CP getting all upset about inaccurate portrayals of history. You'd never catch them doing that kind of thing now, would you?