This is it. I might be a full-fledged, card-carrying adult come Thursday morning. The last of the movies I've been lining up for since childhood hits screens this week. Should I even bother mentioning the title? You know what I'm yammering about. Indiana Jones IV. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Old Man Indy. Call it what you want (I prefer Indiana Jones and the Hot Commie). I had about 8 orbits around the sun when Last Crusade showed the world how to drop a warplane with an umbrella, and like everyone else I've anxiously anticipated the inevitable fourth one ever since—just never imagined I'd be 26 when I finally saw it.

There's been a Scooby-Doo flick. Spider-Man zipped across the movie screens. Superman did return and so have good Batman movies for that matter. Transformers tore shit up last year. And of course, the Star Wars prequels—the films that will always reign as the most anticipated of my life—have come, kicked ass (so says me), and gone. After this Indiana Jones, I can't think of another flick from my four-feet-and-shorter days that I'm still waiting for (never was much of a G.I. Joe kid). This really is it. The remaining cords connected to my childhood near separation, only about 10 years later than most people.

No doubt, dozens of long awaited films will arise in the future. But those movies will have been anticipated from within the sphere of adulthood (at least in the legal sense of being aged 18 and over). Nothing will ever quite buzz with that weird, reckless longing for a movie that can only be felt by a movie-freak kid whose obsession is unhindered by the countless muddling worries of adulthood. Total giddy tunnel vision.

And it's nice to get one last taste of it even if it's only for a day rather than weeks on end. I don't expect to get any work done on Wednesday. The 24-hour countdown will have begun. And I'll be in the grip of absolute childlike "Indy fever." TPS reports will be covered in doodles of fedora hats, crystal skulls, and Indiana Jones typography. Any rubber band, computer cord, or anything in grasp really will probably be turned into a make-believe whip at one point or another. I'll swap staplers with scissors as if they were a sandbag for a golden idol. My boss will introduce me at cross-departmental meetings as David and I'll correct her: "You call me Dr. Frank, doll!" And she'll retort, "Mola Frank, prepare to meet Kali…in the unemployment line."

You see, Indy fever is contagious.

Yup, those are my tickets. And my fingers. Nice eh?

Now some of you are thinking this kind of ultra self-hyping will only lead to disappointment. After all, the early reviews are mixed (RoS head-honcho Brad didn't much care for it). Yeah, years waiting for a sequel can build expectations to unattainable levels. To such a height that some people forget the true nature of the earlier films and expect the latest installment to fit some corrupted mold that never fit the originals in the first place. Not saying all the reviewers panning Indy IV are suffering from this, especially not Brad's opinion which I won't read until Thursday (but I can already tell you I hate him… just a little… maybe not so much… yeah I hate him). But I bet several are (like Brad, what a dick). And that same pattern will occur within the general public too.

Yet, I'm a tad different when it comes to expectations. For the Star Wars prequels and Indy IV, I've never expected the second coming of cinema—that feeling tends to crop up for more short-term anticipated films like The Dark Knight or The Road (which I've publicly said several times is my most anticipated film of 2008, but I should have qualified it in terms of quality). My internal hype meter is running on a lower plane for films I've been waiting over a decade for. I'm just on a crank-like high that I'm seeing another Indiana Jones. Period. All the hype for me almost revolves solely around the fact that there's a movie in existence.

I'll concern myself with quality when the end credits roll. If it's great, then fantastic. If it sucks, then damn. Sure, if this represents some symbolic end to a chapter in my life, I'd prefer for it to conclude on a happy note. But no matter. The fact that I'm this enthused about the idea of a film—and most likely won't be again in my life, at least not with this childhood nostalgia attached—is such a pleasure in itself. As the platitude goes, "waiting is half the fun." Well, in this case it's much more than half.

Related post categories: Editorials, Features, The Shallow End : Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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