Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Number two, in which Indy tries to recover magical stones in East India, is a big dopey comicbook adventure with poor gender and race politics but it remains my favourite, well, perhaps second favourite of the Indiana Jones movies on account of its big opening Shanghai dance number, its hilarious banquet scene, its comedy routine involving jungle animals, the lengthy carry-on involving Indy getting trapped with Shorty in a spikey booby trap, the minecart rollercoaster ride that I've dreamed of going on since I was a kid, and of course the climactic collapsing rope bridge.

★★★★☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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