Sharing a few of the items that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks:
- My buddy Jack greeted me on my first day back online after my vacation with the news that somebody wants to remake the original Highlander movie. As he put it, he wanted to “send me into a froth first thing upon my return” [from vacation]. True to form, I started to get my dudgeon up at the thought of yet another of my personal pantheon facing bastardization, but then… well… it just kind of fizzled out. I don’t know… with new takes on Escape from New York and Star Trek and Land of the Lost and god knows what else also in the offing, maybe I’m finally becoming resigned to the inevitability of my entire childhood and adolescence facing reinterpretation for a new generation that’s (a) too unimaginative to come up with anything new for themselves, or (b) too narrow-minded to bother watching something that’s more than five years old. And, well, even I’ve got to admit that a Highlander reboot might be just the thing to wash away the foul taste of The Suck and get right all the things that producers Davis and Panzer never seemed able to get a handle on in six movies and two TV series. The script is supposedly being written by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, the men who brought us Iron Man, so that’s a positive sign. Still… I’m so very tired of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings… and the casting director is going to have a helluva time coming up with anybody as charismatic and spooky as Clancy Brown to play the Kurgan.
- With all the other remakes of my childhood faves going on, why not a modern-day take on Buck Rogers and another big-screen attempt at Flash Gordon? Believe it or not, I’m really not upset about these two, because they’ve both been reinterpreted several times before. It seems natural to me to do a new version of Flash and Buck every 20-30 years. Of course, I’ll probably still prefer my versions, the ones that involved lots of spandex and (in the case of Flash) a soundtrack by Queen. But then I’m like that…
- Moving on, ever wonder what it’s like to portray Captain Jack Sparrow at Disneyland? This article tells all, from the drunken passes to the corporate oppression. (I find myself wondering if this is the same Jack Sparrow that seemed so interested in The Girlfriend’s lovely teenage niece when we were there last October…)
- Believe it or not, there’s a lightbulb in a Livermore, California, fire station that’s been burning for over 100 years. Ex-firefighter Tom Bramell notes in the linked article that “that bulb predates the atomic bomb and the birth of the automobile.” Amazing and oddly humbling. The bulb has its own website, and like so many hand-crafted items from an earlier age, it’s a curiously beautiful thing…
- A trio of Indy-related items, just to keep the goal in sight until I see the movie tomorrow night: German archeologists are after the real-life Ark of the Covenant, which is believed to be in Ethiopia (I’ve heard variants of this before, notably in the hard-to-swallow bestseller The Sign and the Seal; real archeologists don’t think much of Indy’s methods, surprise surprise (I think I read the same article 19 years ago when Last Crusade came out; somebody must’ve pulled it from the archives, updated the references a bit, and passed it off to their editor as a whole new piece); and finally (and not specifically Indy-related), an article on the resurgence of actual stunt people in the movies instead of faking everything with CGI. I’m with the article’s author who states that he doesn’t hate special effects, but having an actual human being in the shot brings a verisimilitude that you don’t get with massless video-game avatars.
- And finally, something you’ve just got to click to believe. I respect Japanese culture and hope to one day visit that fabled land, but there’s a lot of stuff about Japan that I doubt westerners will ever understand…
And with that, finally, I’m done for the day… tomorrow I’m planning to write a little retrospective on my history with the Indiana Jones franchise, and then tomorrow night, I’ll be kicking off my long holiday weekend with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull…
