{"id":1418,"date":"2008-05-22T22:07:59","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T22:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1418"},"modified":"2008-05-22T22:07:59","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T22:07:59","slug":"driveby_blogging_7_the_quicken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/05\/22\/driveby_blogging_7_the_quicken\/","title":{"rendered":"Drive-By Blogging 7: The Quickening"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sharing a few of the items that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My buddy Jack greeted me on my first day back online after my vacation with the <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/392239\/there-can-only-be-one-more-thanks-to-highlander-remake\">news<\/a> that somebody wants to remake the original <i>Highlander<\/i> movie. As he put it, he wanted to &#8220;send me into a froth first thing upon my return&#8221; [from vacation]. True to form, I started to get my dudgeon up at the thought of yet <i>another<\/i> of my personal pantheon facing bastardization, but then&#8230; well&#8230; it just kind of fizzled out. I don&#8217;t know&#8230; with new takes on <i>Escape from New York<\/i> and <i>Star Trek<\/i> and <i>Land of the Lost<\/i> and god knows what else also in the offing, maybe I&#8217;m finally becoming resigned to the inevitability of my entire childhood and adolescence facing reinterpretation for a new generation that&#8217;s (a) too unimaginative to come up with anything new for themselves, or (b) too narrow-minded to bother watching something that&#8217;s more than five years old. And, well, even I&#8217;ve got to admit that a <i>Highlander<\/i> reboot might be just the thing to wash away the foul taste of <a title=\"DVD Review: Highlander: The Source\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2008\/04\/dvd_review_highlander_the_sour\/\"><i>The Suck<\/i><\/a> 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 <i>Iron Man<\/i>, so that&#8217;s a positive sign. Still&#8230; I&#8217;m so very tired of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings&#8230; 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.<\/li>\n<li>With all the other remakes of my childhood faves going on, why not a modern-day take on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.variety.com\/article\/VR1117985373.html?categoryid=13&amp;cs=1&amp;nid=2562\">Buck Rogers<\/a> and another big-screen attempt at <a href=\"http:\/\/screenrant.com\/archives\/flash-gordons-alive-on-the-big-1663.html\">Flash Gordon<\/a>? Believe it or not, I&#8217;m really not upset about these two, because they&#8217;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&#8217;ll probably still prefer <i>my<\/i> versions, the ones that involved lots of spandex and (in the case of Flash) a soundtrack by Queen. But then I&#8217;m like that&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Moving on, ever wonder what it&#8217;s like to portray Captain Jack Sparrow at Disneyland? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lamag.com\/featuredarticle.aspx?id=7016\">This article<\/a> 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&#8217;s lovely teenage niece when we were there last October&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>Believe it or not, there&#8217;s a lightbulb in a Livermore, California, fire station that&#8217;s been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/local\/la-me-lightbulb5-2008may05,0,3217216,full.story\">burning for over 100 years<\/a>. Ex-firefighter Tom Bramell notes in the linked article that &#8220;that bulb predates the atomic bomb and the birth of the automobile.&#8221; Amazing and oddly humbling. The bulb has its own <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centennialbulb.org\/index.htm\">website<\/a>, and like so many hand-crafted items from an earlier age, it&#8217;s a curiously beautiful thing&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>A trio of Indy-related items, just to keep the goal in sight until I see the movie tomorrow night: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/story\/0,2933,355264,00.html\">German archeologists are after the real-life Ark<\/a> of the Covenant, which is believed to be in Ethiopia (I&#8217;ve heard variants of this before, notably in the hard-to-swallow bestseller <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Sign_and_the_Seal\"><i>The Sign and the Seal<\/i><\/a>; real archeologists <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2008\/TECH\/science\/05\/13\/indiana.jones.arch.ap\/index.html\">don&#8217;t think much of Indy&#8217;s methods<\/a>, surprise surprise (I think I read the same article 19 years ago when <i>Last Crusade<\/i> came out; somebody must&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2008\/05\/21\/DDBM10P2FI.DTL\">resurgence of actual stunt people<\/a> in the movies instead of faking everything with CGI. I&#8217;m with the article&#8217;s author who states that he doesn&#8217;t hate special effects, but having an actual human being in the shot brings a verisimilitude that you don&#8217;t get with massless video-game avatars.<\/li>\n<li>And finally, something you&#8217;ve just got to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkgeek.com\/stuff\/41\/superpiipii.html\">click<\/a> to believe. I respect Japanese culture and hope to one day visit that fabled land, but there&#8217;s a lot of stuff about Japan that I doubt westerners will ever understand&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And with that, finally, I&#8217;m done for the day&#8230; tomorrow I&#8217;m planning to write a little retrospective on my history with the Indiana Jones franchise, and then tomorrow night, I&#8217;ll be kicking off my long holiday weekend with <i>The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull<\/i>&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sharing a few of the items that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}