Posts Tagged ‘George Lucas’
Thursday Morning Link Transmission!
* American says no to MOOCs. So does SFSU.
* Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University says no to tenure.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
Far better for them to spend those five or six years trying to get a TT job at another school.
* Scenes from the Fitness Palace at Purdue.
* In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers… See also: Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students as Aid Funneled to Rich.
* The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor. And its equally unhappy, equally exploitative shadow.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero.
* Food service workers in St. Louis have gone on strike. So might adjuncts in Chicago. Amazon workers sue over mandatory post-shift search. Cooper Union Students Occupy President’s Office To Protest Tuition.
* Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes.
* NYC Considering Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote. Good!
* “Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression,” a new study that will appear in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that aggressive behavior is tied to competition, not violence, in videogames and gambling, according to Forbes.
* Scientists also say that guns are bad, glass is not a liquid, and the Toba catastrophe may not have happened.
* This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl).
* Here’s another example — I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (several times) and I never noticed that Riker doesn’t know how to use a chair. When the guy sits down he pulls the chair back and dramatically slings his leg over the back of it like he’s mounting a freakin’ horse. He apparently does this all the time, regardless of the situation. It’s nuts.
* Lucas wanted Indiana Jones 2 to be a dinosaur movie. I honestly can’t decide if this is the best or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Spitballing Indiana Jones
Spielberg fires off ideas with an adolescent’s stamina—and not all of them are bad, either. In fact, among his spontaneous interjections are some of the most iconic episodes in the film. “I have a great idea!” he exclaims. “There is a sixty-five-foot boulder, that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor, coming right at him. And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder!”
Spitballing Indiana Jones, at the New Yorker.
LUCAS: In the essence it’s just bullshit stuff where he wanders around Cairo trying to uncover the mystery of his puzzle. At the same time, you meet all these interesting characters and every once in a while somebody throws a knife at him, or he beats somebody up, or somebody beats him up. Typical Middle Eastern stuff.
‘Spaghetti Westerns Questioned the Underpinnings of Civilization’
Django Unchained is not so much the evil twin of the saintly Lincoln as its nasty, more clever kid brother, fighting for recognition against the favorite, acting out. If I prefer it to Lincoln it’s because I prefer the Tarantinian project, flaws and all, to Steven Spielberg’s entire career. Lincoln may be the culmination of the Spielberg-Lucas reimagining of the American cinema as family entertainment, a transcendent work beyond the blockbuster form that reimagines the official national myth of an official national father for current and future generations.
Tarantino is more interested in a pre-consolidated cinema that pre-dates Spielberg, in which national myths were put to use in tawdry, violent, and grandiloquent ways, and myth was open to interpretation by genre filmmakers outside the US. So however Tarantino has failed the actual history of slavery in the United States, the way he has opened it up for discussion strikes me as far more remarkable than the storybook of Spielberg’s Lincoln, which closes with a thump and sends us off to bed.
n+1 previews the Oscars. Via Twitter, Jesse Williams has, at length, a somewhat different take on the film.
Wednesday Night Links
The Wrap have spoken to Dale Pollock, author of an unauthorized George Lucas biography. He has apparently read outlines for twelve Star Wars movies but was obliged to sign an NDA.
Still, he’s doing a little bit of disclosing. He said:
“The three most exciting stories were 7, 8 and 9. They had propulsive action, really interesting new worlds, new characters. I remember thinking, ‘I want to see these 3 movies.”
* Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy. The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy; depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future. But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandra’s warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored. That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless.
* Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On. Also at the Onion: Report: Only Way Nation Will Pay Attention To Climate Change Is If Julia Roberts Dies In Hurricane.
* Cuomo is very, very far from an ideal Democrat, but my friend Angus Johnson is right that his climate realism makes him a very strong contender for 2016 if Hillary Clinton decides she doesn’t want it.
* Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos.
* The man who gets paid to jump on mattresses says you can stop laughing now. There is nothing funny about jumping on mattresses day after day. Mattress after mattress. People refuse to understand.
“It’s work,” said professional mattress jumper Reuben Reynoso. “It’s not for everybody. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it.”
I Was a Teenage Padawan
Yesterday it was Ahmed Best; today it’s Jake Lloyd, who says the Phantom Menace made his life a “living hell.”
The mere existence of child actors, it should be said, is strongly at odds with just about every other ideological formation we have regarding childhood; I’m pretty sure we’ve all decided to just overlook the contradiction entirely on the grounds that we like having movies to watch.
‘The Doors I Wanted It to Open Didn’t Really Open’
‘I Was Jar Jar Binks’: Entertainment Weekly profiles Ahmed Best.
Hoax Alert!
The Wachowski Brothers are not planning on pulling a George Lucas after all. Citizens, return to your homes.
Anakin Wept
George Lucas is reportedly considering a new Star Wars trilogy set ”as far as 100 years or 1,000 years in the Star Wars universe future.” I’ll see it, but I won’t be happy about it.
Sunday Night Links with Yoda, Clark Kent, and Banksy
* George Lucas, saved from himself: Yoda was very nearly played by a monkey in a mask.
* Christopher Cokinos argues in The American Scholar that geo-engineering is, as the saying goes, a terrible idea whose time has come.
* Self-serving egocentric rosy retrospection: How Republicans remember the 1990s.
* Bill and Steve’s GOTV video has gone viral with 45,000 views.
