Posts Tagged ‘remakes’
Good Morning, It’s Monday Links
* TNG and the limits of liberalism (and, not incidentally, why I always recommend The Culture novels to Star Trek fans). And one more Trek link I missed yesterday: An oral history of “The Inner Light.”
* Your obligatory 9/11 flashback this year was all about Air Force One. And if you need more there’s always Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man.”
* Sofia Samatar: Risk Is Our Business.
* We are, after all, rigged for gratification, conditioned to want to “feel good.” We seek pleasure, not pain; happiness, not misery; validation, not defeat. Our primary motivators are what I have previously called the “Neuro P5”: pleasure, pride, permanency, power, and profit — however these may be translated across socio-cultural contexts. Whenever technologies that enhance these motivators become available, we are likely to pursue them.
* The layered geologic past of Mars is revealed in stunning detail in new color images returned by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which is currently exploring the “Murray Buttes” region of lower Mount Sharp. The new images arguably rival photos taken in U.S. National Parks.
* “Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion.” The Frankfurt School, forgotten?
* CFP: “Activism and the Academy.”
* Your MLA JIL Minute: Assistant Professor of Science Fiction/Fantasy Studies at Florida Atlantic University.
* Rereading Stephen King’s It on Its 30th Anniversary.
* Rereading The Plot Against America in the Age of Trump.
* How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Built Modern Conservatism.
* Weird temporality in It Follows, by way of The Shining.
* States vs. localities at Slate. Wisconsin vs. Milwaukee is the example in the lede.
* Donald Trump and the Fall of Atlantic City. Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign.
* And just in case you’re wondering: What happens if a presidential candidate dies at the last second?
* Once again: A News21 analysis four years ago of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states found that while some fraud had occurred since 2000, the rate was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million registered voters in that 12-year span. The analysis found 10 cases of voter impersonation — the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls.
* 21st Century Headlines: “Airlines and airports are beginning to crack down on explosive Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones.”
* Rebranding watch: Lab-Grown Meat Doesn’t Want to Be Called Lab-Grown Meat.
* Passing My Disability On to My Children. Facing the possibility of passing on a very different genetic condition — which, as it turned out, I wasn’t a carrier of– I was very much on the other side of this before we had our children.
* Addiction and rehabilitation, a minority report.
* Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?
* Jason Brennan (and, in the comments, Phil Magness) talk at Bleeding Heart Libertarians about their followup paper on adjunctification, “Are Adjuncts Exploited?: Some Grounds for Skepticism.”
* Why Do Americans Find Cuba Sexy — but Not Puerto Rico?
* This Friday at C21: Brian Price on Remakes and Regret.
* From the archives: Some Rules for Teachers.
* And we’ll never see prices this insane again.
Random Monday Links
* Today Jim Henson has been dead for 21 years. In other news, the world has been completely terrible for 21 years.
* American popular culture hits rock bottom: Seth MacFarlane will reboot The Flintstones.
* Pollutocrat Koch fueling far right academic centers at universities nationwide.
* Is there any governmental body more useless than the FEC? I mean really.
* I grow old: AIM is dead.
* From the too-bad-it-will-never-happen file: I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.
Gimme Fever
It’s Tuesday and I’m feeling just a little bit feverish.
* It’s come to this: they’re going to remake Drop Dead Fred. Don’t ask why.
* Oh, the wisdom of markets: Stephen Dunbar demonstrates that Peak Oil has “peaked” by citing the temporary crash in demand due to the financial crisis and speculative recovery technologies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Crisis averted!
* Meanwhile, the climate is still totally screwed. See also: The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. What’s their governor have to say about this?
* Superpoop messes with Texas.
* David Kurtz comes through with your daily dose of swine flu commentary, the first on the rhythm of pandemic and the second on the deep, pervasive rot throughout the global meat industry.
* Science has proved that conservatives don’t get Stephen Colbert.
Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.
Whenever I hear about this sort of thing I’m just shocked. Not only is the parody on The Colbert Report completely unsubtle—it’s so unsubtle I even wouldn’t say it counts as satire—but it’s not as even as if Colbert is trying to fool anyone. If you didn’t get the point just from reading the sidebar during “The Word,” he breaks character, both deliberately and undeliberately, all the freaking time. Multiple times every show. He’s practically holding the audience’s hand.
Let’s hope “more likely” still represents a rather small part of the sample…
Remakes We Can Believe In
In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
Must-See Bollywood 2010
Bollywood will remake Back To The Future. This is guaranteed to be awesome.
Random Linkfest
Random linkfest.
* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.
* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don’t screw it up this time. More at CHUD.
* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.
* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.
2000th Post
This is the 2000th post since I switched over from the Backwards City blog in May 2007, which makes it something like the 7500th post overall.
The 1000th post was only back in February, the one about the original script for Groundhog Day…
Links
You know what these are. They’re links.
* Pirates: the key to understanding the world.
* Inside Joss Whedon’s next project. No, not Dollhouse: Dr. Horrible Singalong Blog, a Web musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion.
* We’ve reached the end of the remake express: they’re remaking Highlander. Not only are there no more ideas in Hollywood, there aren’t even any more movies to be remade.
* Film School Rejects has the Top Ten Indiana Jones moments. This is actually a pretty terrible list, as the Grail challenges from Last Crusade are foolishly clumped together—”The penitent man shall kneel before God” and “You have chosen… wisely” both easily make the cut—as is one of the best lines from the whole series, “We named the dog ‘Indiana,'” which along with four horses in the desert for two decades served as the capstone for the trilogy. But you know a list like this doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it excludes the single best shot of either Lucas’s or Spielberg’s career:
Via Cyn-C.
The Bronze Age
A quick comparison: In 1982, the year’s major sci-fi releases included Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Thing and Tron. In 2007, we saw Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Invasion, Resident Evil: Extinction, Spider-Man 3 and Transformers.
Popular Mechanics takes on the Bronze Age of sci-fi cinema.
As movie studios sift through their own intellectual-property junkyards, no one seems to be making—or funding—the next Blade Runner or Alien. The path of least resistance is the remake, the sequel or the comic-book movie, with its lack of scientific background, its inherent implausibility and its weird cocktail of adolescent nostalgia.
Monday Night Catchup
Links from the weekend I’m only now having the chance to blog:
* It’s finally come to this: they’re remaking Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Via SF Signal, which has the only response one can have: Why?
* Stop the Planet of the Apes: Charlton Heston has gotten off.
* The Office’s John Krasinki has spent the last five years trying to make a movie out of DFW’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Now he’s gone and done it. Here’s an interview.
* Seven superheroes who will never get their own movie (but should). The moral of this story is that the Legion of Superheroes has had a large number of silly superpowers in its pages.
* McSweeney’s hunts the most dangerous game, while Sisyphus enters analysis.
* The best UFO pictures of 2007.
1000th Post! Groundhog Day
What better topic for the thousandth post on this blog (and nearly 7000th post overall) than jwz’s in-depth discussion of the number of times Bill Murray has to repeat the same day over and over again during the early-’90s cinematic classic Groundhog Day? The answer surprised me—like many people who haven’t given that movie with the careful, dedicated study it deserves, I figured the cycle lasted for a few months at most. jwz’s estimate is four years, and in an update to the post she cites director Harold Ramis’s claim that the loop lasted ten years. And most interesting of all:
… though the original script had February 2 repeating for ten thousand years.”
In this case I’ll suspend my usual revulsion for remakes: I’d really like to see that version. I think it would be fascinating.
Gerry Canavan 
Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!
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* ICYMI: My new syllabi for the fall! Infinite Jest and Alternate History. There’s also a new version of my “Video Game Culture” class, set for a new eleven-meeting schedule and with a “Capitalism” week added centered on Pokémon Go (what? oh, that thing). Relatedly: Milwaukee County Parks are trying to remove Pokemon Go from Lake Park.
* The NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities can unionize. How letting grad students unionize could change the labor movement and college sports. The NLRB Columbia Decision and the Future of Academic Labor Struggles. The Union Libel: On the Argument against Collective Bargaining in Higher Ed. But elsewhere in academic labor news: Adjuncts in Religious Studies May Be Excluded From Religious College Unions.
* Are PhD Students Irrational? Well, you don’t have to be, but it helps…
* Colleges hire more minority and female professors, but most jobs filled are adjunct, not tenure track, study finds.
* This morning everyone’s fighting about academic freedom and trigger warnings at the University of Chicago.
* I thought I was the only prof who didn’t really care about deadlines. But apparently there are dozens of us!
* That’ll solve it: Replace college instruction with Ken Burns movies.
* A New Academic Year Brings Fresh Anxiety at Illinois’s Public Colleges.
* Poor and Uneducated: The South’s Cycle of Failing Higher Education.
* Actually, I’m teaching these kids way more than they’re teaching me.
* I’ve dreamed about this since I was a kid: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star. Time to teach The Sparrow again…
* Philosophical SF.
* CFP: Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, University of Florida.
* Cuban science-fiction redefines the future in the ruins of a socialist utopia.
* Puppies, Slates, and the Leftover Shape of “Victory.” On that Rabid Puppies thing and my Hugo Award-winning novella Binti.
* It was a long time before anyone realized there was something not the same about her.
* From all indications, the next X-Men movie will hew closer to Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix story than the previous cinematic effort. But any sense of authenticity it achieves will only arouse and prolong the desire for closure of the loss not only of a treasured character who might have lived endlessly in the floating timeline, but also of the very narrative finitude in which this loss could only happen once. Comic Book Melancholia.
* Bingewatching vs. plot.
* A new book series at Rowman and Littlefield explores Remakes, Reboots, and Adaptations.
* Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi.
* Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.
* The real questions: How Long Would It Actually Take to Fall Through the Earth?
* How did an EpiPen get to costing $600? Earned every penny. A Case Study in Health System Dysfunction. But, you know, it’s all better now.
* Amazing study at Duke: Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds.
* The Epidemic Archives Of The Future Will Be Born Digital.
* How One Professor Will Turn Wisconsin’s Higher-Ed Philosophy Into a Seminar.
* Becoming Eleven. Concept Art Reveals Barb’s Original Stranger Things Fate and It Will Depress You. We Will Get ‘Justice for Barb’ in a Second Season of Stranger Things. This Stranger Things fan theory changes the game.
* Arkansas City Accused Of Jailing Poor People For Bouncing Checks As Small As $15. An Arkansas Judge Sent A Cancer Patient To ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Over A Few Bounced Checks.
* And elsewhere: Drug Court Participants Allegedly Forced To Become Police Informers.
* The times of year you’re most likely to get divorced. Keep scrolling! We’re not done yet.
* Are these the best films of the 21st century? I’m not sure I enjoyed or still think about any film on this list more than I enjoyed and think about The Grand Budapest Hotel, though There Will Be Blood, Memento, Caché, and Children of Men might all be close.
* CBS is bound and determined to make sure Star Trek: Discovery bombs.
* Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.
* An Instagram account can index depression.
* After neoliberalism?
* Parenting and moral panic.
* How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains.
* The technical language obscured an arresting truth: Basis, which I had ordered online without a prescription, paying $60 for a month’s supply, was either the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work.
* Nazis were even creeps about their horses.
* Mapping the Stephen King meganarrative.
* Good news for Dr. Strange: Dan Harmon wrote on the reshoots.
* My colleague Jodi Melamed writes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on white Milwaukee’s responsibility.
* The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Translated from the Icelandic.
* Saddest postjournalism story yet: “Vote on the topic for a future Washington Post editorial.”
* Katherine Johnson, the human computer.
* I arrived at my friend’s party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.
* Uber loses a mere 1.2 billion dollars in the first half of 2016. Can there be any doubt they are just a stalking horse for the robots?
* It’s been interesting watching this one circulate virally: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.
* William Shatner Is Sorry Paramount Didn’t Stop Him From Ruining Star Trek V. Apology not accepted.
* Hillary Clinton will likely have a unique chance to remake the federal judiciary. How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America.
* Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State. You don’t say… 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling.
* Does he want a few of mine? Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of His Own Book.
* Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump. Hey, that was my bit!
* Oh, so now the imperial presidency is bad.
* Good news, everyone!
* At least Democrats are currently on track to retake the Senate.
* Scenes from the richest country in the history of the world: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. Raw sewage has been leaking into Baltimore’s harbor for five days, city says. It appears aquatic life — the moss that grows on rocks, the bacteria that live in the water and the bugs that hatch there — are the unexpected victims of Americans’ struggle with drug addiction. Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds.
* No Man’s Sky is like real space exploration: dull, except when it’s sublime.
* A.J. Daulerio, bloodied but unbowed. How Peter Thiel Killed Gawker. Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself. Gawker Was Killed by Gaslight. And if you want a vision of the future: A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker.
* Greenlit for five seasons and a spinoff: The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates from Miami came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars — one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.
* Also greenlighting this one.
* The legacy board games revolution.
* 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks.
* The millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income because of climate change. The children of millennials will lose tens of trillions.
* When Icon fought Superman.
* Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks.
* An Exciting History of Drywall.
* Title IX: still under serious threat.
* And it’s not a competition, but Some Turtles See Red Better Than You Do.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, adaptations, adjunctification, adjuncts, Agustín de Rojas, alcohol, allergies, Alpha Centauri, alternate history, America, Arkansas, artificial intelligence, assisted suicide, austerity, automation, Baltimore, binge watching, Binti, books, cancer, capitalism, CBS, CFPs, children, climate change, Clinton Foundation, college sports, color, Columbia, comics, commentary tracks, content notes, content warnings, crystal meth, Cuba, Curt Schilling, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, DEA, deadlines, debt, Democrats, depression, disability, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, drugs, drywall, Duke, DVDs, dystopia, ecology, EpiPen, euthanasia, extrasolar planets, fantasy, films, first as tragedy then as farce, fountains of youth, futurity, games, Gandalf, Gawker, graduate student movements, Harry Potter, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, horses, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, Ian McKellan, Iceland, Icon, ideology, if you want a vision of the future, Illinois, imperial presidency, Infinite Jest, infrastructure, Instagram, Jean Gray, Jodi Melamed, journamalism, Katherine Johnson, Ken Burns, legacy board games, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, meganarratives, melancholy, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, mortality, my pedagogical empire, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, NLRB, Nnedi Okorafor, No Man's Sky, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, philosophy, places to invade next, plot, Pokémon Go, polls, post journalism, prison, private college, Proxima Centauri, Rabid Puppies, race, racism, ramen, rape, rape culture, rationality, raw sewage, reboots, religious studies, remakes, Republicans, robots, Ron Johnson, Sad Puppies, science, science fiction, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, siblings, slavery, sobriety, space travel, Star Trek, Star Trek V, Star Trek: Discovery, Stephen King, Stranger Things, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, swords, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, the South, the sublime, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, Title IX, transgender issues, trigger warnings, true crime, turtles, Uber, University of Chicago, University of Florida, Utopia, Vox Day, war on drugs, Washington Post, water, Wes Anderson, white people, William Shatner, Wisconsin, writing, X-Men, Yale, Yoss, you and I are gonna live forever