Monday night roundup.

* Best news ever: LucasArts will be rereleasing its classic games over Steam. Highlight of the first round, coming Wednesday: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Dare we hope, at last, for X-Wing? Also: Day of the Tentacle? A little more at Slashdot.

* io9 highlights ugly SF covers. I sort of love them all.

* Also at io9: teaser photos for Harry Potter 6.

* A world without nukes? Obama and Medvedev have reached an agreement to cut nuclear arsenals by a third. It's something Obama's had on his mind a long time.

* 13 Facts about Dollhouse episode 13. Minor spoiler alert.

* And the world's worst airline, last seen trying to make people pay to use the bathroom, just got a little worse.

But can we talk about the real criminals? Are we really going to stand back and let these monsters further desecrate the corpse of Indiana Jones?

Behold the 125-page transcript of the conference between George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan brainstorming Raiders of the Lost Ark. Discussion at MetaFilter.

Being George Lucas: The Times has a long, wide-ranging interview with the man himself, touching on everything from his quasi-religious relationship with Star Wars canonicity to the chilling possibility of yet another Indiana Jones sequel. Via AICN.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

Transformers, Indiana Jones, now Y: The Last Man: All your franchises belong to Shia Labeouf.

RAY turns on HARRISON. CATE escapes with the MACGUFFIN and HARRISON gets away, only to find himself in the middle of a NUCLEAR TEST SITE that is apparently located within walking distance of AREA 51.

HARRISON FORD

Holy shit, a nuclear bomb! I’ll hide in this lead-lined fridge to protect myself from the radiation that will permeate the area shortly after the ten-million degree heat generated by the blast is done obliterating every single object in a 5 mile radius!

Somehow, this WORKS. HARRISON FORD emerges from the fridge with his face covered in black soot, holding a sign that reads “ouch.”

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script.

See also: "nuking the fridge."

Nuke the fridge is a phrase with a meaning similar to jump the shark. It is used to refer to the moment in a film series(usually a half-serious genre) that is so incredible that it lessens the excitement of subsequent scenes that rely on more understated action or suspense. Such moments are felt to mark the beginning of a low point in the quality of the franchise, as it attempt to explore more absurd avenues.

The term comes from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which, near the start of the movie, Harrison Ford's character survives a nuclear detonation by climbing into a kitchen fridge, which is then blown hundreds of feet through the sky whilst the town disintegrates. He then emerges from the fridge with no apparent injury. Later in the movie, the audience is expected to fear for his safety in a normal fistfight.

Via MeFi.

Well, I'm showing up late today. Sorry about that.

* Scientists have taught monkeys how to control robotic arms with their thoughts. We are so screwed. Via Alex Greenberg, Matt Yglesias, and MetaFilter.

* 24: Season Two: The Musical. From the people who brought you Silence of the Lambs: The Musical. The first song at least made me laugh.

* National Geographic on "the real crystal skulls."

* Scott McClellan has his come to Jesus moment. More at The Nation. MetaFilter debates whether we should care.

* Via Tim, MoveOn is giving away free anti-McCain bumper stickers He's also got a telling link on a redacted CIA document on interrogation techniques that's been nearly entirely blacked out.

World News:

* Tim goes soft on the Latin American menace.

* Via Vu, the new Indiana Jones movie has angered some of our Russian comrades.

* This "We Are the World" parody from Japanese TV is like a three-minute glimpse into the next universe over. The original is a pretty classic cultural document of the '80s, as well, if it's been a few years since you've seen it...

I've been collecting a few Indiana Jones reviews from the Internets, both pro and con, to complement my own. The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich really dug it, as did Matt Zoller Seitz. But Cynical-C had an even stronger negative reaction than I did, titling his review Kingdom of the Crystal SUCK, and Jason Bellamy at The Cooler goes still deeper, dissecting the movie's failings beat by beat. Here's Bellamy:

That saddest part of all, though, is that this movie is entirely without romance. Oh, sure, Karen Allen is back as Marion Ravenwood, so there’s a love story of sorts. But the original trilogy’s yearning to turn over rocks and explore the hidden worlds underneath has been replaced by a retrospective fondness for the time when it was fun to turn over rocks, and that’s not the same thing. If The Last Crusade is evidence of just how much Spielberg cared about the legend of Indiana Jones, Crystal Skull is a love letter that he and Lucas wrote to themselves. It’s a celebration of adventures past (not all of them from the Indiana Jones series, by the way) rather than an advancement of the saga. Thus, it fittingly plays like a high school reunion, with folks sucking in their guts and mistakenly providing evidence of their rapidly eroding vision by telling themselves that they’re just as vital as they used to be.

The further I get from the afterglow of seeing the movie on opening night, the more I think Bellamy's right.

And if, like me, you'd never heard of the crystal skulls that give the movie its plot, Wikipedia and Google can truly deliver.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a rumination on the ravages of age, though early in the movie it briefly pretends to be. Nor is it an examination of the Cold War's culture of paranoia and suspicion—though it has a little bit of that too—nor is it about the way power ultimately looks the same whatever uniform it happens to wear or which flag it claims to fight under, nor about Chariot of the Gods and saucer men from Mars. In the end, it's about being an Indiana Jones movie, which is to say it's all about car chases, booby traps, clever in-jokes, and the sheer, unstoppable force that is Harrison Ford's charisma.

And it does this job quite well.

Now, if I were inclined to look at Indiana Jones with anything like a critical mind, I'm sure I'd find plenty of negative things to say about this movie, from a story that's strikingly light on character or emotional depth (even for its genre) to more than a few embarrassingly silly plot moments to a characteristically Lucasian overreliance on CGI. (Don't even get me started on politics, postcoloniality, or heteronormativity.) El Dorado is a good MacGuffin, but it just doesn't pack the same mythic punch as the Lost Ark or the Quest for the Grail—and while I thought the alien stuff was pretty well-handled overall, fundamentally there's a style mismatch here that approaches the level of category error.

And of course on some pure plane of aesthetic valuation it must be said that Lucas and Spielberg should have resisted the temptation to mess with perfection and let Last Crusade stand as the proper ending to this story it's always been. In this sense Crystal Skull is actually worse than superfluous—the need to return to Indy, 20 years on, undercuts and arguably destroys entirely the narrative arc that somehow took the cartoon hero of Raiders and turned him into a human being. Last Crusade didn't need a sequel; the trilogy was already a complete story, not Episodes 44-46 in the 108 Adventures of Indiana Jones.

Phantom Menance betrayed us right up front, and was pretty noisy about it. What Crystal Skull does is quieter, subtler, and perhaps ultimately more devastating to its franchise: it takes that human being from Crusade and turns him back to a cartoon again.

If I were inclined to look at Indiana Jones critically, I'm saying, I think I'd have a pretty ambivalent view of Crystal Skull. But tonight I'm not at all inclined to do any of that—I watched Indiana Jones tonight as I always do, with the spellbound eyes of my twelve-year-old self, and he liked the movie just fine.

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.

Just a few hours ago I saw George Lucas trying to seriously downplay expectations for Indy 4:

George Lucas has gone out of his way to lower expectations. He said: "When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie, just like the other movies.

"You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up."

He added: "You're not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose."

But now I see him talking the movie up in a big way:

"I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this," he said. "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

"And it’s not like Harrison is even old. I mean, he’s 65 and he did everything in this movie. The old chemistry is there, and it’s not like he’s an old man. He’s incredibly agile; he looks even better than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me."

Conclusion: This movie cannot fail. Even the patented George Lucas reverse-Midas touch can't screw this up. Via AICN.

Plus: LEGO Indy.

* I refuse to believe that the new Indiana Jones movie isn't totally awesome, regardless of what people on the Internet have to say about it.

* Double-amputee Oscar Pistorius has won his appeal against the Olympic Committee and will be participating in the Beijing Olympics.

* Jesse the Body Ventura teases a third-party run in the Minnesota Senate race. I thought Franken would have this thing walking away, but his campaigning hasn't impressed me so far. I have no sense of whether Ventura helps him or hurts him.

* Los Angeles may be forced to turn to sewage to meet its water needs.

* How to get out of serving on the R. Kelly jury, via Kottke.

I blame R. Kelly for Sept. 11. When the judge asked one prospective juror about his feelings regarding Kelly, he cryptically answered: "R. Kelly may have led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11, but you can't prove it." You're right, we can't. In fact, we're fairly certain that no one has ever tried.

* What went wrong: TNR reports on how Clinton blew it.

* And in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan calls 2008 for the Democrats.

New Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer at io9. Meanwhile, Cynical-C has J.D. Salinger's review of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro, which wasn’t exactly indelibly fine, but Deneuve herself maybe was, or came close. I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors.

Isaac Cates finally got his piece of the pie, and he's moving out of New Haven. He's selling a few postcards of photos he's taken of the city as a way to say goodbye.

Don't tell George Lucas I told you, but I happen to know there's some pretty cool photos in the mix.

Researcher Tudor Parfitt thinks he has traced the Ark of the Covenant to the bottom shelf of a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.

There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes.

The ngoma is an artifact of the Lemba—who according to genetic markers appear to be correct in their belief that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel—and is said to have been built out of the ruins of the original Ark.

The only news today is the release of the Indiana Jones 4 trailer. Yes, Harrison Ford can.



Damn, I thought that was closer.

Let this mark the first time in a long time I felt really happy with anything George Lucas had gone anywhere near.

* Oscar buzz for Darjeeling? And does that suggest it will be good or bad?

* George Lucas on track to ruin another classic movie franchise: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is very nearly the worst possible title for Indy IV, with almost any variant (...and the Crystal Skull, ...and the Kingdom of Crystal, ... and the Kingdom of the Skull) being superior. I'm quite suspicious about the alien connection, too—it's got to be a Chariot of the Gods situation, because Close Encounters just isn't going to work. MetaFilter has a little bit more.

* Only the best need apply. $21k for full time June 25 - Aug 20 employment.

* Analyzing the logos of terrorist organizations.

* Bitter Laughter duckspeak thoughtcrime doubleplusungood 9/11.

Two years ago when I taught 1984, I realized that not a single person in my class knew what Osama bin Laden really wanted--what his grievances were, what his ideology looks like, etc. All they knew was that he was inimical to "us," and that he was the enemy. "Enmity" is mightily empty category, and a dangerous one at that, if you refuse to allow it to have content.

And that's exactly what bin Laden is for Americans, an enemy without content. The fact of the matter is that Osama bin Laden is not isomorphic with himself. That is, "Osama bin Laden," as that name is understood in this country, is a simulacrum of the actual man. We do not need to listen to what he has to say because we know what he is -- after all, he is our creation. He represents for us something to fight against, the implement against which we sharpen our knives and define ourselves. His words are not relevant since they communicate a version of himself that does not square with our understanding of him. Why would we both listen or give credence to his video musings?

* Michael Tomasky on Citizen Gore.

* George Saunders on the teevee.

Random links for a Friday evening:

Poet Steve Kuusisto, who gave us an essay way back for Backwards City #1, has a blog, Planet of the Blind.

The coolest thing ever: scans from Jack Kirby's comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via MeFi.

There's a new version out of Desktop Tower Defense.

Amazing LEGO creations.

And, most importantly, production on Indiana Jones 4 began today.