George Lucas said Friday that filming of the long-awaited “Indiana Jones” movie will begin next year. Harrison Ford, who appeared in the three earlier flicks, the last one coming in 1989, is set to star again. Lucas said he and Steven Spielberg recently finalized the script for the film.
“It’s going to be fantastic. It’s going to be the best one yet,” the 62-year-old filmmaker said during a break from preparing for his duties as grand marshal of Monday’s Rose Parade.
Exact film locations have not been decided yet, but Lucas said part of the movie will be shot in Los Angeles.
The fourth chapter of the “Indiana Jones” saga, which will hit theaters in May 2008, has been in development for over a decade with several screenwriters taking a crack at the script, but it only recently gained momentum.
Lucas kept mum about the plot, but said that the latest action flick will be a “character piece” that will include “very interesting mysteries.”
“I think it’s going to be really cool,” Lucas said.
At the inaugural Rome Film Festival in October, the 64-year-old Ford said he was excited to team up with Lucas and Spielberg again for the fourth “Indiana Jones” installment. Ford said he was “fit to continue” to play the title role despite his age.
Ford played Indiana Jones in 1981′s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” 1984′s “Temple of Doom” and 1989′s “The Last Crusade.”
Lucas praised Ford for breathing life into his character.
“Mostly it’s the charm of Harrison that makes it work,” he said.
This has immediately become the movie I’m most looking forward to despite the fact that it won’t come out for another year and a half. What can I say? It’s how I roll.
Jackson Publick and the guys at Astrobase Go! have created a Venture Bros.-themed rendition of the song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time At All,” for Quick Stop Entertainment. It’s fucking brilliant.
Go listen to it here. Goddamn, do I love the Monarch.
Is pretty slow right now. Apparently December and January are two of the slowest months in trucking, or so my boss tells me. But we’ve done our level best to keep busy. For example, yesterday Sarah and I played tag-team solitaire on the computer for a couple hours, while Jerry and Mike played some Madden football game. Today I played some more solitaire (And might I add that the “draw three” version of that game is nigh impossible to win it? I think we were about five hundred dollars in the hole yesterday — which is why it’s probably a good thing gambling via card games holds no real appeal for me) and then played some Tiger Woods 2005 on the X-Box for two hours. All was fun until about 4:15, when I realized that the fax machine was jammed, and had been for about three hours. Then things were kind of busy till five.
In lieu of writing about my, like, totally boring life, I thought I’d post some links I find entertaining, links that I discovered on my journeys along dusty cathode tubes of the Internet.
Continuing this geeky trend, I thought this bit of news was pretty damn cool:
An ancient astronomical calculator made at the end of the 2nd century BC was amazingly accurate and more complex than any instrument for the next 1,000 years, scientists said on Wednesday.
The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest known device to contain an intricate set of gear wheels. It was retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 but until now what it was used for has been a mystery.
[. . .]
The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.
Edmunds and his colleagues discovered it had a dial that predicted when there was likely to be a lunar or solar eclipse. It also took into account the elliptical orbit of the moon.
Theories like this make me wonder if Atlantis really might have existed existed (or at least if some analogous version did). If the Greeks were making shit like this over 2000 years ago, imagine the technologies that the Atlanteans possessed some 6000 years earlier. Consider the following: Atlantis had some huge catastrophe that wiped out most of its civilization. The survivors scattered, and some made it to Europe. The level of technology would have been difficult to maintain for more than a generation or two; imagine some disaster wiping out humanity’s electricity now — where would we be in a hundred years? Early industrial age, if we’re lucky. Now span this out over a thousand years, and watch as we slowly sink deeper into a technological slump. Then add in 5000 more years. We’d either be drawing on the walls of caves, or we’d have recovered to some extent. Perhaps like the Greeks did, with their ancient calculator? At the very least, it’s something interesting to think about.
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Lastly, I present a music video that you’ll probably still be humming or singing for the rest of the day, and possibly for the next several days too:
My work-sponsored Christmas party was held Friday night. It was a blast, and I even remember most of it. Though the last, say, five hours are sort of a blur. Like, I can recall stuff that happened . . . but it’s just that those final five hours seemed to only take place over a two hour span.
Dinner was at Old Hickory. I had a halibut steak — can you say “company paid for” — and beer. The real drinking began first at Sloopy’s, where we warmed up (with vodka!) until a bunch of grandmas started dancing, then me continued the night at some place called Hammerjack’s. It’s this big-ass club, which was interesting. Very loud and smoky, with tons of people — many of them attractive girls — packed tightly together. Apparently Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite was there, guest DJ-ing, but I didn’t meet him, nor did I really care to. According to one of my coworkers, Sarah, he was an asshole, so it doesn’t sound like I missed much.
Eventually it was three in the morning, and the club employees were banging on cow bells and other objects, which meant it was time for the cattle to get the hell out. Sarah gave me a lift to Nate’s. (I left my car at work, which is in Huber Heights, and since she had to drive near Huber to go home, she was kind enough to haul my drunk ass to Nate’s, so I could sleep my drunk off.) I woke at nine, still feeling the effects of my imbibing, had Nate take me to my car, drove home, showered, and slept for two more hours.
No pictures — or “pitchers” if you prefer — for this one, though I do recall Stephanie had a disposable camera at Sloopy’s. If I can get a copy of some of those, they may very well find their way here.
