This that and the other thing...

[shadowkat]

1. Iraq + 100 is an anthology of science fiction stories by Iraqi writers regarding the Iraq war.

The editor of the anthology, Hassan Blasim, asked a simple question–how could you imagine your nation 100 years from now?

The question posed to Iraqi writers (those still in their homeland and those who have joined a world-wide diaspora), has produced an amazing project, a roadmap of what their country might look like following the disastrous foreign invasion of 2003.

2. The Chicago Newberry Library is looking for people who can translate ancient medieval spells from 17th Century archaeic Latin and English

Do you love libraries? Have a penchant for casting spells? Particularly well versed in 17th century archaic Latin and English? Well the Chicago Newberry Library might have the perfect job for you!

Crowdsourcing for spells is probably one of the coolest techno-magic surprises that 2017 has bestowed upon us, and Christopher Fletcher, the project lead, says you don’t even have to be an expert to get involved. “[The initiative] is a great way to allow the general public to engage with these materials in a way that they probably wouldn’t have otherwise,” Fletcher told Smithsonian.com.

The three magical manuscripts are called The Book of Magical Charms, The Commonplace Book, and Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft. You can explore them at the research library’s online “Transcribing Faith” portal.

3. Cassini's Greatest Saturn Discoveries and Photos

Some really amazing photos from Saturn. Cassini is the probe that they sent to Saturn.

4. People keep raving about The Shape of Water on various entertainment and cultural cites, so I watched the trailer and okay, I get it

Guillermo del Toro‘s latest film is shaping up to be one of the year’s best. The Shape of Water has already won itself the Best Picture award at this year’s Venice Film Festival before going on to be quite the crowd-pleaser at TIFF. I’m honestly pleasantly surprised and optimistic about the buzz surrounding del Toro’s fantastical drama because the combo story of woman-meets-fishman romance and Cold War thriller is not one I thought audiences would gravitate towards. As this new red-band trailer for The Shape of Water shows, however, the story is in good hands with del Toro and Fox Searchlight.

The new trailer lays a lot of the plot out for viewers, but it’s told in such a way as to keep things from getting too spoilery. Folks who have already seen the movie may disagree, however, so if you’d rather go see The Shape of Water fresh, feel free to pass. For the brave, this red-band trailer features a lot more interaction between Sally Hawkins‘ Eliza Esposito and Doug Jones‘ creature character known only as “The Asset.” It also shows Michael Shannon losing his cool, which is always a treat. Rounding out the cast are Richard Jenkins and Michael Stuhlbarg, who you can also glimpse in this new trailer. Keep an eye out for The Shape of Water in theaters on December 8th.

It's about a death/mute who rescues the creature from the black lagoon from the CIA.

5.Someone finally asked Harrison Ford about his affair with Carrie Fisher, which she disclosed in her book before her untimely death

His response?

Now, Ford has commented on Fisher’s book and the news of the affair.

In a lengthy profile with GQ, the actor’s asked, “How strange for you was it when Carrie Fisher put out her ‘Star Wars’ book?”

“It was strange. For me,” he replied.

Ford recalled that he was given advanced warning “to a degree,” but he didn’t go much more in-depth on his thoughts.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, with Carrie’s untimely passing, I don’t really feel that it’s a subject that I want to discuss,” he said.

The interviewer, Chris Heath, still pressed a little more:

GQ: Can I ask you whether you’d prefer that it hadn’t been written?

Ford: Yes. You can ask me.

GQ: Do you want to answer?

Ford: No.

GQ: Can I ask you whether you read it?

Ford: No. I didn’t.

That’s likely all we’re going to get from the actor on the subject.

Throughout the rest of the profile, Heath consistently brought up how little Ford wanted to answer questions, especially ones like that.

At the time of Fisher’s death, Ford remembered his friend and “Star Wars” co-star in a statement, calling her “one-of-a-kind … brilliant, original.”

“Funny and emotionally fearless. She lived her life, bravely,” he added.

Which in a nutshell is why Ford has been successful in Hollywood. He's careful. Also to be fair, it happened over 40 years ago, in 1977-78.

6. Global Giving for Hurricane Irma Relief...I think this is a good one, was rec'd by Smart Bitches

* Adopt a Family in the US Virgin Islands

* Community Foundation for the Virgin Islands Fund for Relief

* List of Places to Donate for Hurricane Relief in the Virgin Islands

7. And now I'm following Amber Tamblyn on Twitter...more or less because of this, not so much James Woods, who frankly has always given me the creeps.

8. Ah, Found the GQ Interview with Harrison Ford, by Chris Heath that various sites keep quoting from. (I didn't look for it, it fell into my lap.)

Apparently Ford once punched Ryan Gosling in the face, accidentally on purpose and apologized by pouring him a glass of scotch. It's actually an interesting interview -- Ford hates interviews, which is why it is interesting.

Examples?

Ford: “I've been accused, usually by women in my life, of being unreflective.” A short laugh. “It's just that there's enough going on right now. I just don't think too much about it.”

Heath: What do they mean when they call you unreflective?

Ford: “We're going down the wrong path,” he answers, as though appalled at the door he has inadvertently opened. “I just…I remember these things, but I don't remember them with very much emotional attachment. I think the reason maybe that you become an actor is that you see things from here.” He gestures to indicate a perspective from outside one's body. “From outside. Slightly above.” He laughs. “And a wider lens. And so you see life in a slightly different…askew…maybe a degree of separation. And so what's happening around you becomes more interesting, because you're only a part of it. It's not all about you. And so you can imagine yourself being somebody else. You can imagine knowing things other than what you know.”

***********

Ford: “I punched Ryan Gosling in the face,” Ford confirms. Then he adds, by way of clarification, that “Ryan Gosling's face was where it should not have been.”

Heath: Explain further, if you will.

Ford: “His job was to be out of the range of the punch. My job was also to make sure that I pulled the punch. But we were moving, and the camera was moving, so I had to be aware of the angle to the camera to make the punch look good. You know, I threw about a hundred punches in the shooting of it, and I only hit him once.”

Heath: So he should be grateful?

Ford: “I have pointed that out.”

Heath: And the one that did connect—that's 100 percent his fault?

Ford: “No.” Ford makes as though he's carefully weighing this. “I mean, I suppose it's 90 percent his fault.”

And...for shapinglight, a snippet on Bladerunner. Unless there's someone else who loves Bladerunner like I do? (It's my favorite science fiction film of all time. Just perfect blend of story, character, theme, and world-building.)

The reverence enjoyed now by the original Blade Runner movie has had the unintended side effect of disguising its messy birth. Ford was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark in England when Ridley Scott dropped by to discuss a project. Ford signed on only after Scott agreed to replace the script's voice-over narration with some extra scenes—“I felt I was playing a detective who did no detecting,” he tells me—and the film was shot over 50 nights on a studio lot in Los Angeles, a shoot that Ford has described as “a bitch.”

“And, uh,” he says dryly, “the rest is show-business history.”

In a manner of speaking. Before Blade Runner was released, the studio decided that a voice-over was needed after all and insisted that Ford record various iterations of it—“four or five different versions, I think,” he says, something he was obliged to do but not particularly happy about. And when the movie first came out, it wasn't a success. If you read old articles about Harrison Ford, it's jarring to realize that for a while Blade Runner was included on lists of films that were considered misbegotten attempts by Ford to extend his reach beyond his Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. Soon enough, Ford's career blossomed in all kinds of other ways, but Blade Runner also began its own separate, slow-burn rise.

In the film, Ford plays Deckard, a so-called “blade runner” whose job is to hunt down replicants—androids that can pass for human, some of whom are not even aware of their true nature. Ford and Scott have had a long-running disagreement about Deckard, specifically over whether he is human or a replicant himself. Over the years, Scott at first hinted and then stated with increasing force that Deckard is a replicant. Ford has always taken the opposite position. The story worked better, in his view, if the audience had a character they could trust to be who, or what, he said he was. That's the character he believed he was playing, and that's how he played it. When I first bring up the subject, Ford tries to deflect any sense of a still-simmering disagreement. “We stopped talking about it about 34 years ago,” he says. Except this isn't true. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Denis Villeneuve recounted a dinner with Ford and Scott one night in Budapest, and how Ford and Scott started going at it all over again.

“Oh, we had a few drinks and we did talk about it a little bit,” Ford acknowledges. “But it was just fun. It was war stories.”

“I heard a lot about it from both of them,” Ryan Gosling tells me. “Yeah, they both feel very strongly about it.”

“That was just fantastic,” Villeneuve tells me. “Two of my heroes at the same table, drinking great Hungarian wine, both of them arguing about the fact that they still don't agree about if Deckard's a replicant or a human. They are no men of small words—they are deeply passionate, both of them.”

“I'm interested in preserving the question for the audience,” Ford tells me. “I mean, part of the idea of whether or not he's a replicant is that there's not a definitive answer.”

I had always assumed that Scott believed this as well, but apparently not. At one point during a commentary track on a 2007 collector's edition, Scott alludes to the origami unicorn that Deckard finds late in the movie, which connects to a dream Deckard has earlier on. For Scott, this moment is revealing: If Deckard were human, only he would know about the unicorn; if someone else did, that surely meant the dream was implanted and hence that Deckard is a replicant.

“Can't be any clearer than that,” Scott says on the commentary. “If you don't get it, you're a moron!”

Ford laughs when I recount this for him. “Well,” he says, “I'm a moron. But it doesn't matter. Morons pay to get in.”

I ask Ford about that closing scene, and about what he himself thought his character was doing when he picks up the origami unicorn, looks quizzically at it, and then crumples it, and we go back and forth with the possible implications.

“I don't know,” he concludes after a while. “I just work there.”

I saw Bladerunner in a half-empty movie theater with my mother, back in the 1980s. We both loved Science Fiction and Harrison Ford. And we adored the film. Neither of us understood why it didn't do well. Actually, the best thing in Bladerunner wasn't Ford, but Rutger Hauer. Who was so compelling, Anne Rice had him in mind when she wrote her Vampire series in the 1980s and 90s.

Interesting, Ford and Scott have had an on-going disagreement over whether Deckard is a replicant in the film or human. Ford played him human and felt it worked better from an audience and story perspective if he was human, Scott strongly hinted and strongly believes Deckard is a replicant and that's the twist. What's interesting is that in the original Philip K. Dick novel, When Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard is a replicant. Except that book is nothing like the movie. They have almost nothing in common, except possibly the twist that Deckard is a replicant but doesn't know it like the woman he's become involved with.

Because Deckard doesn't know it -- it actually works that Ford plays him as human. Because from Deckard's perspective, he is human, and you can't tell. And it pulls on the question - "what is human?" (Our emotions and ability to feel empathy and care for others make us human, according to the film and to a degree the novel. Cold rational thought -- is inhuman. Yet, in some respects, the replicants care more than many humans.)

And on Star Wars

Ford's least expected late-career reprise was his return to the world of Star Wars. “I was surprised,” he concedes. The first call came from George Lucas. “It was proposed that I might make another appearance as Han Solo. And I think it was mentioned, even in the first call, that he would not survive. That's something I'd been arguing for for some period of time”—Ford had unsuccessfully lobbied for Solo to die in Return of the Jedi in 1983—“so I said okay.”

Heath: Was that a necessity for you to be involved?

Ford: “Not necessarily. But it was, you know, an interesting development of the character.”

This year Ford attended his first Star Wars “Celebration” fan event, in commemoration of the first film's 40th anniversary. “I was asked to make an appearance and I did,” he says, as though only the want of an invitation has kept him away until now. He appeared on a panel with Lucas, and I was surprised to watch Ford bring up his famous criticism of the director's clunky dialogue right to his face: “You can type this shit, but you can't say it.”

Heath: Lucas doesn't get offended by that?

Ford laughs, as if this has never really crossed his mind. “I don't think so. He sold the company for, you know, $4 billion. He doesn't give a shit what I think.” Ford reminisces about the first time he shared this opinion on the Star Wars set. “George usually sits near a monitor, far removed, so I had to convey my impression…or my feelings…about the dialogue across a great space. So I did shout it. ‘George! You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it! Move your mouth when you're typing!’ But it was a joke, at the time. A stress-relieving joke.”

It's easy to forget that Harrison Ford, a latecomer to stardom, is older than Lucas, and was older than almost anyone else on the set of that first Star Wars film.

“I'm older than everyone now,” he says when I mention this. “Who's older than me?” I take this as a rhetorical question, but Ford does not. “Warren Beatty,” he says. “Jack Nicholson. Clint Eastwood. I'm not comparing myself with them, I'm just saying that, yeah, I was always older. I was the oldest guy on the set.”

What were the consequences of that at the time?

“It made no difference whatsoever. I got no respect.”

When it comes to 'Star Wars', given the nature of science fiction, are you absolutely, incontrovertibly—

“Dead?”

—finished with ‘Star Wars'?

“Um, I mean, I'm finished with Star Wars if Star Wars is finished with me.”

And if 'Star Wars' isn't finished with you?

“I can't imagine it. But it is science fiction.”

He pauses and considers what he has just said, maybe realizing that he is leaving the door a little further ajar than he means to.

“I'd rather not,” he concludes. “You know, at this point I'd rather do something else. Just because it's more interesting to do something new.”

I think he's done with Star Wars. Personally, I'd rather have more Han Solo than Indiana Jones. I don't know why we need another Indy movie. (They are making one. Yes, seriously.) Star Wars, of his film franchises, was the only one that I felt required a sequel -- it had the world for it. The other two, I really didn't need sequels for, they felt self-contained and good in of themselves. Also the sequels to Raiders were...ahem, with the exception of Holy Grail, bad.