1. Have a much-needed four-day weekend ahead of me. I’m starting to get more into the routine of teaching full-time, at least so that it’s less like I’m building a railroad as the train is rolling over it and more like I’m building it as the train is within sight.

2. In my US History class we’re starting on the background to the American Revolution. Touching on the intellectual foundations, I summed it up:

“Most American thought is ultimately based on Calvin and Hobbes, but not the good versions.”

3. Objectivism came up this week and prompted me to read Howard Roarke’s speech from film version of The Fountainhead, the one Ayn Rand furiously refused to cut down in any way. It’s pretty terrible, both from an intellectual and a writing perspective. I don’t want to judge the story without having read it, but I will say the Wikipedia plot summary for the book honestly made me laugh for how contrived and pretentious it all sounded. Maybe it reads better in prose, but I don’t know; that speech does not inspire confidence. I do intend to read Rand at some point, just to be sure I’ve actually grasped the point.

4. Interestingly, there’s a film I saw fairly recently that strikes me as being a better take on the same idea: Tucker: The Man and His Dream, which is Francis Ford Coppola’s biopic about Preston Tucker, the maverick engineer and car manufacturer who tried to build and market his own line of revolutionary automobiles, only to be crushed by corporate and bureaucratic opposition. There too we have a brilliant, innovative pioneer trying to break away from convention and create something new and better, who gets stonewalled by the entrenched forces of mediocrity every step of the way, breaks the rules to try to salvage his project and finally ends up in court where he makes an impassioned defense of the kind of innovation that made America great.

Except, among other things, Tucker’s speech is a lot better written that Roarke’s.

5. Just as one example, compare these two lines:

“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived of, and he lifted darkness off the earth.”

“If Ben Franklin were alive today, he’d be thrown in jail for flying a kite without a license.”

They’re both the exact same idea, but the second one gets it across more effectively – alluding the specific, known achievement of a known person to highlight the absurdity of a common experience, rather than trying to bolster a point with the speculative fate of a conjectural character – in a third of the time while making the audience laugh. Also, this comes at about the middle of Tucker’s speech, rather than being the opening; Tucker uses it to drive home a point, not as the initial salvo (where it would have come across as petulant and childish: “geniuses like me are always persecuted!” …just as it does with Roarke).

6. Anyway, Tucker is quite a solid little film, though like the car that inspired it, it flopped on release (though unlike the car, I don’t think we can blame the entrenched forces of mediocrity for this one). It helps that it has a strong cast of reliable actors like Jeff Bridges, Martin Landau, Elias Koteas, and Mako. It’s the story of a brilliant outsider trying to work his way around the system to produce something better than what’s come before, using a combination of genuine brilliance, showmanship, and bold, risky strategizing to achieve his dream, and that’s pretty fun to watch while anchored by a charismatic performer like Bridges.

Though for me, I thought the highlight of the film was a single scene of Dean Stockwell playing none other than Howard Hughes himself.

And the central idea of the value of innovation and the independent inventor and the malignant tendencies of bloated corporations and bureaucracies strikes home even more than when the film first came out.

7. The remake of The Crow seems to be getting savaged by critics, and I’m rather glad. Honestly, it seems to me that that’s one movie you do not try to remake, and not just because the original is very well-respected and it’s highly unlikely you could match or top it quality wise. This is one case where it feels like remaking a film goes beyond the confines of artistic integrity into the realm of being genuinely questionable on a moral level.

Because, as most people know, Brandon Lee (son of Bruce Lee) tragically died in an accident filming the original; a film that almost certainly would have been his big breakout role and launched him into stardom. As it is, he only has a handful of roles, this being the most famous, most celebrated, and the one that led to his untimely death, cutting short what seemed poised to be a brilliant film career.

Now, one inevitable effect of a remake of the same material is that it dilutes the public’s awareness of the original. The Crow now could mean one of two films, where before it only meant one. That means Brandon Lee’s one chance to show what he had on the big screen now has to share the spotlight with a dumb soulless cash-grab.

That’s why this feels particularly distasteful to me; not just that it’s remaking a film that a young man died on, but it’s remaking one of the only films he got to do, and the one he’s most celebrated for. It feels disrespectful to a real-life tragedy.