On Tap

I’ve been barely posting lately, so let me make it up to the world with a long rant/list I’ve been thinking about for a little while…

I’m very intrigued by 300. But beyond that, I get the feeling Hollywood stopped making movies for me a long time ago. (“Wild Hogs”? “Norbit”? Jim Carrey going nuts in “The Number 23”? Yet another inspirational-coach-turns-troubled-teens-into-champions story?) But it’s not just me, apparently – theaters can’t get butts in the seats these days. The first step is tasering obnoxious folks who talk loudly during the movie or answer their cell phone. After that, Hollywood could try making movies for grownups again, with something like these ten ideas and change…

Action

1. Any Richard Marcinko novel – Marcinko is one of the founders of Seal Team Six, who wrote a bestselling autobiography has gone on to write a series of fictional tales of Navy Seals dealing with every kind of threat from hijackers to the IRA to arms dealers, etc. (Well, co-authored.) Think of an Arnold-style military guy with the colorful language you would expect from a sailor and surprising intellect of a Dennis Miller or the South Park guys, whose problem-solving style has been described as “knocking heads together until a clue turns up.”

2. Modern Adventure Pulp: There will never be another Indiana Jones (okay, I know they’re making a sequel; I mean they’ll never equal the perfection of Raiders of the Lost Ark) but could some other creative mind include the ingredients in a modern day story? Could you tell a modern-day pulp adventure story? Exotic locales, two-fisted hero, plucky woman who’s no damsel in distress, exotic locations, chases, fistfights, gunfights, swordfights, lost relics for MacGuffins, dastardly villains with foreign accents, femme fatales, last-second escapes, and a more-or-less happy ending? And as an inverse of the ultra-tough-guy Marcinko idea above, could action movie heroes remember that audiences like and relate to a hero who is vulnerable and gets knocked around a bit? Think about the look on Harrison Ford’s face when he turns and sees the giant boulder rolling towards him in Raiders – he’s scared that he’s going to get squashed like a bug, and that heightens the tension (and the thrills). And when Indy wins, he actually smiles and laughs, something too few action heroes remember to do. The Terminator’s expressionless cool works for the Terminator, not for most protagonists.

Comedy

3. A variation of Primary Colors, set on a fictional version of the Dean 2004 campaign. What happens when the doesn’t-have-a-chance little-known governor suddenly rockets to frontrunner status… and he suddenly realizes doesn’t really want to win? What does the campaign do when they realize the candidate has enormous temper problems and mood swings? What happens when the Iowa grassroots operation, tasked with persuading middle American farmers, is entirely twentysomethings with nose rings? There’s potential for a great tale of “be careful what you wish for,” as a bunch of idealists, technology enthusiasts, and run full speed into political reality without a seat belt. (The problem with Primary Colors was that it offered a portrait of how messed up Bill and Hillary, er, Jack and Susan Stanton were, but then wimped out in the end by trying to assure us they were still the best choice for the country). If there’s any theme or lesson, it’s knowing when to follow your heart and dream the impossible dream, and when to realize that in the end it’s the journey, not the destination.

4. The fact that people still quote Office Space suggests that the world of cubicle-dwellers yearns for another movie that speaks to their experience. I can’t stand most movies that take place in Hollywood and feature screenwriters with writer’s block as their main character, and most portrayals of the working world are wildly inaccurate on the silver screen. (I know Hollywood rarely portrays any job accurately because of the needs of any given story, but it seems that most of our creative class have never worked in an office.) The rise and fall of the dot-coms, the implosion of the Enrons, the techno-guru status of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs… take it from a guy who worked for a company where the CEO wanted the title “Staff Visionary”, there’s fodder there for a comedy about the rat race that so many endure Monday through Friday.

Drama

5. Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down made a great war movie. Could they do the same with a version of “Guests of the Ayatollah”? It might be healthy to remind the country of why relations between the U.S. and Iran are so bad…

6. I’m leaning towards the historical drama Oscar bait, since that’s what actors want to act in and directors want to direct. We’ve seen the usual villains – McCarthyism, the Nixon White House, JFK’s assassins…

Could some filmmaker make the conflict in the Balkans understandable? Something that illustrates that hatred that Americans find so incomprehensible, that willingness to kill one’s neighbor over an eons-old historical grievance? It’s wonderful that we as Americans think of the Yankees and Red Sox as a hateful rivalry, as opposed to say, the Serbs and the Croats or the Shia and the Sunni, and that our society is pretty free from people willing to act on this kill-all-of-the-rival-tribe mentality. But the rest of the world has plenty of it, and I think Americans tend to think everyone else is like them…

Bonus Dramedy: Forget Studio 60. Why doesn’t someone make a movie depicting the early days of Saturday Night Live? The talent, the genius, the rivalries, the drug use and self-destructiveness? We got a tiny glimpse in that Jim Carrey movie about Andy Kaufman, but how about something focusing on the part of the story we would rather hear?

Comic book

With Ghost Rider, it’s easy to get the feeling that the best, most popular, and most interesting characters of Marvel and DC have been used. But when I was collecting comics, there were two team titles that I thought were pretty good…

7. Justice League – periodically you’ll hear rumors about a Superman/Batman movie, or some movie using all of DC Comic’s biggest characters. I doubt it will ever happen, and I’m not sure it will work. By comparison, one of my favorites when I was collecting, was a very different take on the concept of a superhero team book, “Justice League International” and its variants by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, with art by Kevin Maguire.

As I recall one of the creators writing in an essay, they were given the responsibility of writing DC’s signature team titles, but weren’t allowed to use most of the company’s most famous characters, who were being revamped by other writers at that time: Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash. They were told to write a story in which the team’s roster could be filled in later. They chafed at the setup, arguing that the character is central to a good comic book story… and finally realized they could work around the odd restriction with completely alternative approach, a book that focused on the atmosphere of superheroes when they’re around their peers. And while the Justice League would still go out and save the world regularly, a big part of the book was the personality quirks and group dynamics of people who wore tights and found themselves fighting dastardly menaces as their day job.  Their title was also a reaction to the grim-and-gritty tone that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A movie in this vein could be a bit of “Mystery Men,” and the concept of second-tier DC superheroes finding their place in a world dominated by Superman and Batman. I think they would need two vital characters who were along for nearly the entire run, that illustrated the different tone of the series. First is Ted Kord/Blue Beetle, the “Norm Peterson” of Superheroes, he had no powers, just a bunch of gadgets. He was a prankster, a wise-ass, the class clown. While Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker lamented the burden of their great responsibilities and great powers, Ted Kord was easy-come, easy-go, laughing in the face of supervillains and recognizing the absurdity of it all. Necessary character Number Two: Guy Gardner/Green Lantern – a character who was, at least during this era, a delightful inversion of the usual hero who is kind and noble and just instinctively fights for truth, justice and the American way. Guy was pushy, arrogant, not terribly smart, an egomaniac, and a bit of a bully. Good guys aren’t always nice guys, but you can count on ‘em in a jam. The lesson/theme of this movie would be that the world needs good men as much as it needs Supermen.

8. New Mutants/X-Force: Before Rob Liefield became the personification of all that is wrong with comics (image over story, anatomically impossible physiques, and guns larger than the character holding them, etc) he had a good run on the final year of the New Mutants. Part of the fun of those issues was that characters – set up 90 or so issues ago to be the teen trainees to be the next generation of X-Men – were suddenly forced out of their “teen sidekick” genre and had to grow up and recognize that they were in a dangerous world. With Xavier and the X-Men missing and the mansion destroyed, the teens found themselves in an atmosphere of war in which they were targeted by anti-mutant forces within humanity and by militant mutants as well. (The three X-Men movies explored this dynamic, obviously). Before they got into the way-too-complicated time travel stuff, the team’s new leader, Cable, was a very intriguing character – old guy, lots of scars, artificial arm, artificial eye, seemed to have a past as a government agent, more of a drill sergeant than a kindly mentor. (Michael Ironside, call your agent.)

There’s potential for a movie that takes place in the X-Men world, but the fights of Xavier and Magneto are all happening off-screen (perhaps we hear news reports in the background about events at the Statue of Liberty, Nightcrawler’s attack on the White House, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.). We’re introduced to a bunch of troubled teen mutants who have, for one reason or another, rejected Xavier’s academy. One by one they’re approached by Stryfe, a leader of an international network of mutant anarchists. The X-Men movie makers seemed to be going in this direction with Magneto in the final movie. But instead of an army of hundreds, Stryfe runs the mutant version of al-Qaeda – shadowy, striking and then disappearing, fighting for the establishment of a mutants-only “homeland”). Some of the teens take Stryfe’s offer, some are blackmailed, others run. The other badguy could be the X-villain that seemed perfect for the X-movies but wasn’t used, the tiny nation of Genosha (think Apartheid-era South Africa, but for mutants), using mercenaries to capture and enslave any mutant they can find (since they deny that mutants have rights, they don’t see anything wrong with pursuing them across international boundaries). Cable and his band have to rescue the new mutants who have been forcibly recruited by Stryfe while dodging the hunting teams of Genosha… The whole tone of the movie is about that moment when you realize the world you live in is dangerous, that nothing is guaranteed, but that just means that the decisions you make of what you’re going to do with the time you have on this earth are all the more important…

Sci-Fi

9. Killing Time, by Caleb Carr, which offered a fascinating vision of a future society over-inundated with information and losing its capacity to determine the truth of statements/news/spin. The time frame of 2023 depicted a fascinatingly not-quite distant future, where the world is clearly different from the one we know now, but isn’t the usual flying-cars and colonies on Mars clichés we’ve come to expect from sci-fi.

10. Something Steampunk – Allegedly that Will Smith travesty Wild Wild West fits this genre, but it’s a poor representative. Basically, it’s a sort of alternate history in which technological ideas that are still futuristic today were invented generations ago; it’s one in which very familiar concepts (railroads, gunslingers, bandits) can be juxtaposed with something very different, like laser guns, or spaceships, or magic. I suppose Firefly/Serenity fits this, portraying a vision of human colonies on new planets that resemble the outposts and small towns of the westward expansion. Actually, I’d like to see more in the alternate history genre (anything by Harry Turtledove?); something that will say that sci-fi isn’t just bumpy-forehead aliens and spaceships.

Bonus Pick: Anything involving Monica Bellucci.

I know most of these will never happen. But maybe some studio head out there, desperate for a moment of inspiration, will feel a spark of inspiration from this list.

Cam says: First of all, bonus points for mentioning Caleb Carr. I’m not sure I’d go with “Killing Time”, because I thought that was the weakest of his books so far (though I haven’t read “The Italian Secretary”). But I’d love to see “The Alienist” on the big screen.

Here’s another suggestion: any book by Christopher Moore. Seriously. Apparently every one of his books has been optioned by studios, but they’ve never gotten made. That’s a travesty.

A few other ideas: how about a movie based on the Army/Navy football game? Think Rudy meets Rocky meets Remember the Titans. Only problem is… who would the bad guys be? And just to embarrass the crap out of Tom Hanks by reminding him of what his big break was… how about a movie version of “Bosom Buddies” with Ashton Kutcher (playing the Hanks role) and Jack Black (playing the Peter Scolari role). Oh yeah.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at March 9, 2007 - 3:15 pm and is filed under Pop Culture, Whacky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.