Movies We’d Like to See
Reading This Might Be a Waste of Time, But So Are Half of the Movies You’ve Watched in the Last Month
I’m always disappointed by movies. When I start complaining, I realize that I’m upset because the movie producers didn’t make the movie that I wanted them to make. Why won’t the world reach into my brain and spend millions of dollars realizing my twisted and idiosyncratic fever dreams?
Though I am sure you were not asking to hear what I have to say on the subject, I’m going to tell you just in case someone wants to know. These are SOME of the movies I would like Hollywood to make for me.
The Environmental Western
This would be a standard revenge Western, but the hero would be a person who cares more about the environment than people!
It would begin with some Bureau of Land Management employees doing a survey of blister rust on Pine Trees when the bad guys… a group of MAGA voting, wolf-killing, NRA-brainwashed fucktard cowboys… show up and accuse the “Federales” of “trespassing” and planting “con-trail signal boosters” on “our land.” In case it isn’t clear, when they say “our land” they mean the public lands that they don’t own. They take the three BLM workers to an abandoned copper mine. It’s a Super-Fund site with a giant, azure-blue tailings pond. They make scientists walk out on a plank over the lake of super-toxic goo and dance to “Uptown Funk” (if we can get permission) while holding lit cigarettes.
Something, something… our hero, Kate, shows up and scares off the baddies by ramming their stupid Toyota Tacoma pickup trucks with her 1977 Chevy Vega. The Vega, which Kate calls “Trigger”, runs on deep-fryer grease that she gets from the local “Chicken Fried Kale” shop. Trigger, you may have guessed, is the “most reliable partner” Kate has ever had. In short order we can see that the scars on her face are the outward manifestation of inner wounds she works hard to conceal.
The BLM nerds beg her to help them. She is reluctant, preferring to spend her days doing naked Tai Chi in her sweat lodge (Don’t worry! It’s not at all sexual. She isn’t being objectified. This is all an important part of her “character building”). She accepts an invitation to dinner by saying, “I’ll come, but don’t get mad if I’m more interested in the ants in your sugar bowl then whatever you two legged creatures have to talk about.” The baddies show up at the dinner and do more bad stuff. Kate gets mad and starts drinking and smoking meth again. The film culminates with her walking into the local “Hogs and Heiffers” honkeytonk, surveying the crowd (The grapevine scar on her face highlighted by the stripper lights) and saying “I don’t think you fuckers are AMERICAN enough to be on Federal Land.” Then she opens fire and kills EVERYONE… except the boss bad guy who is gut shot and begging for his life.
He says, “Please don’t kill me. I’ll change. I start protecting rivers and streams and the air.” Kate responds by slapping another clip into her Colt Defender™ and saying, “You’re ten years and 400 environmental rollbacks too late, motherfucker.”
Then the Bad Boss gets uppity and says, “You Libtards don’t love the land. We out here love the land. We understand the land. We are the land! You don’t have the AUTHORITY to judge me!”
Kate replies, “My authority comes from God and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Then she takes a badge out of her pocket. It reads “District Attorney, Massachusetts EPA.” She shoves the badge in his face, puts the gun to his head, says, “The Massholes out East are sick of paying for your freeloading Western ass,” and pulls the trigger. The whole screen goes red except for two words in white. Those words are:
The End.
The Utopian Sci-Fi Movie
It’s the year 56798 and there are only four million people on earth. They all live in a single city that is clean, bright, comfortable, and perfectly efficient. There are no wars or conflicts. Everyone has a job. Everyone is happy to spend most of the year in [Name of totally cool perfect city]. The rest of earth is, essentially, a sanctuary for plants and animals.
And there are humans in the park too. The modern [Name of the totally cool perfect people] call the humans that live in the park “ferals” and they have to be watched and monitored, lest their population makes technological advancements that set them on a path which will culminate in them filling the oceans with plastic. If, for example, a feral human starts to domesticate emmer wheat, then someone has to make sure that guy dies of rabies before things get out of hand.
The main character of the movie is a man named Amos who is the conservation officer for the area of the earth sometimes called the “Levant” but often referred to as “The Fertile Crescent” in middle school text books. Thanks to his super cool translator devices he can talk to animals, trees, and insects. He can listen to and watch all of what the 10,000 or so feral humans are doing in his district. He does a good job. His sector is a a perfectly balanced biome.
Amos is not supposed to be in contact with feral humans unless “operationally necessary,” but he has discovered that the best way to get them to stop doing something stupid is to just show up unexpectedly, demonstrate some technological super power like lighting a tree on fire, and tell the misbehaving hunter-gatherers to “stop”.
After a while, Amos, who can live for 10,000 years because they have socialized medicine in the future, gets bored and starts rooting for the feral humans. When they lose fire or forget how to make it, he gives them fire again. He hands them the recipe for the resin they use to affix their spear tips to their spears, etc., etc. Eventually, he gets so bored that he decides he wants to recreate the Gilgamesh Epic. That’s when the movie takes place.
It takes a lot of tries, but after about 3,000 years he gets his Enkidu and sends a sex pot named Shamhat to feed him bread and wine. Then he finds the perfect Gilgamesh (I’m thinking Jason Momoa or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and unites them.
The action peaks when the two friends travel up to present-day Lebanon and start cutting down cedar trees, Amos realizes that he TOTALLY FUCKED UP and should stop this shit right now. He reveals himself in the forest and tells them to “Stop.” They, of course, laugh at him and say, “Fuck you.” Gilgamesh puts the grab on Amos, and Enkidu cuts his head off with an ax.
Except he’s not dead. Because future things in the future world make anticipating movie plot lines almost impossible. Amos is not dead, but he is pissed. He gets a female friend to help him put down the feral rebellion, and they fuck up worse but manage to kill Enkidu with a simple dose of dysentery. Things get so bad, civilization is progressing so quickly, that they have to report what they have done.
The totally cool super future humans hold a council. They determine that the only way to stop the feral humans from progressing to the point where they have nuclear bombs, no right whales, and rivers choked with plastic is a program of massive violence. Like, let’s say, a flood or a brutal pandemic of super nasty zoonotic disease. Our decedents can’t stomach such large-scale violence. Instead, they punish Amos and his female co-conspirator with some kind of restorative justice, and then blast off in a space ship towards the planet Xenon.
The final scene is a montage that starts with a pharaoh saying, “I don’t care how many lives it costs, I want mine bigger than daddy’s” and ends with the Indian Ocean covered in asphalt.
The End.
I know, this was supposed to be Utopian sci-fi movie.
Well, I tried.
The “Family”
This is a “dark” comedy idea. How dark it is depends on your experience of family. If yours is anything like mine, there is nothing funny about this idea, except, perhaps, in a “let’s smoke on the platform of the guillotine” kind of way.
The story starts with a gay man named Jack somewhere in some part of the country where they think that gay men have two heads and four dicks. I’m not sure where that is. Maybe somewhere in Alabama or Long Island. Anyway, Jack leaves that broken town and moves to NYC. We get to have a montage of him looking out of the window of a plane, train, or police cruiser until eventually he is looking out of the window of a bus pulling into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Then the fun starts!
He eventually settles into a comfortable life in Queens and has an adopted “family” of friends. Here’s the joke: his adopted “family” is just like a real family. The mother figure, who is the landlord of the building, comes into his apartment uninvited to tell him to put on a sweater and eat more. His roommate (and adoptive “sister”) steals his clothes and boyfriends, eats all the yogurt he buys, and leaves used contraceptive sponges on the floor of her bedroom. A co-worker (adoptive “weird uncle”) comes to Thanksgiving dinner wearing cammo, calls Jack’s friend (an actual “friend”) “Japanese” (he’s Thai) and starts complaining about how pampered the dog is. Then grandpa (a diamond merchant for whom Jack kept tropical fish) dies and leaves a giant fortune… so the whole family starts to fight over money!
Throughout the movie Jack keeps complaining to his therapist about how he is tortured by his family. The therapist asks him, in a number of different ways, why he doesn’t distance himself from them, and he, in one simple way, keeps saying, “What can I do? They’re my FAMILY”
