Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Hungry, Hungry Hippos starring Horatio Sanz

They are making a movie out of the game Battleship. To use one of my famous phrases here, I shit you not. I had already heard about the Monopoly movie which makes sense in the vaguest sense possibly. I mean Atlantic City, railroads, in depth discussions of the status of the Electric Company (Easy Reader to the rescue!), throw in an iron and a thimble and you have the makings of a plot. Here you just would have two navies shooting at each other. You know what that is called? Every war movie about the Pacific. You don’t need to tie it to a children’s game.

Personally, I want a movie based on either Connect Four or Mouse Trap. Connect Four because it would probably turn into one of the most avant things ever made. I want some pretentious European guy getting to the deeper meaning of four in a row and “pretty sneaky sis.” And Mouse Trap because, well, was there a cooler game out there when you were a kid. A little CGI and you have the next Pixar movie right there. I’m amazed that this hasn’t been greenlit yet.

And yes, I fear for what will become of my Voltron movie. I’m betting it will turn into Transformers with lions instead of cars. They’ll never get the deeper meaning, the symbolism behind the colors, or the importance of Princess Allura. I should just drive to Hollywood right now and fix things.

It is amazing how unoriginal Hollywood is right now. I was listening to some people discuss whether Inception (a movie I really want to see) is a sign of a change since it is based on, gasp, an original idea that requires thought to fully understand. And the answer was, no, not really. It will always be easier to make a movie like The A-Team. Just saying “There is going to be an A-Team movie” tells you everything you need to know about the movie: there will be explosions, special effects, a vague reference to Mr.T and at the end of 90 minutes you will be satisfied in the sense that it wasn’t a painful 90 minutes. It was just kind of there. You don’t need an advertising budget or a script or even actors for those films. You probably could just show 90 minutes of explosions and everyone would go home happy.

I’ve toyed with writing a movie script at some point in my life. Since I always view my never ending first novel as a movie in my head maybe it would be easier if I just wrote it as one. If I lived in LA I probably would do it. But while I wonder if I ever could write a novel that was good enough to be published I know for certain that my movie would never be made because it would simply be too good. Who would ever want to watch something about people struggling with their lives?

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