Tuesday, October 05, 2004

I found this website, "Done Deal: Script and Pitch Sales" through this Blogger "notable weblog" weblog. And, anyway, oh man. It is something else. A He-Man movie set to be directed by John Woo? "Hip Hop Nanny"? Some others follow.

Title: Starship Dave
Log line: A massive fireball from space hits New York's Central Park and an ordinary man emerges unscathed. The man turns out to be a spaceship operated by 100 human-looking aliens who are one-quarter inch tall and seeking a way to save their planet; complications ensue when their captain falls in love with an Earth woman who's always picked losers for previous romances.

OK, kind of goofy, but then...
Writer: Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett

(a) Crow! I'd say that anything anyone who wrote for MST3K is a part of is worth checking out, but then I am faced with America's Funniest Home Videos and the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and what happened to our dreams?

Title: Terminator 4
Log Line: Centers on a new terminator model.

Unanticipated!

(This is turning out to be harder than I thought. An Alvin and the Chipmunks screenplay? What can reasonable people do with this information? So far I have learned that Hollywood is riddled with unasked for remake projects. Who is clamoring for an Hawaii Five-O movie, or a Revenge of the Nerds remake? ((Though I guess that one might have some interesting post-1990s dotcom burnout stuff going on; nerds are weird! wait, now they're great! wait, where is my retirement money? nerds are villainous crooks! But I doubt it.)))

Title: Run, Fat Boy, Run
Log Line: A charming but oblivious overweight guy leaves his fiancée on their wedding day only to discover years later the he really loves her. To win her back, he must finish the New York marathon while making her realize the her new handsome, wealthy fiancé is the wrong guy for her.
Writer: Michael Ian Black

Thanks to VH1's I Love A Certain Decade faux nostalgia empire, I want to see Michael Ian Black launched into the sun.

Title: The Untouchables: Capone Rising

What, from the dead? Someone has summoned...Capone!

Title: The Munsters
Log Line: A family of friendly monsters never quite get why people react in terror to them.
Writer: Keenen Ivory, Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans


Title: Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel

Apparently just the concept has been bought so far, with no script having been written, but are they really going to call the movie a novel? Neal Pollack is so cool. Though I guess I sort of got tired of his thing, but then, so did he, so it is all OK again.

Title: Runaway Train
Log line: Centers on an out-of-control train.

I'm honestly, non-sarcastically curious about how and why someone sets out to write something like this.

Title: The Breathtaker
Log line: A small-town police chief pursues a serial killer who strikes only during tornadoes, brutally killing his victims in the eye of the storm.

The "eye" of a tornado is quite fatal on its own. Also: Tornadoes are scary. Serial killers are scary. Will this just be as scary as tornadoes plus serial killers, or tornadoes times serial killers? Because that is probably terrifying. What if there were sharks under the ground, too?

Title: How to Win Back Your High School Sweetheart
Log line: A high school student seeks revenge against the girl who broke his heart, so he concocts an elaborate scheme to win her back just so he can break up with her.

This is a Buffy episode. I guess that's just stating a fact, but it made me think of the scene with Xander walking down the hall in slow motion, followed by the adoring stares of women and the jealous glares of men. That scene is funny.

Title: Hubble
Log Line: By the early 1930s, an astronomer provides the observational evidence that leads Albert Einstein to endorse the model of an expanding universe. The astronomer's subsequent fame allows him to hobnob with the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Charlie Chaplin, but also gives rise to a prodigious ego that isn't above a good lie.

Huh. Where is the Tycho Brahe biopic, though? (The curious life and death of Tycho Brahe tends to be my trump card in situations of escalating amusing trivia showdowns, but I always worry that it is not obscure enough. Escalating amusing trivia showdowns tend to be painfully embarrassing, nerdy, and pretentious affairs, by the way. Don't get in one, and steer clear of any you come across.)

Title: When a Stranger Calls
Log line: A high school student is traumatized during an evening of baby-sitting by a caller who repeatedly asks, "Have you checked the children lately?" After notifying the police, she is told that the calls are coming from inside the house.

This turns out to be a remake, and I suppose that the caller is inside the house thing had to get started somewhere, but that still doesn't justify this.

Well, that's enough of that.

Monday, October 04, 2004

The Dark Knight Strikes Back, Forward

To continue my sad little DKSB analysis: Lots of things feel arbitrary in it. Why is Green Lantern living on some other world as a green blobby thing with a family? (I'm willing to accept that the GBTs are part of some Green Lantern backstory I'm not familiar with, but the question remains: Who are these people/things and why should I care?) Why is Robin now wearing a ridiculous cat outfit? Why is Lex Luthor a lot like Kingpin? How did he and the regular human world manage to get rid of all the superheroes in the first place? Especially considering that the day is saved, at least partly, by Green Lantern literally holding the planet in his hand. How do you stop someone like that from doing whatever wants? Most jarring of all, what is up with Dick Grayson?

I did like playing Spot the TV News Pundit. And Superman's Amazon-raised daughter was interesting; I wish there had been more with her.

Batman should be a very interesting character to put into a post-9/11 type situation. His whole deal is that the state cannot be trusted to effectively wield power, at least in the arena of crime. And terrorism is as much crime as it is war. In both DKR and DKSB Batman organizes armies out of the masses, to either attack the state or do a job the state is unwilling or incapable of doing. Meanwhile, in this story, Superman is turned into the ultimate expression of the power of the state. So there's a fascist vs. communist element to things. Kind of. In theory.

I should have taken better notes.

Re: The Zenith Angle: I saw Bruce Sterling at the University of Washington bookstore, and after his reading someone observed that, as a regular reader of his weblog and other nonfiction writings, many of the elements in the novel felt obvious. That is, that there was a sense of glimpsing the man behind the curtain. Here is his interest in Bollywood, his interest in industrial design, here's that Spacewar article he wrote for Wired. And having read it, this is true, to some extent. I didn't feel that this made the novel less worth reading, though I can see how it might be. There followed an interesting discussion on whether anyone would bother reading (or writing) novels in the future. Or, more likely, whether anyone would bother paying for them. Sterling said he did not know. I should have raised my hand and mentioned how William Gibson quit his blog when it came time to write another novel, because he felt that the former activity somehow satisfied the urges that drove the latter, and what Bruce Sterling thought of this, but I didn't, because I was totally intimidated, really. I have not met many people that I (for better or worse) idolize. The only options I could imagine were complete silence on my part or crushing embarrassment when I opened my mouth. "Dude, I am so writing my undergraduate philosophy thesis about things you talk about! Tomorrow Now is, like, a source! I'm all over your approach!" Awful, I think we can all agree. (Especially since "I am writing" would have been, at best, a gross exaggeration. [On using Google to spellcheck "exaggeration," I find: "Looking for Exaggeration? Find it on eBay!" Thanks, adbots.])

Oh, and one more thing: DKSB just isn't subtle. Freedom from Information Act? Like, neat, but I get it already. I got it awhile back. As the concretizing of a metaphor it is OK, I guess, but not as an example of actual creepy legislative naming, since what it is in opposition to is so obvious.