3 Songs That Could Be Awesome Movies
Movies and music are as intrinsically linked as my browser and websites depicting black women suffering from a mysterious absence of clothes, and it’s not as though films haven’t been made off the back of even less filmable properties. Theme park rides, board games, they’re even making a movie out of a picture of a shoe some Hollywood producer saw in a drawer one day. Sam Worthington is in talks to play The Shoe. Anyway, here are three songs that could potentially be pretty sweet films.
Gary Numan – Down in the Park.
“I was in a car crash
Or was it the war?
Well, I’ve never been quite the same”
The protagonist of Numan’s creepy dystopian track is a cyborg ‘Machman’ who spends his nights hanging out with his mate Five and the other robots in the park, where they chant for the deaths of the humans who are killed and bummed for their entertainment.
“Come to Zom-Zom’s, a place to eat
Like it was built in one day
You can watch the humans
Trying to run
Oh, look, there’s a rape machine”
The Down in the Park movie would be an inverse Blade Runner. The half-remembered car crash or war the narrator was never the same from, that was actually the result of a mandatory worldwide government protocol to wipe the minds of randomly selected humans and program them into thinking that they’re cyborgs. The twist is, there are no robots, just people who were herded into phoney “immunisation centres” and brainwashed. The nightly culling acts as both population control, and a way of keeping the populace distracted from the creaking, ruined Earth they inhabit.
Our hero – let’s call him Rex 60 – regains his memory, and with Five, is forced to go on the run after being exposed as a filthy human. This leads to an eventual human uprising against both the government, and the ‘cyborgs,’ who reclaim their humanity after being awakened by Rex 60 and Five, and find themselves, in a downbeat but hopeful ending, in charge of their own destinies, albeit on a planet that’s on its knees.
Casting:
Director – Duncan Jones, who more than proved he can blend visually engaging sci-fi and thought provoking “what does it mean to be human?” existentialism. Plus, he squeezed a classic like Moon out of $5m, so just imagine what he could do on a bigger scope.
Rex 60 – Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Five – Michael Cera
The President – JK Simmons
Head of the Machman Cyber-Police – Mads Mikkelsen
Any replies in the comments suggesting a motion-captured John Leslie as the Rape Machines will be, well, pretty funny.
…
Metallica – Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
“Welcome to where time stands still
No one leaves and no one will”
The real meat of a potential Welcome Home movie doesn’t come until the last verse. All told, it’s your classic Eighties-era Metallica song – for one thing, awesome – for another, the clear result of James Hetfield watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and picking up a guitar. The song muses on incarceration, medication, and slashing up some guards good and proper. More importantly for this blog, each verse builds toward the crescendo of a breakout, with the moon full and the “natives getting restless.”
“Mutiny in the air
Got some death to do”
On the album, the song finishes before we get to hear the revolt play out, so for the purposes of this article, it’s basically Welcome Home’s opening Star Wars crawl leading us into the movie. I see this as a hybrid of Con Air and Halloween, with the various cartoonishly-psychotic madmen busting out and terrorizing the small town where the asylum is located. The only help for the poor residents, and their bumbling, I’m-retiring-tomorrow police department, comes from a patient; an ex-sheriff who’s been a catatonic mute since the day he came home to find his family slaughtered.
There are plenty of chances for various wacky disorders; serial killers, crazies who think they’re historical figures, a man who believes his penis whispers him future events; and a violently memorable breakout scene where the meeker patients are tortured and picked off, mimicking the Santa Fe prison riot. As the Mute, finding his voice and his wits again, tries to stop the carnage being heaped upon the innocent townsfolk, everything heads towards the climactic showdown between him and the self-appointed leader of the violent inmates, who is eventually revealed to have been the one that slaughtered the Mute’s family.
Casting:
Director – Robert Rodriguez, if he can find the time to direct another movie inbetween all those hours he spends announcing new projects that are totally going to get made, fo’ sho’.
The Mute Ex-Sheriff – Gerard Butler
Leader of the Inmates – Jeremy Davies
Johnny Shit-Fists – Michael Shannon
Rapey Bill – Zach Galifianakis
Napoleon – Michael Madsen
Napoleon II – Werner Herzog
Beleaguered but Ultimately Heroic Local Police – John Hurt
Youtube – Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
…
Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus
“Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares ”
The movie of Personal Jesus focusses on a nerdy, unpopular twelve year old boy, the kind of kid who spends as much time getting out of the lockers he’s been shoved into by bullies as he does hiding in his room from the boorish parents who think he’s some kind of weird little fruit because he has more bruises than he does friends. The kid’s life begins to change for the better when, smarting and snivelling from a humiliating bully-beatdown outside the 7-11 in front of the girl he likes, he meets a new, bearded friend, who offers up some words of wisdom.
With the advice and backup from this new pal, who casually claims to be Christ, the kid learns how to stand up for and love himself, and discovers, like people do in movies, that being who you are is the only fashion trend you really need to follow. Friendly as he may appear to be, Jesus may be either a figment of the kid’s imagination, a homeless sexual predator, or the actual Jesus.
“Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know I’m a forgiver”
This gives the movie a nice, understated vuvuzela-note of tension, distantly buzzing in the background and niggling away at your suspicions during the scenes of high-fiving, bedroom window chats and diving into shrubs as the kid’s parents ask “Who were you talking to?” Is the kid gonna get the girl, or is he just gonna get touched in a van and then dumped in the river? Post-theatre, was he-wasn’t he discussion aside, it’s a nice metaphor for how Jesus, in the eyes of the cynical Hellbound like myself, is essentially just a nifty word for describing self-confidence.
Casting:
Director – Terry Zwigoff. In Bad Santa he already did the misfit kid/unlikely older mentor thing, but he’d be capable of finding the right ambiguous tone, as well as providing a few filthy laughs.
The Kid – I dunno, hold an open casting call or something.
Jesus – Ryan Reynolds or Danny McBride
…
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Perhaps they should make some films out of some Beatles songs. Maybe “Help” or “Yellow Submarine”.
They’ve already made a film out of Slipknot’s “Happy Feet”. Casting penguins to play the band members was a stroke of genius.
They were going to complete the Beatles trilogy with a movie of Free as a Bird, but the bird in question was Lindsay Lohan, so…
That may be the worst joke ever told.
Megadeth – Mary Jane
“Forgive me father, for I have sinned
I’m a child of the air, I’m a witch of the wind
And I’m still wide awake…”
Apparently based on a true story, Mr Mustaine tells the tale of a young girl/witch in ye past who gets caught masturbating by her puritan father. Said father buries her alive for her sins, leaving her to get her haunt on.
I see a Suspiria / Evil Dead style story set in an all girl school near the graveyard where Mary was buried. Some summoning/ breaking of a seal is involved, followed by possessions and gruesome murders of the nubile victims involving trees and wind and stabbings and such like, a scooby style search for the clues, and a finale where we find out it was the father’s ghost haunting the girls all along, all mixed up with a message against the male control of wimmin’s sexuality and that.
Cast would be some Ellen Page type as the plucky lead, Bryan Cranston as Mary’s ghosty father or the lead’s father or somebodies father cos he’s ace, and Lucy Lawless as the headmistress as she’s great in Spartacus B&S, and would help ensure some sweet sweet Tapert/Raimi backing. Music by Megadeth and Goblin. Directed by Raimi or me if he’s not available.
This is a fucking awesome suggestion. What a movie that would be, it’s got *everything*, and tremendous casting too. Cranston <3 Points for being a fan of the fantastic Spartacus Blood & Sand. Drag Me to Hell proved that Raimi’s still got his horror-nads.
Mainly though, to my filthy, thoroughly obsessed mind, this would be a movie that contained a scene where Ellen Page interferes with herself, and for that, I pray for some producer guy to happen upon this blog and drop some $ on the option.
(Any ideas posted on this blog, be it in posts or comment form, are legally mine. I actually own your name now.)
As you once said of one of my ideas, if Down in the Park were a movie coming out, I’d go and see it.
I’m actually getting the horrible sinking feeling that I’m going to spend 3 months writing a pointless Down in the Park screenplay nobody will ever read.
[...] is a follow-up to the post I did a couple of years ago, the surprisingly titled 3 Songs That Could Be Awesome Movies. Click here to read it. If Hollywood should want to option the rights on any of these and cut me in on a finders fee deal [...]
3 More Songs That Could be Awesome Movies « Frantic Planet dot blog said this on July 12, 2012 at 5:08 pm |