Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Some Nice Film Chit-Chat To Pass The Time

Remember that post where I said I’d be creative? I’ll do that too, but what say we make fun of stupid movies as well? I mean, can’t we do both?

Lars and the Real Girl – To sum up: pudgy mustachioed loser, who appears to be a high-functioning autistic, orders a riotously expensive sex doll and pretends that she’s a real live human being. Everyone in small town plays along and gets drawn in to Lars’ bizarre psychodrama. It’s oh so cute. Then he starts fighting with her and it’s still meant to be cute. Hot damn is it ever not cute.

Wait – it’s supposed to be a psychological exploration of a damaged man and his outré strategy for avoiding life, love and all that good stuff. Hot damn is it ever also not that.

If LatRG took place in something resembling the real world, the movie would play out like this:

LARS: This is my girlfriend Bianca.

EVERYONE: She’s a creepy sex toy.

LARS: No she isn’t.

EVERYONE: (tackles Lars and sends him to a mental hospital, where he spends the rest of his days doing the Halidol shuffle up and down the halls.)

EVERYONE: (Burns sex doll as a witch.)

The other thing that would happen in the real world is that creepy folk like Lars would hole up with the sex doll in his garage and emerge once a fortnight for groceries and baby wipes. Not Lars, though; he claims that his toy is ‘religious’ and puts her up a room in his brother’s house. That’s how far you can take your commitment to the imaginary, I guess – sexual contact is the threshold for acceptability. As false as that felt, I had some pity for the filmmakers, who realized that viewers’ sympathy for Lars would evaporate quickly if we were forced to picture an overweight, greasy haired Ryan Gosling grappling with 150 pounds of articulated silicon.


10,000 B.C. – Twelve thousand years from now, humanity will return to the poisoned husk of planet Earth and start sifting through the remains. Maybe our descendants won’t even realize at first that they’re launching an archaeological expedition on their ancestral homeworld, but as they assemble the ancient artifacts, understanding will gradually dawn on them that this toxic ball of junk is the Terra of myth.

As they examine historical records, it will become clear that they have descended from a race of primitive and violent freaks who bore no more sense of their limits than a colony of e. coli in agar understands the boundaries of the Petri dish. They will shake their heads (metaphorically of course – future humans are consciousness-carrying electromagnetic waves latticing the universe) and reflect on their primitive origins.

Then, one of their remote robots will uncover a landfill composed of nothing but DVDs of 10,000 B.C. The humans will watch the movie, have a conference lasting several picoseconds, and extinguish themselves en masse in expiation for their sins.

4 comments:

Miss Syl said...

So you'd THINK the Lars movie's whole premise would be far-fetched, right? But check out this documentary I first saw on Sundance Channel (I think). There are way more of these people than you'd think. And they're creepy, oh yes, but many don't seem to be into hiding it at all. In fact, some of them do take the dolls out in public.

Deb Rox said...

The treatment of Lars is representative of a consistent disappointment I have with real life. Wacked people are treasured in film and in biopics of dead writers and artist, but on a daily basis very few people seem to be as charmed or patient.

Bruce Johnson said...

I suppose we are witnessing the birth of a new film genre with 10,000BC. Much like 300 and other pseudo historical CGI laden lucid dreams. The concept of historical accuracy will be gone and our understanding of the past will be primarily based on graphic novels and comic books. The past will be much more lavish, but not very worthy of study.

I hit on this theme about 2 years ago in my blog entitled "Revisionist History" http://lotus07rant.blogspot.com/2006/01/revisionist-history.html

p-man said...

Is 10,000 the caveman flick with Ringo Starr in it? If so, we should already be dead.