Casting About

Who would you have star in the latest unfilmable novel?
 

Reading Girl on the Train, I immediately started imagining who would play the characters when it inevitably becomes a film. We all do this, and we all do a lousy job, but that’s part of what makes the exercise such harmless fun. I remember a childhood conversation, before Spider-Man had been filmed, two incarnations ago. We were wondering who would play Gwen Stacey, and my friend Matt ventured “Streep?” Streep?! Never mind that she was even then too old to play a kid, was Meryl Streep ever a teenager? Hell, she was a haunted angel in The Seduction of Joe Tynan. 

Since Girl on the Train has been hyped as the next Gone Girl (they’re both girls!), I immediately cast Ben Affleck as Tom, the ex-husband of the titular Girl, which makes no sense. Then I went with Aaron Eckhart. I can’t explain why without divulging spoilers. All right, I’ll tell you. Tom gets half his face melted off and becomes a criminal supervillain.

I cast Jeanne Tripplehorn as Rachel, even though Hollywood hasn’t given her a leading role since she turned twenty-four. I don’t care; I think she could play Rachel’s hazed-out desperation, based on her work in The Firm, I guess. Okay, it was Waterworld. That’s the miracle of movies: a viewer can hold on to the memory of a performance long after Tinseltown has chewed the performer up and spat her out.

Realizing this, I tried to second-guess what Hollywood would actually do and came up with . . . Jennifer Lawrence, based on her crazy-eyed work in American Hustle and the fact that the answer to every question about actresses is Jennifer Lawrence. Googled to see who’s actually going to be playing the role for the film already in development and it’s . . . Deanna Durbin? No, wait, that was the 1945 production of Lady on a Train. The Girl train is on track(!) to be an Emily Blunt project.

So I’m no good at casting movies that are going to be films soon. What about movies that will never be made into films? Surely I can do better there.

Granted, they’ve actually tried to film a lot of unfilmable books, for example Naked Lunch; Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, putatively based on The Orchid Thief; and Howl (casting James Franco for your unfilmable movie is a cop-out). Maybe those books are just screaming (or Howling! By the way, The Howling franchise is the strangest movie adaptation of Ginsberg’s poem, and didn’t get enough credit when Franco’s movie came out) for some ambitious director to film them, because of their very unfilmability, but there are other books which aren’t throwing down a gauntlet but are just unfilmable because they exist in worlds of the mind.   

If you had to keep checking the title page to confirm that The Dog was written by the same Joseph O’Neill who wrote Netherland, you were not alone. While Netherland earned accolades and comparisons to Gatsby for its pulsing and earnest depiction of a first-world striver as witnessed by the narrator, The Dog is a satirical stream-of-consciousness spree from the mind of an unnamed lawyer living and thinking in detachment in the sterile confines of Dubai skyscrapers. He lays out a system of personal rules and rationales as a plot gently bumps into him from time to time and then suddenly catches up to him. It’s so much about the character and his disassociated embrace of the seemingly dehumanizing aspects of humanity that it reminds me of Up in the Air, which, damn it, they turned into a halfway decent movie! Still, I’m not casting Clooney.

I want to cast Aaron Eckhart, but isn’t that just because I was talking about him before? How about Ben Affleck? No! Clear the mind. Who is a chilly intellectual type who seems somewhat removed from his moral code, but not? Jessie Eisenberg’s too young, but that’s what I thought about Jeanne Tripplehorn. No, let’s go with . . . Michael Shannon!

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is just a guy ruminating about poetry. There are other Baker books that would make for visually stimulating cinema, but not this one. Oh, let’s just get Gene Hackman out of retirement. Tell him it’s not a cop, see if he bites.

There But For The by Ali Smith is actually quite filmable. Take out all the postmodern experimentalism and you’ve got a zany story with multiple points of view, something movies don’t actually do all that well but that they do all the time. Still, it’s got a weird title and a gay protagonist and I think that will put the financial backers off. So I’m going to cast it and come up with a new Hollywood-friendly title. Let’s cast Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson as young Miles Garth, Michael Shannon as grown Garth, Jeanne Tripplehorn as older Anna, Chloë Grace Moretz as young Anna, Susan Sarandon as the demented May Young (even though she is still beautiful and should still be starring in romantic dramas, but Hollywood sucks and I do like to see her in movies), and an unknown as Brooke, the kid. Call it Grace of God, make Miles Garth straight, have love conquer all, and make it an ongoing series on Netflix. It’s probably already in development with Emily Blunt.

Or you could just read the book and cast it yourself. 

 --Dan Kilian

Freddy vs. Wishmaster

Michael J. Fox's Bad Day

 

Rejected Pixar Projects

With their latest triumph Inside Out, Pixar maintains its status as the premiere producers of 3-D computer animation entertainment. It seems as though they can do no wrong, but that’s not the case. Pixar’s success depends on strict quality control. If they had green-lit every project in preproduction, their batting average wouldn’t be so extraordinary. Here are some Pixar concepts that never made it to the screen.

Mugs

Some of the less popular cups in the cabinet team up when Teacup breaks her arm off. Joining her are characters such as the lovably drunk Beer Stein, the adorable Sippy, and an assortment of underused mugs, as well as a spider who lives in Chippy, the most forgotten of the gang. They must embark on a spectacular journey across the kitchen. One tangent takes them to the microwave, where they gain wisdom from the half-full, half-warm, half-forgotten cup of coffee, who tells them where the drawer with the super glue is. You’ll drink a mug of tears when Mustache protector discovers his owner is now clean-shaven, and when Best Dad Ever learns he doesn’t belong on a trophy rack but is just a thoughtless gift. 

WALL E 2

WallEye looks on in dismay as the new inhabitants of Earth eat the last of the new plants, and slowly starve to death. 

Fans

A group of ambitious fans escape to the countryside to fulfill their dream of becoming windmills, only to find that wind power is a corrupt lie, powered by coal. 

Blender

A blender and a food processor team up on a journey to compete in a reality TV cooking show, only to find that once they are unplugged they become motionless objects, stuck on a counter, cursing their fates. 

Cars V

The cars explore their history and learn of the singularity that eliminated all non-machines from Earth. 

The Story of Hall and Oates

Eschewing Pixar’s usual strategy of imbuing inanimate objects with anthropomorphic cuteness, this movie depicts a true story of the career of these 70s/80s pop superstars. Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, none of the duo’s music can be used in this picture, so Pixar will use Randy Newman songs instead.

Wigs

A bunch of wigs wig out! This is the story of one low-budget wig who aspires to be worn by Elton John (voiced by Randy Newman). You’ll pull out your hair crying at the heart-wrenching ballad “A Small Price Toupee.” 

Poops

A bunch of poops aspire to escape from a sewer modeled after the Nazi prison camp in The Great Escape. You’ll cry when they get their wish. 

Things

This one gets a little vague. The animation is, as usual, impeccable.

--Dan Kilian 

Top Trek: A Pan Fiction! 

Godzilla's Ghost

 

 

The Ks - Prove My Love - Live Lakeside Lounge 2-23-2012

The Ks - I'm A Sexy Girl - Live Lakeside Lounge 2-23-2012

Troll Matrix

So I was drafting up a two-axis troll matrix the other day with Bridge Material across the top (rope, wood, stone, iron, etc.) and Spanned Item on the side (watercourse, viaduct, chasms/voids, etc.), so as to better catalog the variety of trolls one might encounter on a given journey.  I started to extrapolate the matrix to situations that one would not normally associate with trolls – for example the instance of a nanofiber space elevator cable which bridges between the surface of the planet and low earth orbit.  Big troll, no doubt, but where is “under” for that particular bridge?

Naturally this progressed to an exploration of abstract troll conditions, such as a shared third language bridging the misunderstandings between two foreigners abroad.  (Are botched idiomatic expressions the trolls of such a bridge?)  This quickly got silly, until I was saying “Love is the bridge that spans the gulf of historic enmity, man.”  Which in turn made me think of a yet-to-be-recorded AC/DC song:

When we cross that bridge

We’re gonna burn it

But before you ride

You got to earn it

First you gotta pay that toll

You owe seven dollars to the

LOVE TROLL.

That is all.  

 --Steve Kilian

Hollywood Harvest

A Classic Joke and A Classic Comedy Routine Meet, With Unsatisfactory Results

 

Rock and Roll is EVERYWHERE

--Steve Kilian

Micky Rourke as Godzilla

The Rose Armonica

Kurrah

There were kurrah skins all over the fairgrounds.  They’d gotten into a patch of volunteer potatoes and tore up the meadow something fierce.  William and Zack Briarson were kicking chunks of sod back into the holes that had been dug, but if it rained there’d be nothing to stop anyone from calling it a mudpit.  

I picked up the skins as I came across them, stuffing them into my old paper route bag.  It was shiny from ink and sweat and grease and still smelled like the Hartwick Courant.

The skins were funny things – some were intact from the waist up, so you could almost picture how big the kurrah was before it shed.  They had little strands on the inside like you sometimes see on an orange peel, but the outsides were smooth, almost glossy in the right light, but so thin that you could read your fingerprints right through them.  They smelled like a cross between cabbage and cinnamon, if that makes any sense.  I’d picked up at least two dozen before Zack called me over.

“What do you make of this?” he said, pointing at a big sheet of skin with his toe.  It was at least two feet across, bigger than any I’d seen.

“Wow.  That one must be at least four feet long,” I said.  We said “long” rather than “tall,” probably not for a very good reason.  It seemed easier to think of them as less than bipeds when it came time to clear out a nest.  Some of the old timers couldn’t figure out what difference it made, but those were the same old timers who would cook and eat them in lean times.  There were some certifiably country folk who lived out east of Millpond and Gerth Roads.  

I’d be charitable in saying that the people who ate kurrah had probably never seen one wash the little shift of fabric that they sometimes wore around their necks, or seen one cry over their young when they got hit crossing 28 South.  But I bet they’d seen it all and didn’t care.  “Meat is meat,” they’d say. 

There’s only so much empathy you can expect out of some folks.  

--Steve Kilian

The Last Reality Show

Birthday Cake Balloon