“All Right: Stop, Collaborate and Listen”

(it’s a sad day when it can quite strongly be argued that Vanilla Ice has a better grasp of negotiation than the majority of current world leaders.)

This post has been a long-time coming. Buckle in, it's gonna be a while.

It has been a long time since last I posted, but this time frame does not indicate the writing I have been doing in the meantime. Writing with the main goal being to update this place of fevered and frequently alliterated fabrications. Now, with your mind-rebuttal, I can hear you forming the questions: “So Smart-Guy, if you’ve been so busy writing, why’s this place stagnant?”, “Good! Well crafted writing, and quantities of it! But where?” and lastly “I saw that, f’s all over the place, how come you are so cool?” To be fair, I must answer these questions before launching into my most recent soliloquy, satire and vitriol cocktail.

a) Because I haven’t posted anything – it just didn’t feel right. It’d be like taking to the football field wearing high heels: you could do it, but you’d deeply regret it.
b) Well, to be brutal, I’ve actually posted all my well-crafted writing in this downtime…yep, it’s true – you are most definitely your harshest critic. (probably pretty close to the truth though!)
c) Hey, maybe I was born with it: maybe it’s Maybelline. Mostly, it’s merely a method of manipulating the minor messages to more melodically move into motion together.

I discovered that no matter what topic I attempted to write on, to update you on and to fill your minds with vaguely philosophically points of view, it always fell back to the one constant. It was really getting on my nerves, every time I had an original idea to write on, this one theme would worm it’s way back in, like a platoon of greek warriors hidden in a giant wooden idea – Trojan Themes, clad in leather armour and brandishing topics sharpened to a point. But what is that theme, I see on mental-semaphore. (it’s like morse code on flags, but in your head. No really.)

It’s Jesus.

Parody and satire are my bread and butter. Which gets spread on the other, I don’t quite know, but it’s a liberal layer of one, on a thickly-cut chunk of the other. And I wanted to write about movies, and how the whole Hollywood machine is becoming outrageously out of control…but everything I did came back to Jesus.

When you boil it down, there’s only a certain number of stories Hollywood can tell. They can throw a twist on (they’re all ghosts! ARGH!), they can even change the setting (can you just be whelmed?), but it’s the same story. Now Jesus, he’s one cool cat whose got the story well and truly down-pat. You know what you’re getting with a movie about Jesus.

Or do you?

The problem with Jesus’ story, is you know exactly what you’re getting. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the whole idea of getting a director on your film, is to get their personal take on the idea or story. With a premise over 2000 years in the telling, your ability to be dynamic is a little hindered. But I’d like to see a few different takes on the story.

Like, you could have a telling where the son of God was brought to us in the near future. He could keep the same hairstyle, same name just trim the beard a bit. He could have served in the compulsory armed forces, won the admiration of many, but then rebelled against the ruling class (all legit, true-to-the-story). Things go bad, he loses an eye and eventually goes down…or does he? Rumour surrounds that he lives, then he’s finally called in – they need him, they need his unique skills. He goes back into action to hunt down Guevo Judas, a gun-runner who has taken control of the local area with his militia and his charisma. And along the way, everyone JC runs into recognizes him, spawning the classic exchange.
Guard: “Hey JC, I thought you were dead!”
JC: “Yeah…I get that a lot”
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a rollicking story of sci-fi takes on biblical bad guys, as Kurt Russell portrays Jesus in John Carpenter’s “Escape From Nazareth”

And then Mr Carpenter and Co. get lynched.
Even with the trivial name connection that the director shares. (No, I’m not spelling out both jokes there) See, the problem with the Jesus story is that if you were to view it as a franchise, much like those for Spider-man or Star Wars, the built-in fan base is arguably a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more zealous. A studio put nipples on Batman, or flames on Optimus Prime – to do the equivalent with Jesus would have you on a cross of your very own in record time. And this is where the movie world comes unhinged.

We could very easily have a languid, Lynch-ian flash-back telling of the story, from the eyes of a recently risen Jesus, trying to piece together his memory, only to find he was really a failed starlet whose life was over on the corner of a particular Hollywood road. Or maybe a heart-touching outsider in a Steven Spielberg story, highlighting the importance of the father-son relationship (whoa, that’d work)
Or maybe even further, he could be from another planet (symbolistic!) and sent here to help us become all we can, and reach our own potential. He will eventually give his own life to save the entire world from an evil that we ourselves have caused…and then, miraculously get a second chance due to his own self-sacrifice.

Unfortunately, Bryan Singer already made that last film and called it “Superman Returns”, so maybe there is a way to tell the fabled story in a newer way. Or maybe Bryan Singer’s 2.5 hour love letter to Richard Donner required some kind of camouflage and he stumbled across the analogy.

Either way, I think without allowing a director to do his or her thing, we’re not going to have anything worth watching in a few years time.

In the mean-time, the little green men are lurking. They gather in the craters of their home turf, readying neon-rayed weapons and chattering to one another in an obscure dialect, which we hope will share enough similarities with English for us to interpret…hopefully before they announce their plans to render us all down to pet food for the omnivorous octo-dogs.

Me? I’m growing my hair and putting on an eye patch. There’s nothing that Snake Plissken can’t stop, he’s even beaten the fashion police into submission.

Snake, you’re the man.
*special thanks to Mr d'Licious*

Q: Learned anything new today? I learnt not to kick the corner of my staircase, and then learnt not to fall over after not doing the first action - how's that?
Song For The Day: "Radio Nowhere" by Bruce Springsteen