I’m watching Frankie & Alice, whose plot description sounds like an SNL sketch: Halle Berry as a stripper, Frankie, with dissociative personalities. One of them is just Halle Berry speaking baby talk, lisp and all, and another who’s a caricature of a racist white woman, Alice. With a bad Southern accent. Set in the 1970s.What could the elevator pitch for this possibly have been?
Or Tiptoes, in which Matthew Mcconaughey and Gary Oldman play twin brothers, with Oldman as a dwarf. Performing the part on his knees. Even though Peter Dinklage was right there on the same set, as a leather jacketed biker with a bad French accent. Whose girlfriend is Patricia Arquette.
Still watching Frankie & Alice and I can confirm it also includes masses of raggedy plot holes, bad hairpieces, worse dialogue, and Stellan Skarsgard as tonally perpendicular comic relief.
From the podcast “How Did This Get Made?”, two of the silliest movies they mentioned were “Old Dogs” (a comedy featuring John Travolta, Robin Williams, motion control puppet suits, gorilla rape and a jet pack) and “I Know Who Killed Me” (with Lindsay Lohan as a one-legged, one-handed stripper with amnesia who might be identical twins).
Space Truckers - Dennis Hopper as an interplanetary truck driver hauling a stolen load of bio/cyber killing machines. Charles Dance as a cybernetic pirate with a pull start penis. Debi Mazar and Stephan Dorff for…reasons?!
C’mon – you’re telling me a little girl got swept up in a tornado and ended up with her whole house setting down in some “Land of Oz,” with munchkins, and a Good Witch and several Bad Witches and lord knows what else? Can’t have happened. Not buying it.
Well, the premise is certainly realistic, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen it (when it was first-run) that I can’t remember it will enough to offer a critique.
Seeds of Evil (1974) – Everyone talks about the gardener (Joe Dallesandro) as if there was nothing of equal importance in their lives. And then…the gardener goes for a nude swim before turning into a tree. The end.
Zardoz (1974) – A giant head comes down from the sky and declares the gun is good and the penis is evil while a bunch of half-naked savages look on dumbly. Savage Sean Connery hitches a ride in the head, clips its wheelman and ends up in an advanced society where more weird shit happens.
Max My Love (1986) – Charlotte Rampling is married and has a lover who is a chimpanzee (suit actress). Her husband accepts the situation, at least initially, and the chimp moves in with them. I was not able to watch long enough to see how it turned out.
Born of Fire (1987) - Flutist Peter Firth treks to Turkey to learn what happened to his father. He finds he has a deformed half-brother (“The Silent One”) he never knew about. Firth’s big-eyed astronomer girlfriend also shows up to check out a volcano (stock footage). She rapes Pete, gives birth to an insect and dies. Later, Firth and the Master Musician (who shoots fire and has a skull for a hand) have a flute-duel while the Silent One soul-fits. Not a dream, I swear.
El Intoxico (2001) - Amateurish yet strangely compelling; the short clip details the origin of the title character:
Monkeybone (2001) - Unimaginably awful:
The Fountain (2006) – Tortuous pseudo-profound drivel; hard to believe this was produced and released.
The Spirit (2008) – Frank Miller debases Will Eisner’s creation. Sadly, all too real…
Thing is, you can also do this sort of elevator-pitch précis with movies with ridiculous premises, that are actually good:
“Let’s make a movie about two idiot stoners find a time-machine phone booth, travel into the past, and kidnap Beethoven and Napoleon Bonaparte to pass a history exam.” - Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
“How about a live-action version of a comic, about a dorky Canadian guy, who falls in love with the girl who uses his head as a subspace highway to deliver packages for Amazon, and has to battle to the death each of her previous seven exes. Who explode into showers of coins when they die. Oh, and we’ll have video game elements, like extra lives and eight-bit swords, for the characters to interact with - the hero will defeat the Big Bad with a sword he pulls out of his own chest.” - Scott Pilgrim versus the World.
A ludicrous premise does not automatically mean a bad movie.
Yeah the cast lists in my original examples were a big part of what made them so unlikely. God knows there are thousands of great movies with scenarios that are ludicrous as synopses.
The fact of Gary Old man playing a dwarf on his knees while Peter Dinklage was standing right fucking there
I think you’re missing the premise of the thread: it’s not “Could this movie come true?” it’s “How did this movie get made?” In other words, how is this a real movie?
What’s there to understand? Halle Berry wanted another Oscar, so she made a movie that’s (a) a true story (b) about a beautiful woman with mental problems. There’s your elevator pitch right there.
I thought of that film (Incubus) which cast William Shatner as an Esperanto-speaking soldier who falls in love with a succubus and is forced to battle demons, but personally I would be running to produce it.
