Tag Archives: If they were in television

If they were in television… Michael Bay

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Notable Films: The Rock, The Island, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Transformers series. 

Famous for: Explosions, great action sequences, narrative incoherence, military propaganda, the decline of mainstream American cinema, shooting women like he is filming porn.

Hypothetical title: The Colony

Hypothetical premise: Focuses on the first station in space to host private citizens from Earth.  It starts off peacefully enough, but soon enough the mixed cultures start feuding, and in order to keep order, the station’s AI turns on them and begins killing anyone who starts a fight.  This doesn’t sit well with the nearby military installation, who begin planning to rescue everyone with the latest military technology.  The series rotates between a couple brave American soldiers and a witless but charming protagonist on the colony, his shallow love interest, and over-bearing but comical parents.

Cross between: The Island, The Rock, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wall-E, and Transformers.

Likely to bring: Some Bay regulars are Ben Affleck and Shia LaBeouf, so why not cast them in the two lead roles?  You can place pretty much any attractive super model in the love interest role, but why not take an exceptional actress like Scarlett Johansson and drain her of life?  For the parents, why not add in Patricia Clarkson (she’s a mom in everything now) and John Turturro. 

Likeliness of this happening: 4/10.  Bay couldn’t make enough money in television and explosions don’t look nearly as good on a small screen.

If they were in television… Wes Craven

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Notable films: Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Red Eye

Famous for: Horror with American allegory, heavy amounts of blood and gore, genre subversion, self-aware horror, torturing a female lead and sometimes letting her live.

Hypothetical title: Euro

Hypothetical premise: Honors student Jane is in the transitional summer between high school or college and has just been informed that her job at the ice cream station has been terminated because it is going out of business.  With absolutely nothing tying her down, she decides to fly to Europe for the summer with her two best friends.  This is set up in the first few episodes.

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If they were in television… Zack Snyder

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Notable films: Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen.

Famous for: Comic book adaptations. Slow motion during fight scenes, multiple cuts, zoom-ins and close-ups during action sequences. Shooting films entirely in front of a green screen. Dark, grimy visuals with highly saturated colors. Rock and roll soundtracks. War allegories. Releasing movies in March.

Hypothetical title: The Break

Hypothetical premise: The stage is set in San Francisco only moments after the bombings of Pearl Harbor struck the nation. The city is in political chaos as city and government leaders prepare to handle the increasing population of Japanese Americans living amongst the diverse population. Allegories and criticism toward the reaction of 9/11 and modern terrorism can be made throughout the series. This is Snyder’s fictional re-envision of WWII on the west coast. Continue reading →

If they were in television… David Fincher

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Notable films: The Social Network, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, and Se7en.

Famous for: Dark, beautiful visuals, perfectionism, masculine codes of honor, violence as a part of human DNA, social outcasts, and using famous actors in unexpected ways.

Hypothetical title: Blackout

Hypothetical premise: The show follows a career man plagued by boredom.  On his routine walk home from work one day, he stumbles on the aftermath of a brutal assault against a woman.  He becomes weirdly obsessed with the case when the police shove it aside, and as she lays in a coma in the hospital, he takes it upon himself to uncover what happened to her.  After discovering she was a journalist hot on the trail of a violent secret society that has infiltrated every crack of the local government, he begins to realize that he’ll need her help to uncover all the intricacies of the plot.  The woman wakes up from her coma, only to be abducted 20 minutes after being back on the streets.  As the season reaches its conclusion, the man tracks down the woman, only to discover that she leads the society, and that the assault was an attempt by a vigilante to remove her from power.

Cross between: Zodiac, Fight Club, Blue Velvet, and Sin City.

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If they were in television… Lars von Trier

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Notable films: Europa, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist, Dogville, Breaking the Waves, and The Idiots.

Famous for: Shocking his audience, controversy, female lead performances, depressing idealism, anti-religious undercurrents, beautifully unique visuals, low budget hand-held camera angles, talking about his fears and emotions, and refusing to watch his own movies.

Hypothetical title: Heaven’s Highway

Hypothetical premise: After being set up for a misdemeanor and kicked out by her polygamist family, lonely widow Gretchen kills her abusive father and flees her small west-coast mountain town.  Emerging from the mountains a completely new person, she begins rebuilding her life for herself, learning her sense of individuality and coming into her own.  However, the past catches back up to her, and she is soon on the run from the law as well as her haunting, abusive past.  She begins seeing delusional crimes committed in everyday life, mimicking both the ones her father did and the way she killed him. When the police catch her, there is no proof that her father was the patriarch of a repressive polygamist regime because nobody in it will talk but her.  She is sentenced to life in prison, but commits suicide after reflecting on how good her life was for those few months.

Cross between: Thelma and Louise, Dancer in the Dark, Big Love, and Dogville.

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If they were in television… M. Night Shyamalan

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Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Notable Films: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, The Happening

Famous for: Films with ridiculously unprecedented twists endings, supernatural science fiction, making cameos in his movies and crediting himself as an actor, films that lose money, The Sixth Sense

Hypothetical premise: A selfless, middle-aged heart surgeon is traumatized by the loss of his bride and mother of his children in her suicide attempt that he could not prevent or save her from after he spent a the night drinking. Now sworn sober and a dedicated father, he deals with painful flashbacks and alienation from people in his life who are much more perfect than he is. Almost too perfect. As he begins searching for cause of his wife’s suicide, he realizes it may not have been a suicide at all, instead it was a highly plotted murder carried out by the town’s council who wants to seduce the male lead and pull the memories of his wife away and replace them with memories of her. Of course, only something so mischievous and supernatural could be done by the queen of a water nymph town where no humans were allowed to leave. Escape is a world away. Each episode ends with him finding out he is in a different time period, on a different planet, as a different character. Enter aliens. Apocalypse. Continue reading →

If they were in television… Woody Allen

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Director: Woody Allen

Notable Films: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Match Point, Husbands and Wives, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Hannah and Her Sisters

Famous for: Screwball sex comedies, over-thinking relationships, neurotic versions of himself, biting one-liners.

Hypothetical premise: A New York couple, recently broken up, both decide separately to travel to Europe to evaluate what went wrong with their relationship.  The man, a successful writer of Jewish literature, wants more stability in the relationship to ease his many phobias and quirks.  The woman, a semi-famous painter, wants more adventure and chaos to propel her creative energy.  He travels to Britain, while she travels to Spain.  Along the way they both find love in neurotic partners suffering from Anhedonia.  Midway through the season they both flee the insane, joyless relationships and go back to New York with a newly-found sense of place in the world.  They rekindle their relationship, but before the season is over the relationship is again too.

Cross Between: Annie Hall, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Match Point.

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If they were in television… Darren Aronofsky

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Director: Darren Aronofsky

Notable Films: Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Pi, and The Fountain.

Famous for: Unbearable honesty, emotionally destroyed and hopeless people, gritty surrealism, and intentionally ambiguous endings.

Hypothetical Premise: A cocaine-addicted woman is divorced by her extremely wealthy tycoon husband.  Since there was a pre-nup and she came from a poor and abusive family, she has nothing.  Over the course of the season, she goes from having everything to being a lonely, drug-ridden bum on the streets of Seattle.  Her husband makes sure she never gets a job or has any way to lift herself out of the disparity she’s in.  Then she meets a bouncer at a club, falls in love with him, but he can’t allow himself to love a crack addict.  If there is a second season, she would descend into madness and half of the series would appear to take place in the middle ages.

Cross Between: Requiem for a Dream, Breaking Bad, and The Wrestler.

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