Off Screen - DUMB'S the WORD

AI, NBK, IQ, ID, FTW . . . pieces of paper bearing these acronyms keep arriving in my post. But what can it all mean? They are all recent or forthcoming film titles, specifically Stanley Kubrick’s post- global warming sci-fi thriller Artificial Intelligence, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Albert Einstein-themed romantic comedy Intelligence Quotient, football hooligan drama Identification and the straight to video Mickey Rourke/Lori Singer thriller which can be read as either Frank T. Wells (the name of Mickey’s character) or Fuck The World (which Lori has tattooed on her knuckles). This latest titling trend is perhaps best encapsulated by the forthcoming sub-NBK murder and media satire S.F.W., which stands for So Fucking What. My sentiments exactly.

Given Hollywood’s propensity for creating its own ludicrous bandwagons and then jumping all over them until they collapse, I await with bated breath and bad grace (or maybe that should just be bad breath, or even just BB) the announcement of such forthcoming projects as AA (Robin Williams stars as an alcoholic who is mistakenly installed as head of the Automobile Association),

WC (romance blossoms for Hugh Grant when he is trapped overnight with three fat ladies in a water closet), VD (hilarious Police Academy style romp set amongst the staff of a Venereal Disease clinic. Steve Guttenberg makes a guest appearance as a particularly virulent strain of gonorrhoea) and IUD (Meg Ryan in serious issue based drama about the reprecussions of failed contraception).

Titles are considered vital to a film’s BO (that’s Box Office, not Body Odour), with anything too unusual quickly being dropped for fear of alienating the vast, unwashed and presumably illiterate moviegoing audience. Recently the multi-Oscar-nominated British drama The Madness Of King George III was truncated to The Madness of King George, in case American audiences thought it was a sequel and the MD’s (Managing Directors) of Miramax (don’t ask me what that stands for) decided to change Robert Altman’s Pret-A-Porter (an American film set at the Paris fashion shows) to a more user friendly Ready To Wear. Given the film companies attitude towards the suspect intelligence of their audiences, can it be any surprise that the latest cinematic trend appears to be rampant stupidity? Recent No 1 (Number One) films in the USA (United States of America) have included the Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels comedy Dumb And Dumber, the infuriating misadventures of a couple of complete buffoons (no prizes for guessing who plays Dumber) and Billy Madison, about a grown man so deficient in the brain cell department that the movie has been labelled Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest by US (United States – the America is silent) critics.

Meanwhile Forrest Gump, having scooped best film, best actor and best director at the 52nd Golden Globes (GG for short) has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards (AA’s), with Tom Hanks installed as favourite to win a second best actor Oscar in a row (a feat last accomplished by Spencer Tracy in 1938, who achieved it without getting a bad haircut, acting stupid or crawling to the audience begging to be loved). Gump’s main competition comes from Pulp Fiction with 7 nominations, which makes it a kind of battle between dumb and clever-clever. Put your money on dumb. As an unnamed source in the Independent commented, “Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction represent two halves of America’s tortured soul, the American Dream vs (versus) disillusionment. And in Hollywood the former will always win.”

So if stupid really is the next big thing, perhaps they should make a film about movie executives. Just a glance at the forthcoming production schedules is enough to convince me that there must be an awful lot of heads stuck up an awful lot of asses (most of them their own) out there in LA (Los Angeles). How else do you explain Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise and Barry Levinson expressing an interest in doing Rainman II? Or Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Ezterhas being paid $2.5 million dollars for a four-page handwritten synopsis about a married man who has a one night stand entitled, with breathtaking imagination, One Night Stand (or ONS), even though when American Premiere (AP) magazine sent the same synopsis around without the writer’s name attached, it was rejected by Disney as ‘a somewhat embarrassing male-menopause wallow,’ and Columbia for being ‘stock, very lame and tired.’? Paramount also gave it the thumbs down, commenting that ‘the writer lacks the depth or insight to make it truly meaningful and memorable’ while Tri-Star commented ‘Given the fact that this piece has neither a middle nor an end, it seems fair to reason that this is the first twenty minutes of an extremely mediocre film’. Hey, sounds like a hit to me! But what I really want to know is what moron gave Andrew Lloyd Webber the money for a musical remake of the 1962 whimsical Hayley Mills/Alan Bates movie Whistle Down The Wind about a little girl (Kirsten Dunst) who mistakes an escaped convict (Johnny Depp) for Jesus (well, he has a beard)?

For genuine madness, it is hard to beat the news that, in the wake of the fiasco that surrounded the simultaneous release of competing films about Robin Hood and Christopher Columbus, there are currently three films in development about the life of Irish independence hero Michael Collins. Typical, isn’t it. You wait for over fifty years, then three biopics all come along at once. Two of the stars attached to opposing projects are past masters of ludicrous accents, Northern Irishman Liam – I can do Americans, Germans and Scotsmen, as long as we slip in a line about them being educated in Belfast – Neeson and Kevin – Rahhbin of Laxley – Costner (who apparently owns the great man’s briefcase, so at least he can bring his own props). I don’t know anything about the third version, but, to fit in with recent trends, I expect it’ll be a musical comedy starring Jim Carrey as an idiot who accidentally starts a revolution, creates a new state then somehow manages to get himself killed by his former friends. They could even call it IRA. Or maybe not, since most Americans would probably think it’s a film about taxation.