Your Dream Movies - Pick a movie, director, and star

Taxi Driver, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski as Travis Bickle. I don’t necessarily think this would eclipse the film we have now, but it would be something to see.

I love Herzog, but what would happen here is that one of the interviewees would reveal they were interested in tiny snakes or Russian icicles or whatever, and we’d get a 20 minute tangent on that. I’m not saying that would be a bad thing, of course.

I need to read more Pratchett, I am sadly lacking in that, but I would watch the shit out of a Herzog doc about him. 

Speaking of Gilliam, I’ve soured a lot on Brazil over the last decade, mainly around Jonathan Pryce’s Sam. In the 1980s there was a director working who had a much sharper eye for all sorts of toxic male bullshit, though, and he’d even directed an idiosyncratic dystopian film, albeit a very different, pastoral one. In other words, I want John Boorman’s Brazil.

I don’t think he’d necessarily be a good replacement for Pryce (too good looking) but I think of Gabriel Byrne’s performance as Uther Pendragon in Boorman’s Excalibur. Byrne had an energy—and sense of threat—that the rest of the film, as much as I respect Excalibur for existing at all, couldn’t quite live up to. Boorman and Byrne’s Uther is ambitious, past amorality and into immorality, a man of power whose big dream (having sex with Igrayne) does come true. Sam only has heroic flights of fancy, and while his fantasies are more straightforward good guy fantasies from what I remember they are still ones where he is in a clear position of power over a woman. Although it’s been a while, I remember thinking that maybe Sam’s ego-sex-power-control fantasy manifested pretty darkly: Sam ends up exhibiting some fairly threatening behavior. It’s a great performance by Pryce, but I don’t think Gilliam’s direction is emotionally aware enough to really explore that.

Boorman, though, I think could get there—Excalibur is very much about the intersection of desire, political power, and narrative, and you see themes from Brazil elsewhere in his work: the dark uses of chummy male cameraderie (Deliverance), deception and political opportunism (The Tailor of Panama), the disruption of human nature (Zardoz), ambiguous reality and antiheroics (Point Blank).

What would Doug Jones be playing? The vacuum?

How about if Tarantino made "Kill Bea" with Zendaya as Copperhead's daughter, grown up, trained by blind Darryl Hannah, and and out for revenge on Uma Thurman? She could kidnap Sydney Sweeney as the grown BB in the first act.

I'm still waiting for the Bryan Fuller version of the Interview with the Vampire TV show...sigh...

Having just re-watched The Shining, I was struck by how many other directions the story could have gone in the hands of a different director. My starting point was that Alfred Hitchcock might have gone the Psycho plot twist route and had Wendy simply keep smacking Jack in the head a few more times halfway through the movie, creating a totally different set of problems for Wendy.  Halloran shows up and sees Wendy standing over Jack's mushed in head with a bat, and suddenly the rest of the movie is Wendy's trial where she tries, despite a lack of evidence, to prove that there were evil supernatural forces at the overlook, and that she did not murder Jack.
James Cameron might have made a franchise where Wendy went the Sarah Conner route, escaping from whatever institution she was committed to after her trial, to battle the Overlook's dark forces to save Danny from it's clutches. Let's face it, Shelley Duvall's Wendy really did have the potential to evolve into a total badass. She showed a tremendous amount of courage as a terrified, traumatized DA victim.
As good as Shelley Duvall was at portraying Wendy's trauma, imagine if George Miller had been directing Charlize Theron as Wendy. Maybe Tom Hardy as Jack, I have heard she wouldn't mind a little batting practice with him.
Totally different, yet awesome movies. I would love to see each of them.