As a writer I’ve noticed a degradation over the years in the public’s appetite for good writing, what with zombie and vampire books proliferating. As writers, we used to be told to write at a fourth grade reading level. Nowadays, we seem to have reached the “see Dick run” level. Then, if you want to sell anything nowadays, you have condense your book into what’s called a “treatment”. This is because even those Hollywood producers on massive doses of Adderall don’t have much of an attention span. For example, a modern day treatment of Moby Dick might go something like this: “A guy named Ishmael, (think Johnny Depp), enlists on a whaling ship with a guy named Queequeg, (Will Smith would be perfect). The captain of the ship, a guy with a personality disorder and a peg leg named Ahab, (Jim Carrey, I’m thinking), steers the ship on a maniacal course after a big white whale that previously bit off his leg. Here our plot diverges a bit from Melville’s. We discover a stowaway, named Phoenix, ( I think I can get Anne Hathaway cheap now that she cut her hair so short). Ishmael, who she calls Ishy, hides her in his cabin. Numerous soft focus love scenes with the ocean surging outside the porthole follow one after the other. The two lovers have a balcony, even though it’s a 19th century harpoon vessel, and they conspire with another shipmate played by Jude Law to have a nice breakfast served in their cabin with Mimosas. The scene is interposed with slow motion footage of flying fish over the surf. As time goes on, Phoenix befriends Moby Dick, the white whale, by tossing him her shrimp tails from lunch. Eventually, the girl and the whale become so close that Phoenix can ride on Moby Dick just like Liz Taylor in National Velvet. Meanwhile, Ahab is really pissed, because Moby Dick now seems to have come in touch with his female side enough to make Ahab’s macho diatribes seem ridiculous. Just as Ahab is about to shoot Moby with a harpoon, Phoenix appears with a pistol she stole from the ships gun room. She shoots Ahab in his good leg, blowing it off. The film closes with a beautiful montage of Ishy and Phoenix getting married on top of Moby’s back against a sunset. The sequel is foreshadowed as we see Ahab thumping around the deck on his two stumps swearing vengeance. Music by Rihanna. Directed by the Coen brothers in 3D.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 18:22:25 +0000
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