Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Now that our favorite reality show is over and Barack Obama has officially been declared America’s Next Top Commander-in-Chief, we here at the Screengrab can finally breathe a sigh of relief and allow ourselves a few hope-filled dreams of a better world full of gay terrorists and socialized abortions and redistributed wealth for all...while up in Alaska, Track and Trig and Trots and Trickle-Down and all the other residents of Wasilla are having nightmares about the very same thing.

As Milton said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n,” and, frankly, given the overactive imaginations in our little corner of the blogosphere and all the campaign promises and scary robocalls of the past few weeks, we’ve spent WAY more time than usual contemplating any number of best and worst case scenarios for our nation and the future of humanity in general...

...which eventually led to us contemplating our Netflix queues instead, so we could stop thinking so much and just zone out for a while with the following movies, as we take a break from politics and go to our happy place (and a whole bunch of not so happy places) with our salute to The Screengrab's all-time favorite cinematic utopias and dark, dystopic futures!

IDIOCRACY (2006)

We already paid tribute to the brilliance of Idiocracy in a previous list, but it seemed appropriate to kick off with a nod to Mike Judge’s cult classic about a fast-food, monster-truck future where the average IQ has dropped to sub-Heidi & Spencer levels, anybody with an original thought is automatically labeled a “fag” and Ow, My Balls! is America’s number one show, since it features the endlessly hilarious spectacle of a man getting nailed in the nuts again and again and again and again and...anyway, let’s just say it’s the kind of “real” America a certain fake plumber I know might find utopian, while my elitist ass would be searching for the nearest “Time Masheen” home.

LOGAN'S RUN (1976)

There's always a catch, isn't there? The world of Logan's Run certainly seems like a utopian one, assuming your idea of an ideal society resembles a Dallas shopping mall circa the Bicentennial. Inside the domed city of the future, everything is provided for you, including all the sex, drugs and plastic surgery you could ever want. However, as your thirtieth birthday approaches, the red crystal implanted in your palm begins to blink, signaling that your time is just about up. On Last Day, you report to Carousel, which looks like a fun way to go if you like floating around in a colorful bodysuit and bursting into flames. Be advised that there is always the chance of "renewal" although no one really seems to know exactly what that is or if it has ever happened. If this seems like a bad deal, you can always run and seek Sanctuary outside the dome. There are two flaws in this plan: 1) Armed enforcers called Sandmen will try to kill you. 2) If you do manage to find Sanctuary, you'll probably be disappointed unless you want to spend the rest of your life with a smelly old man and his cats.

WALL*E (2008)

Let's face it -- for all the hard work that goes into designing them, most big-screen sci-fi and fantasy worlds aren't exactly the kinds of places we could imagine ourselves actually living in. To cite one example, we wouldn't want to live in a future full of feral Australians who power their city with pig shit, although to be certain, we'd consider it if Thunderdome was there. So compared to most movie futures, the world conjured up by Pixar's WALL*E looks pretty darned appealing. After all, doesn't it sound ever so wonderful to live forever in a deep-space colony where all of your daily responsibilities -- walking, feeding yourself, even procreating -- are taken care of for you by the latest in efficient yet people-friendly machines? In the world of WALL*E, all of this is possible. The catch? The space colonies aren't destinations for vacationers, but rather their new home after life on Earth became unsustainable as a result of excess consumption and pollution. Enabled by mega-corporate sponsor Buy-N-Large, the citizens of these brave new worlds become even lazier, not to mention universally obese. WALL*E was attacked by the right as being a pro-environmental screed (like that's really a bad thing?), but take a second look at the film and tell us it's not more of an attack on complacency, that unfortunate tendency on the part of most people to take the easy way out rather than do a little more work to save themselves in the long run. Luckily for the characters in WALL*E, life eventually finds a way, making it possible to resettle and rebuild the Earth. It's up to us to pull ourselves together enough to preserve our way of life before WALL*E becomes a reality.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

Okay, so it’s not really Utopia. It’s Alaska, which, judging by the quality of politicians they produce, is anything but. “Utopia” isn’t much more than the title of the final entry in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby ‘road picture’ series; in fact, it’s just a hustle by Crosby’s Duke Johnson to swindle Hope’s Chester Hooton out of some cash. But Road to Utopia is far and away the funniest of the Road pictures, its self-reflexive, self-deprecating, mile-a-minute humor much more in keeping with the anarchic films of the Marx Brothers than the kind of hoke that Crosby usually associated himself with. There’s lots of inside jokes, an amiable hatred between the two leads, an absurd plot that never gets in the way of good gags, special guest appearances by master humorist Robert Benchley, and, of course, Dorothy Lamour, looking as lovely as ever. Watching Hope and Crosby take clever cheap shots at each other for an hour and a half may not be Utopia, but it’s close enough for us.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

In Barack Obama’s America, “socialism” is a word that got thrown around before his election to scare people. Betting on the ignorance of Americans that dozens of prosperous countries get along just fine with some state control of the private sector, right-wing scaremongers used to imply that Obama was a new Stalin who would centralize the Wal-Mart and send anyone who owned a shotgun to a gulag somewhere outside of Wasilla. In John Ford’s Hollywood, though, “socialism” was a new and tempting word for a country that had been beaten to the point of utter despair by the worst economic depression in history. To millions of Americans, the limited socialism advocated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed like it might be the country’s salvation at the same time the nation’s rich excoriated him as a communist who would be America's doom. While much of Europe turned to the poison of fascism to rescue it from the Depression, FDR’s mad notion that the government’s job was to help those who can’t help themselves found a receptive audience among most citizens – a notion reflected in The Grapes of Wrath. Late in the book, Tom Joad’s migrant Okie family, near shattered from death and poverty and hostile, exploitative bosses – come upon a farm camp called the Wheat Patch, which seems like a utopia: no cops allowed without a warrant, free food and shelter for those who work for it, and “the best dances in the county, every Saturday night”. Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad, in utter disbelief that such a place exists free from the cops and bosses who have tried to squeeze him every step of his journey, goggles: “Who runs this place?” Told it’s a government facility, he asks why there aren’t more of them. “You find out,” replies a caretaker with some cynicism. “I can’t.”

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s rare that the screenwriter for a splashy indie film will get as much or more attention than the director, but that was the case when The Usual Suspects hit it big in 1995. Boyhood friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie first collaborated on 1993’s Public Access, which went nowhere despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Their second effort become a modern crime classic, and there was no ignoring the fact that McQuarrie’s twisty narrative and twisted characters contributed greatly to the success of Suspects. In fact, when the Academy Awards were held the following year, it was McQuarrie who walked away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Singer, however, who used Suspects as a launching pad to a blockbuster career. After the Stephen King misfire Apt Pupil, Singer bounced back with the first two X-Men movies and the semi-successful Superman Returns. McQuarrie went his own way, hoping to realize his dream project: bringing Alexander the Great to the screen. This turned into a long, frustrating odyssey that ended when Oliver Stone made his own much-mocked version with Colin Farrell. McQuarrie’s sole effort as a writer-director, The Way of the Gun, was released in 2000, but it was something of a disappointment, getting lost in the post-Tarantino crime wave. Since then, McQuarrie has worked as a script doctor (doing uncredited rewrites on the first X-Men, among others) and has been involved in a number of aborted projects, including a Bryan Singer remake of Logan’s Run, but he has a grand total of zero screen credits since 2000.

That’s finally about to change. Today McQuarrie’s name popped up in this AP story about yet another controversy surrounding the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It seems Slate has had to retract a claim that the film’s producers altered photographs of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg in order to make them more closely resemble Cruise. This claim turned out to be false, and commenting on the situation was one of Valkyrie’s producers – Christopher McQuarrie. Per the AP: “‘The picture United Artists used of Colonel Stauffenberg can be found all over the Internet,’ said Valkyrie co-writer and producer Chris McQuarrie in a written statement released by a United Artists spokeswoman Tuesday. McQuarrie, who won a screenplay Oscar in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, added that it would have been easier to ‘alter Tom Cruise’ than to doctor ‘every available picture of Claus von Stauffenberg.’”

Valkyrie is the first full-fledged reunion of Singer and McQuarrie since The Usual Suspects. The duo was also set to re-team for the Harvey Milk biopic The Mayor of Castro Street, but that was before Gus Van Sant went forward with Milk. McQuarrie’s next announced project as a writer-director is The Stanford Prison Experiment, based on the actual psychological study gone awry in 1971. Rumored cast members include Ryan Phillippe and Paul Dano, but given the bumps in the road McQuarrie has already hit, it’s best to take such information with a grain of salt.

Related:
Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update
A Brief History of Milk

The Screengrab : logan's run

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part One)

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie