The movie business is a funny thing. It's the only part of our society in which someone is allowed to continually create awful things without being effectively exiled. Imagine if a chef got a reputation for making vile, ridiculously expensive dishes and yet somehow kept getting hired to run various restaurants into the ground. There is so much money and so many cynical, gullible people in the film industry that guys like M. Night Shyamalan manage to produce at least one cinematic embarrassment every few years and the profit margins on whatever crap Eddie Murphy is doing these days are still good enough to get him studio backing for another 2-hour romp in a fat suit. And then there are filmmakers like the Wachowski Brothers (one of whom now legally qualifies as a sister), two people who have come to epitomize the hopelessly inept wing of the big-budget movie industry. Despite making one stinker after another, the Wachowskis haven't quite realized that they suck at making movies. There's some buzz in Hollywood today that they've been seeking funding for what will either be the best or worst movie ever made. It doesn't have an official title yet, but for now I'm going to call it Iraqi Gaysplosion From The Future.
According to a number of actual, respectable sources, the plot of Iraqi Gaysplosion From The Future is that a male US soldier in the Second Gulf War develops a romantic relationship with a male Iraqi citizen, then for some reason the film shifts to the near future where everything goes what scientists have classified as Ultra Mondo Weird to the Max. The Wachowskis have enlisted none other than Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post to play what may or may not be a whacked-out version of herself in the future scenes, a fact confirmed by Huffington herself on a picture-laden twitter post from late 2009 that featured a disconcerting amount of hair dye and Lana (formerly Laurence) Wachowski doing some screen tests.
But the best part of the Iraqi Gaysplosion From The Future hype is the alleged involvement of Jesse Ventura, once and future professional wrestler and former Governor of Minnesota. In a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show, The Body himself described being adorned with a wig of multicolored dreadlocks, a long, pointy beard and even a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The way Ventura described his experience on set, the Wachowskis just let him rant about the Iraq war in a silly costume for a few minutes and there's a good chance they'll use the footage.
I have no doubt that Iraqi Gaysplosion From The Future, should it get the greenlight, is going to be thoroughly amazing. It will make Southland Tales look like a sober, coherent narrative and the two Matrix sequels will seem reasonable and spare by comparison. Because if there's on thing the art of film needs today, it's a speculative political commentary piece by the people who made Speed Racer and produced Ninja Assassin. Since we're currently living in a world that's willing to spend millions of dollars making, distributing and advertising a partial CGI Marmaduke movie, I don't think it's too much to ask for a mescaline-trip-like Wachowski Brothers movie like Iraqi Gaysplosion From The Future.
