Thursday, January 22, 2009

Answer honestly: would you prefer...to have your dream house in the Arctic or be homeless living on the beach?

This is an easy one. The dream house in the Arctic. Hell, you could put a beach in your dream house and pretend to be a homeless person living on that beach.

Think of the possibilities. Remember the ice castle from "Die Another Day"? (Aside: if you answered no to the previous question, you are missing out on the finest of the Bond franchise. Not since the days of Timothy Dalton has arrogance and misogyny met such an utterly outlandish plot. The only shame is that Pierce is overshadowed in his finale by freakish villain Graves, the North Korean dictator's son, who undergoes gene therapy to become a WASP wine-swirling, hair-slicked-back, black-turtleneck-wearing fencing specialist. For me, the apex of the movie comes in what I consider a modern interpretation of the Luke-I-am-your-Father scene: Graves' father (good solid North Korean last name) claims he no longer recognizes his son, forcing Graves to make the painfully difficult decision to electrocute his "father" with his metal glove/wrist guard that harnesses the sun's power, a decision so painful that the sheer agony of following through with the choice - one necessary to futher his pursuit of world domination/destruction - sends a burst of remorse through his semi-human nervous system and causes Graves to turn away suddenly and turn his eyes upward (toward the sun that is now under the control of Graves's wrist guard-turned-patrocidal-weapon). I don't know what literary or artistic term explains why this moment is so poignant.) Combine that ice castle with the emperor penguin exhibit at the Boston Aquarium, and you have the coolest anteroom/deck imaginable. That's before you take a heated Gotham-City-before-the-crime-scourge monorail to the center of your personal Wayne Tower. You get the idea.

I think this is a case where whoever wrote the question didn't think through just how boundless "dream" is. Give me three wishes without any conditions on them, and I'll start by wishing for unlimited wishes. Bam. Then I'll use wish number two out of infinity to wish for a fifth Pierce Bond movie starring TD as the villain. Or maybe I'd prefer a knock-off franchise starring Pierce and TD side-by-side as a British-accented dry-humor version of Starsky and Hutch. Not sure how that would play out. Then again, who cares? I can recast and/or revise the script with wish number three. JCVD might be involved.

1 comment:

  1. Would you prefer to be constantly hungry for the rest of your life or constantly itchy?

    ReplyDelete