Todd Stadler's blog

Blog backlog #2: yet another horror film idea

(Yet another old blog entry that I've been sitting on for a while. Like most such entries, it was predicated on a conversation with Gerry Toll.)

My friends and I were talking at dinner about Japanese horror films. I've never seen any, but like most topics on which I'm wholly ignorant, this didn't keep me from participating in the discussion.

But we came up with a good idea for a new horror film, in the genre of "man gets organ transplant from criminal; bad things ensue". The idea was that the main character is a man who drinks too much. Drinking is always a good topic for a film because it allows for rocking "bar music" and it really just lends itself to montages. You know: "bartender!", pour, drink, "bartender!", pour, etc. Also, drunk people are inherently entertaining and the humor they generate tends to cover up any gaping plot holes that movies containing them inevitably have (presumably because the director was also drunk).

Anyhow, since all good horror movies contain ham-fisted moralizing, at some point early in the film, the main character has to get a liver transplant because of all his hard-partyin', two-fisted-drinkin' ways. Yeah, who's laughing now, pal, huh?

As I've already alluded to, the liver which is transplanted into the main character comes from an evil man. His wickedness is shown in flashbacks in which we see him carousing in bars, much as we just saw the main character carousing, but the flashbacks, in addition to being humorously soused, also carry an evil overtone, probably done with cellos (celli?). The flashbacks climax with the evil man dying of alcohol poisoning, once again making absolutely clear that drinking is bad, even if there have been several scenes depicting it as humorous, albeit with evil overtones. I think the multiple celloid instruments will make everything clear.

I know that some people may be overanalyzing things too much at this point and wondering why doctors would transplant the liver of a man who died of alcohol poisoning into another man who is drinking too much. Suffice to say that this minor plot point will be explained with thirty seconds of hand-waving, probably with some minor character using big science-y words and maybe some color charts. And then he'll get killed so we don't have to justify things any more. And then everyone will be on the same page, as they say.

So, at this point, we have a hard-drinking guy who had to get a liver transplant, and he receives the liver of a former hard-drinking guy who, and this part is key, was evil.

Then the horror stuff starts happening. Let's say that our hard-drinking protagonist (not the evil one) has decided to stop drinking (I can't remember if that's "on the wagon" or off it, but suffice to say that the position of this man relative to the wagon is such that he's not drinking anymore).

But one day, after brushing his teeth, he decides to use some mouthwash. The camera can zoom in on the bottle of mouthwash, where a label reads "25% alcohol; 50 proof". And suddenly, the man feels strange — he lurches (or perhaps the camera does ... or both!) and grabs for the sink. He stares wildly into the mirror as if to say, "While that mouthwash would be strong if consumed in large quantities, I barely swallowed any of it; I can't be drunk!"

But then we hear a maniacal laugh, and it becomes clear somehow that this man's evil liver, since it is evil, is refusing to process the alcohol that did make it into his system. And not only that, it's actually outputting more alcohol into his bloodstream, even though the man no longer drinks! This can be shown with stock footage of internal organs, perhaps with evil eyes superimposed on the liver. And the aforementioned evil laugh, probably with reverb. And synthesizers that make a sound like that of a cello, only moreso.

And here's the real mind-blowing bit: the man, now drunk because of his evil liver, staggers out into the street, trying to get help. He tries to make his way to the hospital, but due to his blurred vision, accidentally stumbles into the bar that is next door to the hospital. As the camera records him humorously (for all drunken staggering, intentional or not, is humorous) but ominously stumbling into the bar, we see a sign outside that says "Tonight: Men's night! Free drinks for men!" and the ominous music increases in volume.

Inside the bar, the man attempts to alert someone to his (evil) medical condition, but, being (evilly) drunk, he slurs his words, and "I am in need of immediate medical attention" sounds like "I ... need ... me ... a whisky and bitters and a twist of lime". Thinking that the drink that is served to him is a medical antidote (remember that he is confused because he is (evilly) drunk), he knocks it back, but realizing that his condition is getting worse, he again asks for help, with the same (ironic/humorous/evil) results.

To highlight the irony, the same rocking "bar music" that was previously used in the binge-drinking montage can be played, but with ominous, large string instruments (somewhere in size between a double bass and a viola) creating tension that wasn't there before. If it helps to save money, we can actually use the same montage as before, but maybe darken it or have it go out of focus now and then.

Eventually, the man dies of alcohol poisoning (words alone cannot express how ironic this will seem), and at the funeral, one of his friends will give a touching eulogy in which all the major morals of the movie will be touched on: don't drink and drive, organ transplantation is wrong, etc. And everyone else at the funeral will realize he's right, and it'll stop raining (it was raining up until this point), and it's a new day and everyone is turning over a new leaf ...

Until! Just before the credits roll, we flash to a scene in the hospital in which a man is lying on the operating table. We learn that he was once a hard-drinking man himself, and he needs a liver transplant (maybe he is holding onto a bottle as he is being wheeled into the operating room). The doctor tells him, "We have good news: a man just died. He left behind a liver, and we're going to put it in you now, since your liver is not good anymore, but this one should be." And then the doctor will whisper to the associate doctor next to him, "The liver comes from a former hard-drinking man, but I do not think it will be a problem, as I heard of a previous doctor that did the same procedure. The only way it can go wrong is if the liver is evil, and I do not think this one is." But as he says that, we see the liver — in his hand — with its superimposed evil grin.

And then it swallows the camera and we roll the credits.

Blog backlog #1: bad ways to propose

Sometimes, I look at my blog with misty eyes and wonder why I don't write in it as much as I used to. I tell myself that while I used to blog more, I also used to write a lot of bloggy fluff, and now that I've cut a lot of it out, I'm left with this ... which is pretty much nothing. Ah, but a more succinct nothing!

But I do have a collection of blog entries that I started at some now-forgotten date that I haven't posted. I really should delete them, but every time I read them, I think, "Well, that's kind of funny. With a little reworking, I wouldn't be ashamed to publish that."

The problem being, of course, that I never feel like reworking tired, old material. It's like chewing on a tire in the hope that some day it'll be tender. Or like trying to wrap your head around a hastily crafted, tortured simile until it makes sense.

So rather than rework it, I'm now relieving the guilt of my blog backlog (backblog?) by publishing an old idea as-is. Quantity, not quality. This, I believe, is more in keeping with the spirit of blogging.

This piece was written before Julia and I got married. At that time, it was obvious that we would get married, but I wasn't sure when. The inevitability of it all seemed vaguely unromantic, causing me to muse on even more unromantic ways to propose, below:

1) "Baby, I know I've been drinking a bit ... okay, a lot. But you look really hot tonight. And, um, [belch] doyouwannagetmarried?"

2) "Hey, um, I know you're driving right now, and I don't want to distract you from that and all. But, if you could just give me your hand ... no, the other one ... whoa, sorry, didn't mean to make you swerve like that. So, will you marry ... oh, turn left here ... whoops, just circle back, then ... me? Look out!"

3) "So, I've been thinking about us a lot lately. You know, about the future of our relationship. And whether, you know, we should break up or get married and that sort of thing. Because relationships can't last forever, of course. Most of them end with people breaking up. But sometimes they last a really long time and then end when one of the people dies. So I've decided after thinking about it that I don't want our relationship to end by breaking up. Because then we'd both be sad. But if we, I don't know, get married, then our relationship will just end when one of us dies, and then only one of us will be sad. Because the other person will be dead. Do you get what I'm saying?"

Ah, the humor of days gone by! Brings back memories, don't it?

Todd reviews an ad

For reasons that I have since buried somewhere in my mind, I long ago signed up for Harris Poll Online.

I think it may have had something to do with continually reading articles in which the American public tries to prove, via polling results, that it deserves every fool politician it gets. I felt bound to go out there and skew the results as much as I could toward my way of thinking. That way, see, when Americans continued to vote for fool politicians, I could at least comfort myself by saying, "Ah, well, but the polls didn't indicate that would happen!" And that's nice.

Anyhow, I seem to like getting emails every so often indicating that some corporate giant (or possibly a politician ... samethinghahahaha) has paid the polling service to get my opinion. It's like blogging, except that in this case I'm sending my stupid opinions off into the ether at someone's request, not in spite of it. That, and I earn "HIPoints", which are a form of electronic currency that I believe are pegged at 1:1 with hamster pellet treats.

Recently, as part of this process, I was asked to view a TV commercial for Chili's ... er, Chili's Grill & Bar Family Restaurant, now with Slow-Loading Web Site®. Of course, to me, this is like asking the class bully if he perceives any flaws in that nerd over there. I've never been a fan of Chili's, and you could say that I've always chosen to live in parts of Portland that don't have Chili's in them (what's the plural of "Chili's"? "Chilis'"? "Chili'ses"?) That, and I think most advertising is terrible.

So, naturally, I relished the opportunity to enjoy-by-not-enjoying a Chili's commercial. At one point in the poll, I was asked to give a description of everything that I could remember about the commercial. This seemed more like a memory test than a consumer survey, but regardless, here's what I answered:

Woman: "Whaddya want for dinner?"

Man, ignoring her, typing on laptop, apparently unaware of the changes in gender expectations in recent years: "Whatever."

Woman, apparently unable to make any decisions on her own, despite clearly being the cook in the house and only having two choices of canned meat, cries to herself in rather pitiful desperation: "Just make a choice ... !".

[Montage of various images introducing us to the apparent solution to all this tedium: a Chili's restaurant! For some reason, this is the only time we actually see the Chili's-word logo.]

Young lady, more enthusiastically than anyone at an actual Chili's ever would: "Welcome to Chili's!"

[Then we are shown a highly unrealistic montage of food images from this "Triple Dipper" monstrosity: fried this smothered in creamy that, a dish that combines artichoke and lobster (?!) in it, and another dip-y item of some sort. The food looks revulsingly greasy and fattening in spite of having been gussied up for the ad. Then there's an image of four people that look more-professional-than-hip raising mugs of beer to celebrate the imminent onset of myocardial infarction.]

[Then, and yes, I'm much the worse for noticing it, there's a pulsating cartoon chili pepper, apparently all that we get for official branding these days, which pulsates to the aggravatingly-remembered "I want my baby-back-baby-back" rhythm (there's not really much of a tune to it). I wish I hadn't noticed that.]

As you can tell, I really liked the commercial! Later on in the poll, I was asked if I noticed if there was a tagline in the ad. I didn't remember one, but after indicating such in the poll, I was told that there actually had been a tagline. The great thing about consumer surveys, though, is when you get something wrong, it means the commercial screwed up, not you. Very nice.

I was told that the tagline in the ad was "Live A Little" and asked what that meant to me. To which I replied:

It means that somehow, the annoying guy talking over the ad has come to the conclusion that I am lamer than him, which, given the way he talks, is not surprising (that he would think that). He sounds like the kind of guy who tells coworkers that "This weekend I'm throwin' a kegger! Should be ragin'!". Furthermore, it implies that going to Chili's would greatly improve my social life from the sad state it is in. Even though I know all of this to be false.

At this point, you may find yourself wondering, "Why is Todd wasting so much time mocking stupid commercials?" To which I say, first, "Take a number friend — you're not the first to wonder." And, later, under my breath, I add, "Jerk."

No, I'd like to believe that by expressing my contempt for this ad, I'm helping to improve the quality of all television commercials. Just like how when I vote, I make America a better place — and just look what I've done with our country!

But I think the point is that being asked my opinion makes me feel popular, and isn't that the real lesson here?