Tagline's Thursday Three: The Saturday Night Satellite-Delay Edition

Those shameless link-whoring scamps at movie weblog Tagline have introduced The Thursday Three which gives lazy bloggers some ideas for cinematic content in return for a recripocal link. Sounds fair enough to me, so here goes.

Do we need Indiana Jones 4?

Well, this of course depends on your definition of need, as first off I'd put food, water and sleep slightly above the prospect of seeing 62-year-old Harrison Ford pick up his bullwhip for a fourth installment of Indy. But, relatively speaking, it all depends on the script: if the story is great, the thrills magnificent and there's genuine talent in front of and behind the cameras, I haven't got a problem with another caper. However, given that this isn't the way Hollywood works and the story will probably be the last thing that gets worked on, the basic concept itself doesn't exactly enthrall me. Now if River Phoenix were still alive (stop me, if you've heard this one before...)

What the heck do we want to see after Return Of The King?

Stephen, Al, if I can be pedantic and patronising for a minute, what I really want to see after Return Of The King is less use of the word heck amongst non-US peoples, if you ask me. But back to your question, and if I was a Hollywood mogul looking at a new franchise I'd take a leaf out of the screenplay of movie producers from the 70s and make a host of great movies I wanted to see, and busy myself taking lots of drugs and shagging up-and-coming actresses so I didn't have to worry about the poor box-office returns.

For a start, I'd take David Cronenberg to one side and get him to put his ideas for the Basic Instinct sequel back on track, with the Sharon Stone character suffering from a rare pigment condition that transforms her into Halle Berry with the hots for an embittered female cop played by Gina Gershon in a series of tight-fitting black vest-tops.

Then, having seen Rules Of Attraction I'd yank Roger Avary off the Glamorama adaptation and put Paul Verhoeven in charge, and give Justin Timberlake the lead as the feckless but good-looking richboy struggling with orientation issues and an uncertain future. After all, typecasting is just a variant on giving the public what it wants, in my view.

Other than that, I'd pull ace director Nicolas Roeg out of retirement, give him loads of money and let him direct anything he wants: the last time anyone did something like this he produced the magnificent Eureka so I'm prepared to take my chances. In order to get away with financing this, I'd need some hits: so I'd cast Lucy Lui as (Aqua)Marina in a remake of the Gerry Anderson Stingray TV series, opposite a good-looking but wooden Jude Law as Troy Tempest, and encourage Quentin Tarantino to finally fulfil his destiny and remake Pam Grier's entire early 70s film catalogue with Beyonce Knowles (and have Kelly Rowland on standby if Knowles gets too greedy with her wage and wardrobe demands).

My coup-de-grace would be pairing-up absent bloggers Graybo and Mo Morgan in a crazy madcap remake of Cheech and Chong Get The Munchies. Well, I'd find it funny, and you would too if I shovelled enough drugs down your throat and introduced you to Heidi Fleiss' finest.

And these are just the ideas off the top of my head. Bet you're really glad you asked now, aren't you, boys?

Who should star in Terminator 4?

I haven't seen Terminator 3 yet, so this is a bit tricky. Mind you, if Cheech and Chong Get The Munchies is the roaring box-office success I expect I'd need to find a follow-up star vehicle for Graybo and past evidence suggests he has the cool shades and pimptastic jacket to pull it off. But if G detaches himself from reality too much regards his wage demands, I'd give the role to Gina Gershon in a series of tight-fitting black vest-topzzzzzzzz......

So here's the deal. The clocks go back tonight. But you can't have the five minutes of your life back that it took to read my answers to The Thursday Three. Parallax View is terribly sorry.