I wrote this out in various forms over the years, but I can’t seem to get it down in a way that will make me money. Maybe this will make you money.
Short Synopsis: A middle-aged social worker is left holding the bag when one of her care in the community clients goes missing on the subway after a meeting. The client is haunted by dreams of being a fighter during the crusades saved by monks of an unholy order, worshippers of a devil older than Christianity and darker than the black halls of their cloisters. The social worker enlists the help of a down on his luck police sergeant and his teenage runaway son in a search through the halls of the city’s underground and the dark reaches of the tortured mind of a man lost in time. Now the homeless are going missing and body parts are being found in dumpsters all over the city.
Long Version:
Our hero is a Social Worker, she’s middle aged, single and committed to her job. She’s smart, capable and single-minded. She is literally married to her job and has little time for social contacts. She splits her time between her care in the community office job and volunteering for local NGOs and social programs. What spare time she has is spent researching the histories of her clients, she has a voyeuristic bent that drives her to delve deeper and deeper into the pasts of the lost people who wander into her life. She keeps a telescope hooked to a webcam that she can control from her website so she can observer the streets outside her apartment at any time and from anywwhere.
The mystery man is a vagrant who drifts from care facilities to the street and back again. Violent and disruptive, he often finds himself in trouble with the law, which suits him fine as they keep him heavily medicated and trapped behind bars; where he feels safe. He is plagued by dreams of being a crusader, cutting down men in the middle east, only to be felled by an arrow to the chest. He dreams of being taken to a monastary that hides a deep and deadly sect of Faustian monks, who have dealt with devils and demons older than Christianity. He also dreams of stalking the streets of the city, unleashing these same demons on the poor and unfortunates in the alleys and subways of the city. After his last visit with the hero he has decided to seek refuge in the deep tunnels of the city, only to find that the Monks that he dreamed of are real and operating under the guise of a Charity for the homeless in the city.
The Sargeant and his son are at constant odds, typical father-son conflicts; but the son has run away and the sargeant reaches out the hero for help in locating his son in the system. The Sargeant is burnt out, sad that he has lost his son to the streets. The Son left home to try and stretch his wings and gain some freedom from his “cop” father, he meets our mystery man in the streets and befriends him. The son witnesses some of the horrors that creep from the mystery man during the night and looks for his father and our hero.
The “big bad” is a demon of the C’thulu level mythos, an old Demon who has been working with “The Order of the Whole” since before the Crusades. The Monks are led by a charismatic old monk who is a figure in the city of ill-repute. There is a vague air of menace around the order, but they are a generous charity who house and feed anyone who comes to their door. They are feeding the homeless the remains of their compatriots, used in dark rituals to commune with their demon lords.
Plot arc: The Mystery man is introduced, walking into a police station and assaulting 5 police officers in acrobatic fashion, breaking at least two arms. He is left in the care of the hero, to whom he relates some of his story (leaving out details about what he gets up to at night). She concludes that while he is violent, he needs care and he is taken in an ambulance to a sanitarium for further observation. Our hero looks into his past hsitry and sees hundreds of arrests. The mystery man is “lost” en route by the ambulance drivers, who stopped for a bite to eat. This sets in motion the events that lead to the sargeant and the hero meeting. After finding the monks, the mystery man is led by the demons to commit more and more horrors. It is revealed that he is in fact the Crusader that he dreamed about, and he has been alive these many years, cursed by the demons after he slaughtered the whole order save one initiate (the leader of the order now). It is the hero who in the end must face and defeat the whole order and the demons themselves.
Since reviews are subjective: Manohla, F**K your reviews
Published by NiteMayr on June 27, 2008I haven’t seen “Wanted” yet. I want to. I do. I don’t subscribe to the theory that male on male violence is some sort of release for homosexual angst. This reviewer seem to think any kind of male on male violence is a precursor to surprise butt secks and sword fights.
Case an point “Manohla Dargis” reviews “Wanted” with this turn of phrase:
First of all, who begins a sentence with “And”? The word ‘and’ shouldn’t be used that way; and is used to join concepts as an additive (you suck as a reviewer AND you are a hack) see? That’s how one uses ‘and’!
The thrust of this little expulsion is to draw attention to the throbbing members of the review, all veiny and proud. (See I can make penis jokes too!) However, I’m not a highly paid reviewer for the New York Times. I assume highly paid, for all I know this person could be an intern. However, their review history says otherwise. That’s a good five year history there; good, nothing I write will hurt their feelings, they sat through and enjoyed Fido they clearly lost their sense of reason and ability to discern value in a film before they took up the reviewers pen.
I see nothing wrong with being funny in your reviews, I remember one review from Robert Ebert where the whole thing devolved into an anecdote about how a pair of young audience members could not get into a movie about pretty lesbians. I can accept eccentricity in a review as well; but to pare a movie into a long gay joke? Why? It was the same with Jackass, Borat, Eastern Promise and Fight Club, any kind of bare chested fighting gets into a movie and the main characters are suddenly picking out china patterns and looking for an apartment on Church Street in Toronto.
You know, I was bouncing around the idea of a Gay Cowboy movie years ago, not like Brokeback, but a real gay COWBOY movie, with action and gunplay and so on. In a movie like that, you would expect gay jokes and so on, but with movies with clearly male-focused plot some reviewers can’t help themselves but to project a homosexual idea onto it. Does that say more about the reviewer or the movie?