' ' Cinema Romantico: Movie Character Road Trip

Monday, October 29, 2012

Movie Character Road Trip

Recently I was listening to the Solid Verbal College Football podcast (stay with me!) and near the end hosts Ty Hildebrandt and Dan Rubenstein launched into a crazy-in-the-best-way-possible conversation regarding which coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference they would most like to include on a hypothetical road trip. This, as it must, got me to thinking: which movie characters would I most like to see take a hypothetical cinematic road trip?

Thus, a list was in order. A couple points. One, this road trip, in adhering to the spirit of the road trip movie Fandango which I recently watched for the first time, will be restricted to five characters. Two, no characters from actual Road Trip movies are allowed. Instead these are regular movie characters drafted for their very own Road Trip movie.


1.) Walter Stratford (Larry Miller), 10 Things I Hate About You. He is our driver, the man who initiates the road trip when he receives a panicked call from his daughter Kat at college across the country at Sarah Lawrence in New York only to have her phone battery die before she can explain her crisis. Thus, he gets behind the wheel of his old Dodge – he is spending so much on college for his daughter that he has turned into a penny-pincher and refuses to splurge for a last-second plane ticket – and sets out to rescue her from, well, whatever it is that has obviously gone wrong. I like Miller for this part because of his incessant irritability, a trait that would play well as the road trip goes further and further off the rails.


2.) Dr. Allen Pearl (Eugene Levy), Waiting For Guffman. Having left Blaine, Missouri to seek the stars, Dr. Pearl has just finished performing a song, dance & comedy show at a ski lodge in Boise only to be abandoned by his suspect manager at the Comfort Inn – the same Comfort Inn where Walter Stratford is staying. Dr. Pearl and Walter get to talking over continental breakfast and Dr. Pearl reveals he needs to make it to his upcoming shows in Cheyenne, Wyoming, DeKalb, Illinois and Parsippany, New Jersey. To help cut costs, Walter agrees to bring him along.


3.) Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), The Royal Tenenbaums. Dr. Pearl’s show in Cheyenne is less than successful, save for Eli Cash who came to Wyoming to write a novel about Jim Bridger. Instead he wound up back in rehab and now has no one to ferry him back home to NYC. Dr. Pearl attempts to mentor Eli but finds the tables turned.


4.) Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), Glengarry Glen Ross. At Dr. Pearl’s show in DeKalb, Ricky Roma is in the audience, having come out from the city to convince some sucker to buy a shabby property in southern Wisconsin. He immediately senses a few patsies and moves in to get one of the three – Dr. Pearl, Eli, or Walter – to agree to purchase a poorly half-built vacation home on a Georgia swamp. Sensing he has Dr. Pearl on the hook, he agrees to tag along to Parsippany to reel him in, all the while dispensing life advice to Eli and prompting Walter to re-evaluate his relationship with his daughters.


5.) Michael Shannon (Michael Shannon). At a diner in Parsippany, the four men run find Michael Shannon working the counter. He claims to be “researching a role” but never discloses what this “role” is. He wonders if he can bum a ride back into “the city” and upon getting a whiff of Roma’s real estate scheme tasks himself to be Dr. Pearl’s protector while also officially declaring himself to be Eli’s new sponsor.

2 comments:

Derek Armstrong said...

This was funny. I have nothing more to add.

Except:

I so thought this was going to be another post about Elizabethtown. ;-)

Nick Prigge said...

Ha! I suppose if I hadn't written the post I would have suspected it would be about Elizabethtown too.