The latest Hollywood trend? Board game movies. From the Battleship flick last spring, to projects for Monopoly and Hungry Hungry Hippos and even Candy Land starring Adam Sandler, Hasbro must be raking in the royalties. Here's a list of kitchen-table-to-silver-screen adaptations that Hollywood should capitalize on:
Operation directed by Wes Craven
For Halloween, the man behind Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes brings us an adaption of the Milton Bradley classic. The film stars Nicolas Cage as a depraved, former NU pre-med student who dropped out of school after failing Organic Chemistry. Still dreaming of being a doctor, he now resides just off campus, close enough to frequent the Keg and solicit “patients” for his grizzly operations. His normal routine meets a hitch, however, when he convinces university president Morton “Morty” Schapiro (played by John Slattery) to come check out the serial killer's allegedly massive collection of purple ties. Once inside, Morty proves too charismatic to kill, but he's seen too much for the villainous aspiring doctor to let him leave.
Sorry! directed by the Farrelly brothers
This rom-com from the guys who directed There's Something About Mary pits Jenna Fischer, Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and Seth Rogen in the love triangle's rarer and more dangerous older brother: the love rectangle. For a while, the characters play relationship musical chairs with each other. At one point, while straightening his tie and fixing his hair, Wilson actually looks into the camera, winks and says, “Sorry!” He's just bumped Rogen's character out of his relationship with Aniston's. Tempers finally flare up and the dramatic climax has Rogen looking forlorn at his own reflection in the window of the bus he's riding with no destination in mind. It seems friendships have been ruined, but all is made well after a friendly game of Sorry!, and the characters agree they can still get along.
Chutes and Jacob's Ladder directed by Lars von Trier
The Scandinavian director presents another haunting exploration of human suffering. Characters without names or back-stories endure unbelievable miseries that make Björk's fate in Dancer in the Dark look tame. Juxtaposed with these symbolic “chutes” are scenes of a deranged rabbi wandering the streets of Chicago seeking Jacob's Ladder, the Old Testament's legendary stairway to heaven. Finally he stumbles upon a fire escape and eagerly climbs to the top of an apartment building, where he proceeds to accidentally fall into the garbage chute.
Jenga directed by Andy Warhol
Recently discovered and reconstructed from the Warhol Archives, this four-hour epic consists of Nico pulling the block that sends a Jenga tower tumbling over. The clip is played in slow motion over and over again while John Cale and Lou Reed scream “Jenga!!!” at first mildly or ironically, but eventually their cries become shrill and agonizing. Jenga won't be as controversial as Warhol's self-descriptive film Blow Job, nor as teeth-grindingly dull as Empire, an eight hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building. Expect critics, Warhol fanatics and every RTVF major in your dorm to fawn over the metaphorical collapse of gender roles/capitalism/existing power structures represented by the falling blocks.