GENRE FILMS (cont.)
“The Mendelian” - A politician who wants to better the country by eliminating the weak says we should blend our genes in the best manner: smart people with smart people, strong people with strong people, beautiful people with beautiful people, etcetera, to create the best people possible out of the dominant genes. A series of communities spring-up around the country calling themselves Mendelians. Their cause catches-on as the years go by, until large swaths of the country are Mendelian. These people then concoct a plan to purge the rest of the country of the “inferiors” with a propaganda-fueled genocide designed by the smart, promoted by the beautiful, and fought by the strong. (08/27/2013)
“The Undercity” - A shifty-eyed vagrant befriends a benevolent hobo at the latter’s encampment, then strangles him in his boxcar, steals his rucksack (containing a notebook, some food, and some money) and runs away. On his way out, the vagrant passes a preteen: the son of the hobo. The son discovers his father and subsequently turns to the local underground mafia, to be raised as one of them instead of becoming a street urchin. Better yet, the orphaned son is itching for revenge…
The orphan's father was a kind-hearted bioengineer, a year removed from his house and job after a financial setback, and he’d been since working on an idea for cybernetic eyes that would give you night vision and an HUD for your entertainment and organizational needs. The vagrant stole the notebook and patent paperwork that would have brought the father back into prominence; as a consequence, upon realizing what he had stolen, the vagrant became rich and famous and—fifteen years later—is living in the Boston Overcity. (He didn't even need to do any extra work because, bringing this to the right people, he acquired a top team of actual bioengineers to interpret the blueprints and actually develop the product, while he just worked the media as a “rags-to-riches” CEO.) Meanwhile the orphan was raised by a low-class mafia, with next to nothing in the Boston Undercity.
An older, well-trained caporegime (hitman/messenger) trained the orphan, after his induction, for those fifteen years, taking him under his wing partially to help fill a void left when his own son abandoned him, saying he didn’t want to “grind” for meat and potatoes his whole life, and instead had a brilliant-but-risky idea to seize wealth from the top-down; the capo told him he was crazy and going to get himself killed, and his son told him to fuck-off and left. In training the orphan, the capo started him off with learning to collect and leave dead-drops (guns, drugs, etc.) then how to stake-out, then burglary and retrieval, then interrogation, then how to fight, how to defend, how to disable, how to maim, how to kill, how to take on a group, how to assassinate with nothing but silence and a knife, and finally how to use a gun, and how to shoot long distances. // Elsewhere, during the latter half of this training period, an Undercity conman hatches-up a scheme: steal goods and pawn them for cash, saving-up to pay for plastic surgery, to make himself look like the ex-vagrant CEO, so he can infiltrate the Overcity, stealthily kill the CEO, and commandeer his life. It would mean performing for the rest of his days, but—with time—he can modify the CEO’s personality to match his own, until he can basically live as himself with the identity (and perks!) of this shithead CEO.
In the present-day, the orphan travels up to the Overcity to avenge his father with the help of the caporegime; together they plan the best way to attack the CEO, deciding on hitting him at a convention, when the most eyes will be upon him. At the same time, the conman—recovered from a successful surgery—gains entrance to the CEO’s tower “as him” and, waiting there, surprises the returning CEO and kills him, and covertly disposes of the body into the incinerator. — Preparing for the convention, the orphan infiltrates the arena and ascends to the rafters, where he sets-up a sniper rifle overlooking the stage. (The convention is for a new product release: a device built into the ear to act as a phone, radio, and hearing aid.) The capo takes a seat in the audience. The convention begins, and the CEO comes out to detail the product; eventually the capo interrupts and says he knows the truth behind the CEO’s first invention—that it was stolen—and that the CEO is a fraud. The conman, in his performance, says this isn't true (honestly, he wouldn’t know) and he asks for his heckler to stand up. The capo stands and the conman is shocked, breaking character: "...dad??" The capo—seeing something specific about him, or hearing the familiar voice—realizes the CEO is actually his son in disguise; he turns to the orphan above, yelling not to shoot, but it's too late: the orphan has pulled the trigger on the conman, putting a fat round through his chest, killing him.
The capo is distraught—angry, sad, confused... The police learn that the CEO was actually the conman, and that the conman had killed the CEO earlier; in gathering evidence of the penthouse killing they find the hobo's journal in the CEO’s safe; an investigation is launched, and it's concluded that it was stolen. — Meanwhile, the capo seeks revenge on the orphan, but the orphan—after apologizing profusely, to no avail—hesitantly dispatches his surrogate father figure… The orphan then has to leave the mafia to avoid his own death contract; resigning to the Overcity, he is reunited with his late father’s journal and, subsequently, chronicled by the news and then offered—by the company’s board—an atonement of a board seat and position as [temporary] frontman of the company. The orphan is gracious but he also now has 0/2 father figures and is alone—but that's okay, because he knows he isn’t long for this earth: the mafia will come knocking, looking for revenge, and the orphan waits for the day they decide to do so…
Given that it’s a cyberpunk/action film, the score should be electronic music. I'm thinking an original score by Deadmau5—he has the chops to do it and do it a great job.
The Undercity is the original City of Boston, built on land, but—as overpopulation became more of an issue, and skyscrapers are not easily traversable—a second city was built above it (as the case with most cities by this point, in the year 2144) and this is where the richer half lives. So above their crumbling old city is a glistening metropolis (max height above, 1500 feet; min height above, 100 feet) built upon massive, thick steel pylons. There's old oil rigs planted in random places in the old cities, where buildings used to stand, that pumped-up what remained of the last of the fossil fuels; now they rely on solar, wind, and thermal energy; everything but thermal is gathered on the Overcity; thermal plants exist in the Undercity, much like the oil rigs had except running deeper and funneling their energy to the Overcity; enterprising lower classes siphon some of this heat-energy, however, into the Undercity. There is an ink that knows when it's been seen, so there are messages that can only be read once, and once your eyes read a part, the ink starts to fade away. The Overcity has a high-speed maglev tram/subway system with a modern design: sleek white exterior, curvy seats, and blue interior lights, and is clean and extravagant; the Undercity retains the MBTA subway, dirty and on its last legs. (Based on a dream I had.) (08/27/2013)
Evil Siamese Twin - A man was born with a conjoined twin whose head is submerged in his left shoulder blade, and the head (face, really) is the only truly “unique” part to this twin. His (their) family had often debated killing the twin and removing it so the “whole” son could live a normal life, but the son and the twin can communicate without speaking, and have bonded, and he can't allow his twin be killed. The family eventually respect this decision. The man has few friends (people who are okay with him having a twisted face on his back; note that he doesn't remove his shirt in public). Eventually, the leech twin starts trying to control the body (with the normal twin's blessing—trying to teach him to know what it's like to be normal and have bodily agency). Soon the leech can control the body, and he likes to take control for brief random seconds if only to mess with the normal twin: all fun and games. His friends question him about removing the leech, since it’s been proposed by doctors that keeping it will lessen his life expectancy; the leech twin is done with listening to this kind of talk and, when the normal twin is asleep, the leech one controls the body and tries to leave the house (sleepwalking the body) to kill a particularly outspoken friend. The normal wakes up once they get outside and he regains control, but he is now scared of it happening again. When they're all hanging out, the leech takes control suddenly and tries to strangle the one friend, almost succeeding before the normal can regain control. The leech and normal struggle as the leech tries to obtain full control and the normal tries to resist being overcome by his evil half—a struggle both internal and external—and, after a term of dead-even struggle (more of a writhing, really) the normal fears he might lose and he tells the cops (who have since shown up) to shoot him in the face—to actually kill him; they say they won’t but, when he charges them in a burst of control, they eagerly oblige. His body twitches and tries standing as, while the normal is dead, the leech uses the last of his energies to try and assume full control—but the body was never his, he was only borrowing it, and eventually he, too, expires, unsuccessful in becoming autonomous. (08/27/2013)
The Core Four is hanging-out; Leah and Nick go off to talk about how much of an ass I’ve been lately, which is fair; Kevin stays with me, and he tells me he's getting back with his ex-girlfriend, and I say “Nooo”. While we talk, in our parked car, I see seven armed people pass us to go into the building that Leah and Nick are in; I'm nervous AF, so Kev and I pull our guns (concealed carry, apparently) and wait for them to come out; I prop up my phone to take a photo every second of that same sidewalk, through my windshield. He and I wait outside, behind our car, and Leah and Nick come up behind us scaring us and we're like “Fuck!” because they almost got shot by us, and before they can ask why we have guns there are screams from inside the building, and the seven armed people rush out: a stern older woman with short red-grey hair, a scowling bald man, two identical twins with matching facial hair, three goons, and lanky grey-haired man—my old professor.
We pop out and start a shootout, and Leah gets her pinky finger [and the top of her ear] shot off, and we kill the three goons and wound the professor in the chest, and everyone else escapes. I run over to the professor to execute him (sorry) saying "I never did like your class" but he says “Wait wait wait!” because he wants to snitch on his compadres, because they had cajoled him into this job on threats of killing him, but won't say why they needed him or who they were or what they were trying to accomplish with their shoot-up/burglary in that building, unless I get him to a hospital and save his life before he bleeds out—so I begrudgingly throw him in the back of the car, between Nick and Leah, and Kev and I drive him to the hospital. Professor staggers in alone and I say I found him: he had been shot in the chest; he's taken off and fixed, and after he's patched up and resting, Kev and I struggle to sneak him out of the hospital while Leah plays distraction following her pinky finger's patch-job, with Nick helping her perform, and we anxiously impatiently wait (with Professor hiding in the backseat, in pain and drowsy) for Leah and Nick to come out.
They finally do and we drive off; headlights off, we avoid our house after staking it out and seeing that it's being watched by someone else; we go to a different house—one owned by our friend, played by Aziz Ansari (but not actually him), who is super super hesitant for his home to become a safehouse for a wounded hostage/criminal that's being hunted down, but he complies when we insist and force ourselves in. He was hosting a game night with three other people, including Stella, a DIV III footballer named Steven, and a cheerleader named Cindy that Steven is dating. We parked in the closed garage and stashed Professor in the loft, overlooking the main space, and yet somehow the older woman with red-grey hair and the silent bald man find us, and innocently knock on the door to ask if we're visiting for their game night (which they shouldn't know about yet they do) and Aziz plays dumb and irritated and he asks them to leave, so they do—and Aziz thinks that's the end of it, but Steven knows it's not and helps us weapon-up for an escape in a different vehicle. As Steven expected, the four foes were encircling—so Kev and Nick got in our car and opened the garage to drive away fast, taking the heat before the four could storm the house; as they were distracted and getting in their car to pursue, I dragged Professor with Leah, Steven, and Cindy to Steven's car, and the five of us drove off in the other direction.
Aaaand this is a long chase, then a conspiracy thing; can't get the cops' help; I’m forgetting a lot of what happened later the longer I’m awake and sober-up from the land of drowse. There was, at one point, we had to tie a guy to a chair with duct tape and interrogate him, and we pushed his chair backward down a flight of stairs (ouch; can't steady his fall, takes hurt to his neck and knees and his body goes rigid) and Peter Stormare was there, but I can’t remember why. (Based on a dream I had.) (01/03/2018)
Bomb rigged to blow inside apartment building; wire switcher left out front: goaded to defuse. What's their angle? I, experienced detective/bomb-defuser, am brought in to do it. I examine it and start pulling plugs. The order in which I do pull these AUX/mic-like cable from their ports should have been fine, but as soon as I twist one before pulling it, the bay window blows out in a fireball: the bomb went off. But I hadn't disconnected the connection yet, which means it wasn't an electrical signal to blow it—it was a mechanical one, for the twisting of the cable; it went too fast for it to have been electrical, as I hadn't pulled yet. "It's tape!" I realize, because somehow there was tape blocking the connection (maybe on the cable partially, and twisting it revealed the connection that triggered it).
So the cops kick-in the door and rush upstairs, to the apartment of the guy we're after: a kidnapper. They rush past me as I stop to take-in the foyer: something seems off. The cops all run upstairs but I poke around this lobby area, and I notice a deformity in the couch upholstery. The cops all ran past and didn't notice, but I did—and it stands up: it's a man in a body-suit made of the same fabric this couch is upholstered in (camouflage). He pushes past me but I lunge. He fends me off with one arm, and as his body-suit falls away I see he's holding the captive baby in his other arm. I climb up his back to get him in the crook of my elbow and choke him. I yell out the door for help but it appears all of the cops had rushed upstairs where sound no longer exists as a physical property. I yell upstairs "officer!" but no reply. He breaks free and tumbles outside.
A crowd has formed and a few officers are doing perimeter. When he stumbles out, he ducks through the crowd, and I pursue. I weave through and pass a man who's quizzically holding a baby: the hostage baby, which has been handed off to him. I skirt past, trying not to lose sight of the guy. I hear "he's over there! He's headed that way, through the crowd!" and lots of the crowd get riled up, looking in one direction and swaying to look, and moving that way—and I look, but I also see who's saying it all: the man I pursue, who's now moving away from the crowd, and hollering in an attempt to trick me. The crowd crushes in one direction, eager to find him, and I have to fight the tide and push through.
I break through and chase him down, and tackle him. I sit on his chest, kneeling on his arms, and I push down on his neck's pressure points with both hands (so he can breathe but won't fight) and he's just laughing while still hollering about "where the guy is moving through the crowd." I call for officer assistance but it takes a while for any cops to hear me, or see me, but eventually they find me and they take the guy into handcuffs and walk him off, while he laughs still. An officer hands me the baby, which is unharmed. I don’t want this baby and I try to find who it belongs to. (Based on a dream I had.) (05/01/2018)
Original documents created on the dates parenthesized following each item.