Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 49–On mindfuck
The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked in the local library first as an intern and later as a page. One of the areas I worked fairly regularly was the AV section–shelving videos, audiobooks, cds, etc. Because of this, I got to be something of a connoisseur of video box copy. In my thus educated opinion, I came to believe that this is the Cadillac, the Citizen Kane of video box copy:
Somehow it happens. A conversation begins, then the magic of interaction and the fever of ideas take over. The next thing you know, your train stop is miles back. Or the restaurant is empty and the waiter is gone. Or the sun seeps into your dorm room. You’ve taken a Mindwalk. You’re different than when you began.
That’s the box copy from the film Mindwalk. Later that summer, my good friend and I watched the film and were greatly disappointed. It just couldn’t stand up to the promise of the box text. It leaned heavily on certain “profound” truths–the kinds of things that make you think “duuuude–mindfuck.” Or they do when you’re taught them in middle school physics. In a high-brow film, however, the come off as just kinda weak. This comic is inspired by that.
It wasn’t the only thing inspired by that, though. At the time, my friend and I talked about how awesome it would be to make a movie based on the back of that video box–something a little more irreverent. In homage to Mindwalk, whose tagline was “A film for passionate thinkers,” we dubbed it “Mindfuck: A Film for Passionate Drinkers.” This wasn’t unusual for us–we spent much of our junior high and high school years making up movies. What made this one special was how close it came to becoming real.
Our vision of the film crystallized when we were in college and regularly exposed to pretentious drunken college student speeches. We ourselves were certainly the perpetrators of many of those speeches. We realized that Mindfuck would be an extremely easy movie to make–all the actors would be college age, the only set we’d need would be a dorm room. We started writing a script the first night we moved into a shared off-campus apartment. We put it aside for another year or so, until he won a copy of Final Draft in a contest when we went to a short film festival. Then we got serious and wrote a complete draft of the approximately ten-minute short film. One of our friends needed to do some kind of media project for an internship she was doing, and we talked her into making Mindfuck that project. We put together a cast that wasn’t even entirely made up of our immediate friends–we even shot a scene. But then nobody really had the drive to be the main person driving the production and it ran out of momentum.
So! If anybody out there in internet-land is looking for an easy student film to make and doesn’t have a script, I’ve got one you might be interested in. If you think The Angriest Rice Cooker is funny, you’d probably like this too–the sense of humor is similar.
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