Movies in Fifteen Minutes

I m rather fond of online-to-real-life publishing successes such as two of those previously featured in this column. Sharing origins with Everything Matters and RealLivePreacher.com, Movies in Fifteen Minutes (M15M) hails from one user on LiveJournal.com (LJ), who came back from watching Van Helsing and wrote an entry that somehow became a 2500-word parody.[return][return]Her friends loved it, linked to it in their own LJs and emailed it to their friends. This LJ user, who goes by the name Cleolinda Jones, saw Troy the following week and Troy in Fifteen Minutes followed. [return][return]Through the very viral nature of the online community, the M15M phenomena hit nearly every corner of the Internet and Jones was approached for book deal.[return][return]This resulting tome, aptly subtitled Hollywood Blockbusters for people who can t be bothered , contain the parodies of 10 movies (12, if you want to count all LotR movies individually) - Braveheart, Gladiator, Harry Potter and the Philosopher s Stone, Independence Day, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Star Wars II, Titanic and of course, all three Lord of the Rings& which may run a little over 15 minutes.[return][return]To the uninitiated, the book looks like a collection of bizarre scripts at first glance. If you ve never ventured into that side of the internet chat language, I have no room to explain the lingo to you here.[return][return]But once you get into it, you realize that Jones has it nailed. Take a movie, whit it down to its barest minimum and rewrite the script with appropriate amounts of irreverence, sarcasm and wit. Instant quotables.[return][return]Now she doesn t hate the movies here. In her Acknowledgements in front of the book, she states that this book is for everyone who loves movies so much they can laugh at them anyway. Laugh they did.[return][return]Picture this: Harry Potter asking a muggle porter how to get to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and the porter retorting with, God, I hate this time of the year. [return][return]There were jokes that reoccurred throughout the chapter, like Legolas and his habit of staring the obvious. There were jokes that crossed over into other movies, like Darth Saruman. There are section titles like The Cliff of Manly Weeping in the Fellowship of the Rings chapter (I ll leave you to guess what scene that is!).[return][return]Van Helsing, Troy, Phantom of the Opera and a slew of other M15M parodies do not appear in the print version. Thanks to the fact that M15M was first seen on the Internet, you can still read them at http://community.livejournal.com/m15m if you poke around a little for them.[return][return]Read it, laugh and share it with a friend. And no, you can t borrow my book.[return]return