After Brazil announces plans to
make a film promoting coffee's health benefits, our columnist offers some ideas
about how Hollywood's top directors could make the movie
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Gersh Kuntzman
Newsweek
Updated: 3:51 p.m. ET Nov. 29, 2004
Nov. 29 - Last week, the Brazilian government announced
it was considering a proposal to hire a Hollywood director to extol on film the
heretofore under-explored health benefits of coffee, Brazil's principal
crop (after replica Pelé soccer uniforms).
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You might think that I am
making this up, but even I don't drink enough coffee to have an
imagination fertile enough for this idea. The truth is, U.S. coffee consumption
has waned over the past several years, and the Brazilian government is concerned
that Americans are blaming caffeine for ailments ranging from anxiety to
hypertension and sleeplessness.
"In the U.S. and Brazil people think of coffee as just
caffeine—a film could change everything," said the movie's Brazilian scientific
adviser, Darcy Lima. Yes, of course; but only in the hands of the right
director.
Certainly, many of Hollywood's top directors can convey
the romance, the allure of this intoxicating beverage, but which of these
"auteurs" will also communicate how coffee reduces heart disease and colon
cancer, curbs alcohol consumption and smoking?
To help the Brazilian
cause, here's how I imagine some of Hollywood's top directors might approach the
making of "Caffeine and You: A Love Story for the Ages:"
Woody Allen, director of such
romantic comedies as "Annie Hall," “Manhattan" and "Hannah and her
Sisters ": Max adored coffee. He idolized it all out of proportion. He loved the
smell of a freshly brewed pot of Conilon Robusta sustainably harvested in the
rolling hills of Minas Gerais. He believed that were it not for coffee, he would
have been lost in a miasma of depression, neuroses and a small studio apartment
on West 48th Street with inadequate closet space. When people would ask why he
was drinking so much coffee, he'd reply that he was participating in an
experiment in human (cough) sexual perversion—and he was the (cough) control
group. A militant hypochondriac, Max eventually visited Dr. Chaim T. Porchnik,
an elderly Jewish gentleman who claimed to have once been Hermann Goering's
personal physician. Max asked whether his caffeine consumption was excessive and
Dr. Porchnik hit him on the wrists with a large Polish kielbasa. Out in the
waiting room, Max met a zaftig brunette named Alison Poska and immediately
wanted to do to her what Bush is doing to the national economy. Max asked her
out for a cup of coffee, and, sensing that she was only mildly ambivalent, later
invited her to his place, where they made mad, passionate love for three hours,
stopping only for brief shots of Brazilian Chapadao de Ferro espresso. The
affair didn't last, however. It was bad enough that Alison cheated on Max with
her philosophy professor, but the complete betrayal was confirmed when Max
discovered Alison and the professor drinking Dunkin Donuts decaf out of take-out
Styrofoam cups.
Oliver Stone, director of such
factually accurate films as "JFK," "Alexander" and "Nixon:" Juan
Valdez, a coffee trafficker with the Colombian cartel, gets mixed up in a plot
to overthrow the head of the Brazilian growers' collective, a shadowy,
cross-dressing hitman known throughout the Rio underworld as Señor Peito. Valdez
goes undercover, posing as a researcher at the Sao Paolo Institute of Coffee
Sciences who not only proves that caffeine, taken in moderation, can provide
health benefits, but also that Lee Harvey Oswald would've hit John F. Kennedy on
the first shot if he had been able to procure a decent double shot macchiato in
Dallas in 1963. Pursued by Señor Peito, Valdez slips him a mickey containing
1,200 milligrams of caffeine, inducing a psychedelic hallucination in which
Peito morphs into the late Rodney Dangerfield, who then marches on Washington to
protest the embargo against Cuba.
•
Kuntzman: When Should Pols Be Actors? The
controversy over the appearance of Maryland's governor in new state
tourism ads prompts our columnist to look at similar thespian
efforts by other elected
officials
Jerry
Bruckheimer, producer of such action blockbusters as "Pirates of
the Caribbean," "Armageddon," "Con Air" and "The Rock:" After a mysterious
explosion at the Centro de Cafe Nationale, the government scours its prisons and
organizes a crack team of rogue roasters, caffeine terrorists, and corrupt
bean-pickers led by Surnam Symbolica, who has spent two decades in solitary
confinement for replacing the fine coffee they normally serve at the prison with
Folger's Instant. After a lengthy montage sequence in which Symbolica showers,
shaves, gets back into shape and has sex with his government handler, he and his
team infiltrate the insurgency and arrest the bombers. Then he has sex with
Salma Hayek, who plays Carlita Feijoada, a top Brazilian supermodel who is
working for the government in exchange for a light sentence for her recent
arrest for smuggling caffeine inside silicone breast implants. Just before
Symbolica and his team can be recaptured, Feijoada turns the table on the
government and assists Symbolica's escape. Nicolas Cage plays an aging ex-Nazi
who blames the International Zionist conspiracy for the rise of Starbucks. Jon
Bon Jovi sings the movie's surefire hit theme song, "I Would Gladly Pay $4.50
(For a Double Grande Latte with Extra Foam)."
Pedro
Almodovar, director of such films as "Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown," "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" and "Bad Education:" A
sexy coffee researcher in a low-cut lab coat seduces the son and, later, the
daughter of her lover's ex-fiancée, who herself was having a tempestuous, but
ultimately unsatisfying, affair with the president of Brazil, who has been in a
coma for six years. He comes out of his torpor just long enough to utter the
seemingly random numbers: 36, 27, 39. The researcher's lover (and his son, also
her lover) believe that the numbers are merely the ramblings of an old man
remembering the curves of a former girlfriend, but the researcher (and her
lover's daughter, also her lover) eventually decode the message as the recipe
for the perfect cup of espresso: Thirty-six grams of coffee, 27 meter-kilos of
pressure and 39 degrees (centigrade) of hot water. Later, the president dies,
his lover returns to her other lover and the researcher begins a new project: a
revolutionary treatment for bullfighter hemorrhoids.
George Lucas, director of several "Star Wars" films: A
long time ago, somewhere far away, King Zigurata sent unmanned drones containing
raw coffee beans to all quadrants of the galaxy in hopes of sharing with the
universe the secret of this remarkable bean. One of the beans is intercepted by
a nefarious galactic trader, Moka Java, who unlocks the secret drug inside the
miracle bean, synthesizes it artificially and uses it to enslave the entire
population on Regula 1. But a rebellion, led by O-Big-Kona-Grande, is afoot.
Recruiting young troops in the caffeine mines of Regula, O-Big-Kona and his
protégé Nuke Oldcoffee infiltrate the heart of the Imperial headquarters and
unleash a computer virus that confuses the Emperor's automated coffee-making
system into serving weaker brews. The Emperor, rendered too listless to summon
the power of the Dark Side, orders O-Big-Kona and Nuke to be freeze-dried and
sold in convenience stores throughout the quadrant. By the time the Emperor
realizes that Nuke is his son, he's already been consumed by a band of Wookie
construction workers on the graveyard shift.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a
reporter for The New York Post. Check out his rudimentary website at http://www.gersh.tv
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