MTSBM: The Lay of Leithian

 I don't want to talk about it.

As we all know, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy is a marvel of modern film-making. More importantly, though, it made scads of money. The obvious Hollywood response to such an obvious cash cow is to milk it for all it’s worth, and to that end The Hobbit will be released in two parts sometime in the next five years. But The Hobbit is a happy children’s tale, not the gritty epic that is Lord of the Rings. I mean, come on, in the book, the main character wins the One Ring to Rule Them All in a riddle contest, and spends most of the climactic battle unconscious. Oh, and it has an even worse deus ex machina than Lord of the Rings. But even if The Hobbit does bomb, Hollywood executives need not fear! Because Tolkien had significantly more than just Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit up his literary sleeve. Tolkien wrote entire detailed histories of Middle-Earth, going back all the way to it’s creation, with stories spanning thousands of years. That’s a lot of movies. But one of these is so perfectly suited to be a movie that it’s almost shocking no Tolkien nerd has ever sent this idea off to MGM, and that is the Lay of Leithian, or Release from Bondage, possibly called more simply “Of Beren and Luthien.” The story goes sort of like this:

MTSBM: Ridin' in My Car

Oh . . . too soon.

One thing's for sure:
it will involve these sunglasses.

As far as the ultimate movie goes, many have posited several theories for what it would look like. Some envision it as the ultimate action movie (of course, after The Expendables, that’s pretty much shot), while others see it as a romantic comedy involving their favorite actors (again, depending on which actors this is, it probably already exists). The critic types imagine it as the ultimate meaningful psychological drama that finally reveals the depths of the human psyche once and for all. Some maintain that the ultimate movie either already exists or can never exist. While I do admittedly find myself among the latter camp, I have a vision for a movie that would probably be my favorite of all time. I would watch this movie multiple times in theaters, buy it when it came out on DVD (possibly also multiple times) and force my friends to watch it so many times that, despite its glory, they would inevitably groan as soon I gleefully pulled it out and forced it into the player before they could rip it from my hands. This movie goes something like this:

MTSBM: The White Death

*Sniff*... If only...

Welcome to Movies That Should Be Made (MTSBM), a new series of opinion articles meant to make you feel like today’s movie selection is ridiculously inadequate (shouldn't be hard). We’ll talk about films that, obviously, we feel should be made. They could be based on a true story, a spin-off of another film, a sequel that never happened, or a totally original idea. So, without further ado, I present our first installment: The White Death.