Has anything more frivolous than this been turned into a movie?

[andrewducker]

In 1997 a man writes a fake advert to fill space in a magazine:


The ad become famous, read on TV, on the radio, become an internet meme, and now it's a movie:

And now it's a movie that's getting 92% on Rotten Tomatoes

Has anything more trivial than a fake wanted ad been made into a movie? I mean, Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney Ride, but this takes the biscuit.

Comments

[innerbrat]

There are two questions in this post. In answer to the first one:

Yes, Battleship.

[andrewducker]

Correcting the post now - I shouldn't type and talk...

[andrewducker]

Oh, and yes, Battleship is rivalling it.

[innerbrat]

I mean, at least the fake ad has an interesting premise and you can see where the inspiration was drawn...

[jack]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The ad is more frivolous overall, but has a pretty good concept for a movie. Battleships is not completely trivial in concept, but I doubt any of that transferred to the movie.

[jack]

But also, LOL.

[davegodfrey]

I've not seen Battleship, but from what I've heard the "old guys fit out a WW2 hulk" is easily the best bit of the film, and it would actually have been a perfectly acceptable mindless action flick if that had been the actual plot- basically R.E.D. with even bigger guns.

[pseudomonas]

'With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse'

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

Wow. Battleships? Shit My Dad Says?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Super Mario Brothers - The Movie

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Dude, where's my car?

The only movie where the title is the script.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

You've never heard of "Desperately Seeking Susan?"

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

On a related note, for a couple decades - before some random person sued them and he had to stop - a dude ran a classified ad in the daily news that simply read "Last Chance To Send $5 To (insert whatever his P.O. box was.)"

Enough people responded to his ad - even though it promised nothing, that he didn't have to work.

The only reason he had to stop was when he was sued the court ruled the words "Last Chance" were fraud.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Garbage Pail Kids?

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Battleship - to be followed by Pong and Tetris, one assumes.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I keep telling folks that the tic-tac-toe movie wasn't too bad... it's just a pity that no one else has managed to clear that not-terribly-high bar with more promising premises.

-- Steve'll have to take a bye on judging Clue, as remarkably he has yet to see that one.

[andrewducker]

Well worth seeing.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

The film sounds interesting - I'll look out for it. The advert itself reminds me of a famous advertisement, during the 1720 South Sea Bubble, for investors in a company formed "for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but no-one to know what it is".

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

It looks pretty interesting to me. Here's a friend's review of it:

http://www.randybyers.net/?p=3927

(That's the guy I'm always seeing movies with.)

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Every movie starts out trivial, because every movie just starts out as a single plothook, a single idea, wandering through the mind of whoever ends up writing the story that becomes the film. This is just one of those rare plothooks that got printed in a newspaper instead of flying into someone's head directly.

[andrewducker]

I disagree- because the context I'm talking about here is movies deliberately based on something else.

So, yes, when you get down to it, every movie starts out with something which is inspired by something, which was triggered by something...the big bang.

But when talking about movies created based on some other media, tweets, books, comics, amusement-park rides, etc., I was wondering what the most trivial was.