Indiana Jones and the Lost Café at Borders

With many of us eagerly awaiting the return of Harrison Ford as Han Solo in the upcoming Star Wars sequel, some have come to wonder if we'll ever see Harrison Ford again in his other great iconic film role. Well, who knows?Here's a taste of what such a movie might be like as Harrison Ford once again essays the role of Indiana Jones in ... 

Indiana Jones and the Lost Cafe at Borders! 

As Indiana Jones wraps up a class he is teaching at Marshall College, his friend and colleague Marcus Brody approaches him.

Marcus:   I see you’re back none the worse for wear, Indiana.  I hear your latest escapade is being referred to as Indiana Jones and the Lost Car Keys of Murray Blitzstein.

Indy:  Yes, Marcus, the keys had been missing for almost three days.  The Nazis were already there at Blitzstein’s home jumping at the chance to steal a Studebaker from a member of the Jewish faith, and I had to tangle with Belloq in the kitchen and the hall bath to find them.

Marcus:  How did you locate the keys, Indy?

Indy: In the morning rays of the sun at precisely 5:42 A.M., I saw the glint of the keys in the left back pocket of Blitzstein’s seersucker suit pants.  He had accidentally placed them there, normally being a front right pocket man.

Marcus:  Brilliant, as usual, Indiana.  Did you restore the keys to Mr. Blitzstein?

Indy:  No, Marcus, the Lost Car Keys of Murray Blitzstein belong in a museum. Blitzstein will have to buy himself an Edsel.

Marcus:  Indy, there’s another important matter I need to discuss with you.  Have you ever heard of Borders?

Indy:  Indeed.  It was a book store, a chain of book stores, which proliferated in North America prior to the rise of the Amazons.  The fossil record is unclear, but we believe they were destroyed either by a natural catastrophe, climate change, or some woman named E.L. James.

Marcus:  That's right, Indiana.  And what we have learned is that inside each Borders was a hidden sanctuary called a café where people drank coffee and lattes, ate muffins and scones, and thought and talked about intelligent things, like would Henry David Thoreau have written more about throwing up in Walden Pond had he hung out with Charles Bukowski.

Indy:  But what does this have to do with me?

Marcus:  Legend has it that the awesome power that gave rise to this intellectual conversation was in the scones! Your old friend Belloq is intent on being the first to discover the Lost Café at Borders, acquire the wisdom of the scones, and use it to clone Hitler, but this time with a much better mustache!

We next see a map plotting Indy’s route by car from Marshall College in Western PA to Bala-Cynwyd PA where one of the Borders is reputed to have been located. The route stops in Altoona PA where Indy purchases a Slurpee from Seven Eleven and then proceeds to Bala-Cynwyd.

Sallah:  Indy!  I knew you’d be here.  Look, Belloq’s got full excavation going already! And Marion’s here now too.

Indy:  Marion?  Belloq?

Sallah: No, that’s two people, Indy, one named Marion and one named Belloq. Not Marion Belloq.

Indy: What do you know about the Lost Café at Borders, Sallah?

Sallah:  I know one thing.  They are digging in the wrong place!

Indy:  How can you tell?

Sallah:  See the two Starbucks Coffee Shops 100 yards apart from each other?  I believe the book store was called Borders because it was usually bordered on both sides by a Starbucks.  Belloq, the fool, is digging by the Bed, Bath, & Beyond!

Digging a make-shift shaft, Indy lowers himself down into the inner chamber of the ruins of Borders.

Sallah:  Indy!  What do you see?

Indy:  Books everywhere!  Magazines.  CDs of all kinds!  This would be a great place to browse on a Saturday afternoon!  Make a note of that.

Sallah: Any snakes down there?

Indy:  Just Belloq.  And he’s got Marion!

Belloq:  Hello, Dr. Jones.  I was in one of the two Starbucks 100 yards apart trying to get Marion drunk on espresso when I heard you underfoot and knew where to dig.  And I’ve got the intellectual scones too!

Marion:  Indy, if he eats one, he’ll be able to make another Hitler, this one with a mustache even bigger than Stalin’s!

Belloq:  Soon, Dr. Jones, you will see that I have acquired all the wisdom of the Lost Café at Borders!

Belloq brings a dry scone to his mouth and makes a face.

Belloq:  I think I’d rather open a lost ark.

Indy:  You think that thing’s dry now, you should have had one when it was fresh!

Belloq eats the scone.   

Belloq:  Yes, I feel the power of the scones coming over me now, Jones!  Sweeping over every pore of my body!  It’s beautiful!

Marion: Kind of predictable, isn’t he?

Belloq:  Now … If you get your Borders ticket punched five times, you will get a free latte in the cafe! All Joni Mitchell records 50% off with purchase of a cappuccino! Buy three dry scones and take 25% off Jonathan Franzen’s latest book! What is this?  This isn’t the wisdom of the Lost Café at Borders!

Indy:  No, but it is the wisdom of managing the Lost Café at Borders.

Belloq:  And we have the finest Judaica section in Bala-Cynwyd too!  Every book by Elie Wiesel!! And don’t forget Schindler’s List in videos!!!

Belloq screams, shrieks something about free wrapping in the mezzanine, and thereupon his head gruesomely explodes.

Marion: Shall we take a look at some of the books here before we leave, Indy?  Maybe one by E.L. James?

Indy:  No, I think we’ve done enough with anachronisms already today, Marion.

Marion: Where to next, Indy?  

Indy:  Off to discuss the next Indiana Jones sequel with Steven Spielberg.   I’d like to get it wrapped before I’m 80.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Indiana Jones and the Lost Café at Borders

Lost Cafe at Borders!

___________________________________________________

Quickbreath High Concept Cinema Consulting

High Concept E-Mail

From: Sidney Quickbreath

To: Mel Greenglass, President Sparkle Entertainments

Re:  Smokin' Hot Concept for the Indy Jones Franchise!  

Date: April 25, 2087
____________________________________________

MG, I have truly outdone myself this time!

Which isn’t easy, because outdoing myself anymore is causing myself to be really pissed off at the rest of me!

I have come up, MG, with a fresh and original concept for the Indiana Jones franchise as we prepare to make our 37th entry in the series.

It will well complement the last three smash hit installments: 

Indiana Jones and the Lost City of New Brunswick NJ,

Indiana Jones and the Lost Car Keys of Murray Blitzstein, and

Indiana Jones and the Lost Building Fund of Temple Boray Perry Hagulfin

The film will be entitled:

Indiana Jones and the Lost Cafe at Borders! 

Here’s the high concept, MG:

My meticulous and painstaking research on Wikipedia has indicated that many years ago there existed places called brook stores where contraptions called brooks were sold.  Brooks  had words printed on paper stuck inside them, and people actually read these brooks just as if they were Kindle Plus 473s, Kardashians, or SituationSnooki11’s!

The most fabled among the brook stores was  a place called Borders, probably because it was usually bordered on both sides by a Starbucks Coffee. Sometime in 2011 all the Borders mysteriously vanished! The fossil record is unclear, but we believe they were destroyed either by a natural catastrophe, climate stasis, or some man named Jonathan Franzen.

We just don’t know!

Inside each Borders was a hidden sanctuary where people drank coffee and lattes, ate muffins and scones, and thought and talked about smart stuff --- really smart stuff like the capitals of the fifty-some states of the Union! Legend has it that the awesome power that gave rise to the smart stuff was in the lattes!

Or maybe the scones.

You see, MG, in this way we keep the audience in a state of heightened suspense throughout the entire picture!

And now Indy must outwit an army of neo-Nazis intent on being the first to discover the Lost Café at Borders, learn the secrets of the lattes/scones, and use them to clone Hitler, but this time with a much better mustache!

In this desperate race against time, Indy will be aided by:

• a sexy but high-spirited female archeologist who at first dismissively and condescendingy trades jab for jab with Indy but later chooses to leave all the jabbing (wink, wink, MG!) exclusively to Indy. BTW, MG, our female archaeologist will have breasts so large she wouldn’t be able to excavate Stonehenge without knocking a good third of  it down!

• an  adorable,  wise-cracking, backwards-baseball-cap wearing 11 year old street urchin  whose precocious witticisms and plucky determination will steal your heart!  So I suggest you and I leave ours home in the safe, MG, before we attend the premiere!

• a mischievous,  curly tailed,  tree-climbin',  banana chompin' wooly monkey who’s equally adept at bedeviling Indy with his wacky laugh-a-minute antics as he is at annihilating neo-Nazis with a flying electric chain saw as he merrily hurls guts and gore directly at the audience in a SuperDynamo 8D Effect so superbly revolting that they'll  never get the blood stains out of their collective cheap ass clothing!

I know what you’re thinking, MG.  Is Harrison Ford up for going through the motions once again of yet another of these formulaic romps whose freshness seal was well past its expiration date when Steven Spielberg was still married to Amy Irving?

Dude, any 147 year old guy who thinks a dippy little earring is going to make him attractive to the opposite sex will be less than primordial putty in our skillful little overreaching hands!

As usual, the film will be shot by Sparkle Entertaiments in association with Fu Yen Pictures, a Division of Fu Yen Behemoth Financial, Inc., Trustee-in-Bankruptcy for the United States of America, a Country,  in coordination with the Rancid Organization and Quickbreath High Concept Cinema Consulting.

I can see it up in lights now:

Indiana Jones and the Lost Café at Borders!  

That is,  in somebody's den lights shining on their just purchased obscenely overpriced Blue Ray,  Holographic Sheen-Lohan, or HypnocentricPresidentRickPerry Mindplop!

Who knows? It might even spark a whole new interest in excavating these Borders places.

And I think that would be cool.

After all, I’ve never even seen a brook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Cut-Off

No, not this kind of Cut-Off!

I never question the authority of the Cut-Off.

The Cut-Off, so-called, exists to tell us that we’re growing old in ways we never dreamed of or imagined. And when you get to be my age, Cut-Offs of all kinds come flying at you like bodies in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

My 15 year old son Brandon and I were one day in Borders, perusing with no particular purpose, when I picked up a couple of books and plunked my 60 year old butt down on the floor.

“Dad!” gasped Brandon. “Get up!”

“What?” I said.

“Someone your age cannot sit on the floor! People will think you’re having a heart attack! Isn’t Borders in enough trouble!?"

I simply hadn't realized it.

I’d reached the point in life where placing my can upon the carpeting acts to rip a hole in the space-time continuum!  Invisible but nonetheless fully existent sulfur spewing demons from a parallel dimension were no doubt dispersing themselves throughout Borders, checking out historical romances and ordering lattes from the Cafe.

“Okay, Brandon,” I asked sadly. “What is the Cut-Off?

“38, I’d say.  42 tops.”

I arose. As I said, I'm not one to challenge the authority of the Cut-Off!

Some Cut-Offs are obvious. I would never, for example, think of wearing a baseball cap backwards. Whenever a guy even many years my junior attempts to sport a backwards baseball cap, he looks like he’s not sure what direction he’s going in.

Show me a 60 year old guy with a baseball cap on backwards, and I’ll show you a guy who may well attempt to get places the rest of his life by backing up.

The Cut-Off?  25.  At most.

There are many Cut-Offs in the world of growing older, virtually all of which I am on the wrong side of.   Here's a brief but admittedly woefully incomplete guide to just a few of them:

Calling a male friend “dude.” Cut-Off: 32

 Calling a male friend “man.” Cut-Off: 54

Calling a male friend altogether. Cut-Off: whatever age you first have children.

Using the word “awesome.” Cut-Off: 41.

Using the word “splendid.” Cut-Off: None.  And it’s a splendid word to use to replace “awesome” when you’re past the Cut-Off for "awesome."

Wearing Painter’s Pants. Cut-Off: 27, unless you happen to actually paint houses for a living.

Stacking the cream containers on the table at the diner to see how high you can get them to go until they fall over. Cut-Off: 19. Sure you can do it when you’re older. But what’s cute and funny when you’re a teenager is liable to nervously empty each and every table adjacent to yours when you're 62!

Going on an amusement park ride called the “The Exterminator Terminator Wowie IV!” Cut-Off: Cannot ever be soon enough!

Brandon and I were one day watching a rerun of That 70's Show when I happened to say to him: “Brandon, you know which of the two young women on the show, Donna or Jackie, I find most visually appealing?” I admit that when I posed the inquiry, “most visually appealing " was not actually the precise verbiage I employed.

Brandon turned a color that can only be described as not existing in nature, and at once I realized I had out-Hefnered Hefner, out-Humbert Humberted Humbert Humbert, and gone all the way to out-little old guying the little old guy who married Anna Nicole Smith!

 “Dad, those are teenage girls!!!"

“Brandon," I sighed, "what is the Cut-Off for admiring young girls?” In this instance, having been chastened, I did indeed utilize the verb “admiring.”

“27.  And no higher!”  responded Brandon. “And you are disgusting!”

“Just so I know for the future," I asked wearily, "who is it okay for me to think hot?"

“Betty White,” said Brandon. “Because there is no Cut-Off!”

Betty White is great, no doubt about it.

But this was the most unkindest Cut-Off of all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~