If you are ever driving long distances and bored out of your mind, you need a good car game. Last night, driving back from Chicago, Matt and I came up with a new car game. Remember, these car games are all about killing time.
Years and years ago we came up with a car game, kinda inspired by 20 Questions and Celebrity head, where a person can think of ANYTHING and the rest of the passengers of the car go around in circles to ask eliminating yes or no type questions. As long as you get a yes you get to keep asking, otherwise it moves onto the next person. The more obscure the “thing” the better because it’s all about trying to kill time while you are driving long distances. A “thing” game could last for minutes or hours. As noted in that above link, we’ve had things like “a blade of grass that we drove past miles ago” or “a thought Abraham Lincoln had right before being shot” and I also remember one which was “a mole on my friend Tom’s arm.”
The new game goes like this:
When a song comes on the radio you have to come up with the plot (possibly era, style, director, cast, etc., etc.) for a movie where the song would be on the soundtrack. In addition, you can come up with details of the scene in which that particular song plays during the movie.
The game was inspired by the Haim song, On The Wire (listen above), which I’ve been saying sounded like it should be on some 80s movie soundtrack. Originally I pictured it to be in some Short Circuit-y type movie with Ally Sheedy, but then it turned into a Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russel Rom-Com. Last night though, I actually thought it would be more like an 80s teen movie featuring the Coreys and they are fighting over a girl, but it’s ok because they all end up friends in the end anyway. Matt said it would actually be a high school movie where the leading girl breaks up with the big man on campus. She’s completely distraught and crying and depressed, but then the song plays during a pivotal scene where she starts looking at her best guy friend, who is always there for her, makes her laugh and cheers her up (think Duckie in Pretty in Pink) and she realizes that he is actually perfect boyfriend potential. He also had an additional movie idea where it’s a school team project that comes down to “the wire”. We developed that idea to be an extra curricular type club activity (think Forensics), where a student team is going to championships and the song plays while everyone on the team is working feverishly, last minute to pull together their winning presentation.
Other movie/songs we heard were a Dinosaur Jr song that would obviously turned into a 90s Seattle Grunge type movie. And another song (sounded a bit jazzy and rasta) that I don’t know the artist or title, but would have been a Quentin Tarantino film that looks like it was made in the 70s but actually shot now.
There are no real points or winners, unless everyone decides to vote for the best movie/song idea. It’s fun, and I hope you want to play it next time you are stuck in the car for a long period of time.
We play this game too! It’s so fun, but it does make me wish the movies we think of existed to watch.