5 Real World Fails That Need a Movie

POSTED BY Jame Gumb | FRIDAY OCTOBER 23 AT 10:30 PDT

General - Movies

A quick trip over to Rotten Tomatoes will show you that Amelia, which opens this weekend, has a favorable rating of about 20%. For those of you who don’t know, that percentage means the movie sucks on a collective level.

But you probably didn‘t need some Tomatometer, scientific as it is, to tell you that. After all, does the real life story of the first woman to not fly around the world sound exciting? Christ, why didn’t they just make a movie about my grandma? She didn’t fly around the world either, but unlike Amelia Earhart, she didn’t have a butch haircut. Plus, my grandma made some delicious pierogi. All Amelia made was a wrong turn.*

My point is this: if for some reason you are going to make a movie about someone who didn’t do something, there are a lot more impressive failures to choose from. Here are five of them.

Marv Levy and the Buffalo Bills - Not Winning Super Bowls

Any idiot can not win a Super Bowl, but it takes a man with brass balls to not win four times in a row. From 1990 to 1993, Coach Marv Levy and his Buffalo Bills did just that. Time after time they failed, which should come as no surprise since you can't spell “Boy I Love Losing Superbowls” without B.I.L.L.S.

Balloon Boy - Not Dying In a Balloon Crash

Yeah, I’m sick of this little bastard too, but if someone made a movie that reenacted him throwing up, I’d probably watch it on cable. Throw in a hilarious scene of his douche-guzzling father getting bent over in a prison shower and I might actually pay to see it in a theater.

My College Roommate - Not Getting Laid In College

Everybody gets laid in college. That’s why people go. You could shave male pattern baldness into your head and you’d still be able to find someone to sleep with. Christ, even I got laid in college…once.

But not my roommate. He made it all four years without so much as an H.J. Keep in mind I’m not talking about community college or “living with your parents while you go to school” college. I’m talking honest to god “on your own in a dorm” college. He just couldn’t close the deal. That’s a lot more epic than some chick who couldn’t read a map.

Richard Reid (a.k.a. The Shoe Bomber) - Not Blowing Up a Plane

Muslim extremists believe that a reward of 72 virgins awaits anyone who is martyred for their cause. I wonder what the reward is for someone who is too stupid to light a fuse. Someday, Richard Reid will find out.

In December of 2001, Reid boarded a plane in Paris bound for Miami. Explosives were hidden in his shoes, which means the hard part of getting them onto the plane was already out of the way. All he had to do was properly light a match. He couldn’t, and it wasn’t long before fellow passengers noticed that the dude who looked like he crawled out of Osama Bin Laden’s butt-hole was giving off a burnt match smell.

Reid was subdued, and is now serving life in prison. The only thing he accomplished was making it necessary for us to remove our shoes at the airport, and for that I hope he rots in hell.

William Jennings Bryan - Not Winning Presidential Elections

The good news for Marv Levy is that not everybody watches football. The bad news for William Jennings Bryan is that everybody watches a presidential election. Even morons who don’t care will find out who lost while watching their favorite comedian, Jay Leno. On a side note, isn’t “Jay Walking” funny?

Bryan had to endure the humiliation of losing in front of the entire country on three separate occasions (1896, 1900, and 1908). To add insult to injury, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizzard of Oz is based on him. So in a way, they already made a movie based on Bryan, and it’s one of the most beloved films of all time.

I rest my case.

*Granted, Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, but so what? Give me Lucky Lindy any day. Sure, he may have been a tad anti-Semitic, but so was I for about two weeks after Crash won the Oscar for best picture, so I’m not going to throw stones.