Toy stories

Lego! The Movie

Suggested directors: The Wachowski Brothers

Suggested stars: Voices of Laurence Fishburne, Steve Zahn and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The first film to be made in digital 4D Cinerama and requiring a special neural implant to ‘experience’ it properly, this eight-years-in-the-making animated epic chronicles a colossal battle between pirates, spacemen, Vikings, scuba divers, and Star Wars characters. But beneath the action, there’s a sensitive plea for more educational toy buying and racial tolerance.

Spin-off potential: Inter-generational, cross-gender fun times for all. A commercial lock.

Slinky Joe

Suggested director: Darren Aronofsky

Suggested stars: Robert Hays, a Slinky

The iconoclastic US indie director magically returns to his high-concept roots for this, his first toy cash-in movie. Working as a companion piece to his feature debut, Pi, this film captures a brooding, neurotic Hays (in an Oscar-baiting comeback performance after the boob-heavy crime caper, Good Cop, Bad Cop) wandering around Harlem in a trenchcoat trying to dream up a movie around a man working in a bed-spring factory. He ends up locating the meaning of existence in the thermodynamic system of a humble Slinky. And then he buys a yacht.

Spin-off potential: Lo! The New Age toy market was born…

SIMON

Suggested director: Philip Noyce

Suggested stars: Alec Baldwin, Xzibit, Glenn Close

Fondly remembered multicoloured electronic memory game/doorstop SIMON is begging to be re-imagined for our troubled times. Alec Baldwin plays an aircraft carrier captain who must find the missing colour-coded launch keys to the ship’s nuclear torpedoes before NSA Deputy General Glenn Close arrives for an inspection. Xzibit features as a rookie scuba diver who saves the day.

Spin-off potential: Nintendo DS, your time has come.

Rubik’s Snake

Suggested director: Bob Dylan

Suggested stars: Casey Affleck, Joan Jett, Emir Kusturica

Another existential puzzler from occasional director and folk enigma Dylan. Affleck is an itinerant toymaker wandering 18th-century Provence in search of a fabled ‘Rubik’s Snake’ that unlocks the secrets of alchemy. But fate, revolution, severe budgetary constraints and the director’s touring commitments in Shitwheel, Ontario, have other ideas…

Spin-off potential: Soundtrack, obviously.

Twister

Suggested director: Zack Snyder

Suggested stars: Jessica Alba, Harry Connick Jr, Dennis Rodman

Roger Ipswich’s morally repugnant and legally dubious art-house porno My Naked Twister proved that the limb-flinging party pastime has cinematic mileage. It’s a gaudily coloured, confusing game that always elicits an unnecessary amount of gurning and shrieking – director Snyder would be in his element.

Spin-off potential: None.

Spacehopper!

Suggested director: David Gordon Green

Suggested stars: Jack Black, Cheech Marin, Dennis Hopper

Everything changes for portly local schlub and part-time pill dealer Frank McGaskill (Black) when he samples a shipment of new happy sweets from the laboratories of a madcap genetic scientist (Marin). His body swells, his ears extend into long rubbery protrusions, and pretty soon all he wants to do is bounce. Hopper appears in a self-mocking cameo as a zany drugs baron who attempts to kidnap our hero for the amusement of his children.

Spin-off potential: Surely there’s got to be something in the collision of old-school bouncing technology and new-fangled geosynchronous digital gadgetry?

Galt train set

Suggested director: Andrei Konchalovsky

Suggested stars: Jon Voight, Sam Elliott, Tommy Lee Jones

Introduce your youngest to a pantheon of grizzled, over-the-hill leading men as Konchalovsky remakes his classic Runaway Train for the pre-school set. Voight and Elliott play friendly daddies who bust out of naughty-time and hop aboard the non-stop wide-gauge wooden track express to Sleepy Town. With Jones as the eager-to-help neighbourhood bobby out to stop them, this is a completely non-threatening thrill ride for all the family.

Spin-off potential: Arctic tundra playset includes wooden Voight and Elliott with removable real-hair moustaches.