FORAGING FOR KEBABS

Contains emergency geology, Christian Erotica, and unnameable foodstuffs that lurk in the woods

Sometimes I despair about the current state of writing and the creative arts. The competition, the nepotism, of course the ever-present threat that some self-righteous snot-nosed curtain-peeper will tell teacher you committed a thought crime, such as believing pumpkin spice to be a gross corporate trick on the taste buds, or thinking that women should be allowed to express their opinions without threat of being bludgeoned to death.

It’s a tough time to be a writer. But there is hope. Because there is James Foti.

You’ve probably never heard of James Foti. There’s a good reason for that. There’s probably a number of very good reasons for that, actually. I’ve only heard of James Foti because last weekend I watched a movie that he wrote and it changed my life. The movie is Romance in the Wilds, and I’m about to either ruin it for you or make it way better. Either way, it’s all spoilers from this point on.

The movie’s hero is Buck. Now, Buck may look like a cover model for self-published Christian Erotica novels, but he’s actually a forest ranger. His mom is also a forest ranger, as is his sister, his cousin, and his dead dad, because apparently forest ranging runs in the family -- both sides of the family, in Buck’s case. It’s in his blood. Which makes it a bit weird that he doesn’t seem to have been in a forest before or have much of a clue about how one works. Then again, he also doesn’t seem to know how a face works. He spends much of the first part of the movie making unfathomable expressions at the camera, prompting the viewer to wonder what the hell he could be thinking about, because it’s certainly not anything to do with the plot, which hasn’t happened yet.

After nothing has happened for quite a while, someone knocks over a can of petrol, and Buck finally lurches into action in order to rescue a woman from the resulting forest fire. But the woman in question angrily exposits that she hasn’t got time to be rescued just now. “I’m a geologist!” She explains. “I look at layers of rock,” she adds, presumably mainly for the benefit of Buck, who looks like he thinks she just made that big word up. She’s on a deadline with her rock observations, she says. “I have to get this finished by the end of the week!”¹ But Buck won’t stand for any of her female nonsense. The emergency geology will just have to wait.

The geologist has a dog, the mere sight of which triggers Buck into an immediate jarring flashback of his time in Afghanistan. Luckily, the geologist’s dog, Charlie, is nothing like the highly trained and courageous canines Buck served with. He’s just a big fat Labrador who looks like he already hates this movie and everyone in it, and wishes Buck would piss off out of the forest and get back to doing mildly titillating cover shots for Fifty Shades of Heaven.

Buck’s rescue plane is taken out by a burning tree limb that one of the film crew has lobbed on top of it. It’s okay though, because the geologist has a jeep. Unfortunately the geologist (being a female inexperienced in the technicalities of driving on paths) rolls over some broken twigs and blows out one of the jeep’s tyres. At this point, Charlie the dog runs away into the forest and lies down under some trees, causing inexplicable panic. “Here Charlie,” calls the geologist, as Charlie obliviously chews the scenery (although not as much as his two co-stars do). Then Buck mans up and takes over. “Let me do it,” he says. “You have to get his attention. That’s something I learned in Afghanistan.” He holds out his hand. “Here Charlie,” he calls. Incredibly, the dog comes lumbering over. The geologist is impressed by Buck’s dog-handling prowess and begins to understand what all those tradwives see in him.

The jeep then explodes for no adequately explored reason, but perhaps as a protest against having been driven by a female woman. They have to continue through the forest on foot. “This is now an official rescue,” says Buck, which raises the question of what the hell it was before. Despite the official nature of the rescue, and the forest fire that threatens to burn them all to death, no sense of urgency troubles our hero. He and the geologist meander through the forest like they’re two pensioners on a Saga holiday making their way back to the coach park with hours to spare.

After about a million years, they stop to shelter in the mouth of a cave. “We’ll need a fire,” says Buck, somehow forgetting that they are meant to be in the middle of one. It’s lucky that they do get a fire going, though, because Buck needs to heat up some mysterious kebab-like foodstuff that has appeared out of nowhere. What actually is it? No one can say. It doesn’t look exactly like food, but then again, it doesn’t look exactly like anything you’ve ever seen before. Buck tears some grey substance from the skewer, and chews it like he’s getting paid by the mouthful. Where do the creepy kebabs come from? No one knows. We can only presume he foraged them from the forest itself.

Buck and the female geologist are enjoying(?) their food(?) when footage of an angry bear turns up in a different forest entirely. The female geologist suggests that they can escape the footage by crawling through the cave, which goes all the way under the forest and comes out at Buck’s lodge. You’d think Buck would be aware of this handy shortcut, what with him knowing every inch of the forest because it’s in his blood, passed down through generations on both sides of his family. But I guess it just goes to prove that looking at rocks is also an important job, even when ladies do it.

Within thirty seconds, they make their way through the cave - a shortcut that has saved them several hours of walking and which suggests the cave is almost certainly an actual wormhole through space and time — a suggestion which sadly is not pursued by James Foti, or they could have taken this forest fire into another dimension entirely. Instead, they arrive at Buck’s lodge, where they immediately set about making more fires and lighting hundreds of candles. It’s beginning to look a bit like Buck is obsessed with starting fires, and maybe even that he deliberately started this forest fire as a way of getting closer to the female geologist. But this twist would make for a way better film than James Foti was paid to write, so don’t get your hopes up.

Buck gives the geologist a blanket that he crocheted himself – crochet being his hobby, naturally – and they take turns sleeping until the morning, when the angry bear footage turns up again and triggers the action-packed climax of the film. They run away from the footage, Buck falls over and hurts his leg, the geologist hotwires an abandoned ATV, Buck finds a flare gun, a burning tree limb (possibly the same one that fell on Buck’s plane earlier) falls on the ATV which then explodes, causing some light foliage to fall on top of Charlie the dog, doing him no harm at all. Buck saves the dog from sitting patiently under the foliage. The geologist hugs the dog tightly, mainly to stop him from embarrassing them by wandering away, since they are now using him as the reason why the geologist needs to go on alone and seek help while he and Buck are roasted to death by the encroaching flames. This is a good enough reason for Buck and the geologist to kiss, despite them not having had time to pray about it first. In the middle of this kiss (and to my mind quite bizarrely) the geologist fires the flare gun into the sky. Buck doesn’t even flinch, just keeps whirling his tongue around the geologist’s gums like he’s searching for crumbs of the forest kebab he made her eat earlier. The flare alerts Buck’s sister to their location, and within moments, a helicopter has landed in some footage of a huge forest clearing, everyone is saved, and no one wonders if the flare gun started a second fire, which is probably a good thing because we can’t go through all that again.

Amazingly, there’s no inquiry into Buck’s incompetence, his arson attempts, or the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand the basics of forest ranging, despite it being in his blood. The geologist reveals that her important research has incomprehensibly led to a job in the forest looking more and/or longer at layers of rock. Buck smiles indulgently, clearly not understanding a word she’s saying, but happy she’ll be making some money so he can give up the modelling and open an Etsy store for his crocheted bible covers. The dog bolts off at the first opportunity, making absolutely no attempt to look injured, and yet still effortlessly out-acting everyone else in the movie.

It’s a happy ending, delivering on the overarching theme of the film, which is that cultivating an original talent for writing, acting, directing or producing is a complete and utter waste of time. Why bother with learning, training, practising, testing your ideas, finding your voice, working out what you stand for, and doing your best to create something of beauty and worth? You’re not going to get paid for doing that, you idiot. What you actually want to do is find a small group of people who have a lot of money and absolutely zero interest in anything except the propagation of their own ideological values, and then create something that reflects those values, no matter how unoriginal, pedestrian, trite, pointless, or banal the creation may be as a result. (Insert joke about your favourite streaming service/Hollywood studio/publishing company here.)

James Foti may never have written a film before, but he literally wrote this one. The awe-inspiring part is that he was paid to do so. (I’m assuming he got paid in dollars, and not just in as many kebabs as he could forage from the undergrowth.) James Foti, legend, proves once and for all that you don’t need to know anything about writing in order to make money as a writer. And I think that should give hope to us all.

Pretty sure the first aid kit she’s clutching in this photo is actually full of rocks she needs to look at before the end of the week.

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1. This is verbatim. ALL the dialogue quoted in this review is quoted verbation. See? Writing is a piece of piss. Anyone can do it.