WillWybrow.com

I have a pretty good idea for a film, I think. A short film. Where there’s a guy who has a kind of sub-standard life, things are pretty rough for him, but then some supernatural act happens where, I dunno, let’s say the Devil or someone offers the guy a chance to have a really amazing life full of everything awesome, and all the guy has to do is some monumentally horrific act like torturing and murdering a mother and her young child.

And then instead of the usual moral dilemma that such a situation might evoke in other films, the guy does the thing, gets his perfect life and never once looks back on all the suffering he caused in order to get what he wanted.

People wouldn’t be left feeling optimistic and happy like after feel-good romance films, nor would they feel sad like after weepy films about a sacrificial protagonist, or even that weird triumphant feeling after films where the main character struggles but successfully overcomes diversity by the end. It wouldn’t be like those films with a moral lesson about how it’s wrong to shit on people to get your own way, and the audience wouldn’t be able to empathise with the hero’s remorse about his ignoble climb to the top because the hero himself wouldn’t feel any remorse. I think it would leave people feeling hollow and bitter and confused. That’d be ace.

I was watching a film just lately, and one of the guys in it told one of the girls in it that she was beautiful, or whatever, and she said thanks and whatever, they hook up or something and live happily ever after. I guess that’s how these things work in film. Oh yeah, before we go any further, this is my warning that nobody is going to agree with what I’ve got to say because, like a lot of my ideas, it’s just too different and will undoubtedly be expressed badly. But even if you do agree in theory, I don’t imagine you will in practice. Hell, I’m not ever going to think about this in a real-life situation, so I don’t expect anyone else to.

Breakdown of a Compliment

When Person A says something flattering about Person B’s looks, Person A can be saying a number of things. The first and most obvious one that comes to mind is that the “compliment” Person A is paying means literally that Person A finds Person B to be visually appealing through whatever it is between people that facilitates that reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s innate or learned through “society’s standard of beauty” or something like that. What Person A could be saying is that he (for the sake of argument, let’s say Person A is male and Person B is female) likes the way Person B looks through no action on Person B’s part.

Person A might also be making a point about Person B’s specific appearance at that point: “you look nice today” for a (weak) example. Coming across in this instance is the implication that Person A has recognised the fact that Person B has either deliberately or inadvertently made a difference in her appearance and Person A approves.

Person A might also be saying that he finds Person B to be attractive even though most people wouldn’t. I wanted to avoid saying the word “objective” here, because I don’t think there is an “objectively” good-looking person, but there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider attractive, and there are people that an overwhelming majority of peers would consider not attractive (plus, obviously, the whole range in between). If Person A is sincere when he pays his compliment to Person B, he is saying that even though most people think Person B is unattractive, she happens to be to Person A’s personal taste.

For the sake of the argument, I am going to make two assumptions. The first is that people cannot actively choose which physical traits they find to be attractive and which ones they don’t. I don’t think this is too far from the truth, and while taste may change over time, I feel it is largely out of the control of people themselves. That first assumption now lets me make my second, which consists of me lumping together my first scenario (where Person B is “objectively” attractive) with my third scenario (where Person B is not “objectively” attractive, but is to Person A’s personal taste) under the heading of Inadvertent Attraction, and leave scenario two (where Person B has made an effort) as Deliberate Attraction.

So, in this film, the line was something like “you have really pretty eyes,” it doesn’t matter about the specifics. This line fits into my category of Inadvertent Attraction — it wasn’t through any effort on Person B’s part that Person A liked her eyes. Given this, her next line, “thank you,” doesn’t entirely make sense. A compliment is praise or even congratulations for something, but if it’s a compliment for something that isn’t deliberate, why the thanks afterwards? Person B didn’t choose to have nice eyes, so the compliment doesn’t deal with her. The compliment goes to whoever is responsible for Person B being attractive to Person A. Which is nobody.

What am I saying? That nobody should pay each other compliments anymore? No, of course not. They’re nice things to say, and everyone wants nice things said to them and about them. But I am remarking on the realisation that Person B doesn’t get to say “thanks” afterwards. Nothing nice has been said about her, just the unchangeable circumstances that mean Person A likes Person B’s appearance. Person B can’t really take pride in having an arbitrary facial arrangement any more than I can take pride in being white. It’s just genetic make-up that we have no control over.

Of course, the thanks may have only been out of polite courtesy, and that’s maybe how it is the world over. But people flush with pride when they hear something good said about them — I know I do. I just wanted to say to everyone that, on paper, it’s just incorrect to be proud about such things.

Then we get into murky waters with things like nice hair or make-up, which can be part Inadvertent and part Deliberate, and then there are things which are totally Deliberate, like picking clothes or picking perfume. Paying a compliment to deliberate choices people make to please each other is like saying “good job, I approve.” In this society where having free will is an assumption we all live by (even if it’s not true), we are allowed to be proud of the choices we make. So that’s fine.

But good-looking people, beware. I’m on to you.

The film was Hitch, if you were wondering, and it was quite enjoyable.

I’ve been checking out some stand-up comedy DVDs recently to investigate whether any of the good and well-known comics of the day (including Mr. Carr, Mr. Gervais, Mr. Minchin, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Moran and a few others) hold views that are respectful or in any way sympathetic towards religious believers.

They’re not. Put plainly, if you believe in any non-trivial definition of god, you can’t laugh at jokes at the expense of the irrational, be they theists, psychics, “new age spiritualists,” etc., without incurring a hefty hypocrisy penalty and losing all credibility.

This tweet in reply to my glib observation of the above point suggests that my ability to laugh at humour that’s at the expense of “White [sic] people” is analogous to Christians’ ability to self-deprecate by enjoying comedy at their expense. No prizes for telling me why that doesn’t make any sense.

If you are religious, you are widely considered to be wrong. It takes some very shaky reasoning to justify even the most vague claims about a god without throwing questionably-sourced specifics in as well (read: Biblical claims). Any nonreligious person who is even vaguely aware of the damage that irrational faith, childhood indoctrination and religion as a force in its whole all cause to humans as individuals and humanity will look down on those who choose to accept religious beliefs. No matter how nice and tolerant they might seem to come across as, if nonreligious folk accept that religion is damaging then they must accept the religious are the root of the damage.

Stop laughing at our jokes belittling you. You don’t get to laugh, you are all too mired in your own self-sustaining incorrectness to laugh. God will smite you if you laugh.

Ewan McGregor stops the antimatter bomb, but turns out to be the bad guy all along.

This film doesn’t deserve its present IMDb rating of 7.1, since it was a bit of a shitpile. I haven’t read the book but if I had, I’d probably have thought even less of this film.

Go and see Star Trek instead of this. Angels and Demons was at least better than Wolverine, but not by very much. Hell, stay home rather than make the effort.

The new Star Trek movie was pretty enjoyable. Loads of explosions in space and aliens and rebelliousness — everything a healthy diet needs. But there weren’t very many people watching it.

There were two showings within a short time this evening: one at 5pm and one at 5:35pm. I was at the cinema for 5:15pm and barely saw anyone. A screenful of people could have already gone in. But if there were two showings so close to each other, one would expect it to be pretty teeming, right?

There were about fifteen people in our screen. A group of friends behind us and then three couples. Couples?! Is Star Trek a “couples” film? Keep in mind that the undoubtably terrible new Matthew McConaughey film “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” was on at the same time. Maybe that’s where all the people were except for those three couples? I don’t know. Star Trek just didn’t seem like the kind of film you’d go on a date to watch.

Anyway, yeah, it was a pretty good film. Go see it some time. I am going to watch the new Dan Brown adaptation about the Vatican’s fictional crackdown on 19th century geometrists later in the week, Angles and Demons. I’ll let you know how it is…

Hey, if anyone ever invites you to sit down and watch the film Wanted with them, RUN. Kick them in the groin and turn around and leave.

There are so many things wrong with this film that I hate the fact it made any money. Film makers should be honest with their film trailers and include relevant information (such as a warning branding the film as a load of bollocks) that informs potential viewers of what to expect.

Better start at the beginning, I suppose, with the film’s premise. A thousand years ago, a secret society of weavers was formed because they had magical powers to slow down time and kill people very easily. Stop reading for a moment and let that sink in. Weavers. People who make cloth out of threads. A thousand years ago, hardcore assassins would have been Medieval knights or something equally as cool, not cloth makers. I can’t think what kind of shit was thrown away as the writers decided that this was the best idea for a backstory that they could come up with.

The film got an 18 certificate. The thing is, it was narrated by the main character, who seems to take the approach of delivering motivational commentary in a style that might inspire 12-15 year-old males. Every time I listened to his voice, I was put in mind of some of the vocal work employed by Sega in some of their more recent Sonic the Hedgehog titles. Now, Sonic the Hedgehog is fifteen years old, and it’s not hard to imagine that he’d be portrayed as such by the actors voicing him. The only people who are going to look up to a fifteen year-old are kids around that age.

Next, the big hook of this film: bullet curving. You can’t curve a bullet. Game over, film idea is worthless.

The secret society of weavers recruit the hero guy to take down some rogue Jedi assassin who defected and killed the main hero’s father. But then we find out that the rogue assassin is the guy’s father and so the hero has to go back to kill the guys that recruited him in the first place. Well, that actually starts happening about 30 minutes in, after nearly a third of the film is spent explaining how bad the hero’s prior life is.

The society of weavers obey a giant magical loom that weaves binary code (UTF-8 maybe, the encoding was never satisfactorily explained) into a big cloth that spells out the name of the victims that the weavers have to kill.

A GIANT MAGICAL LOOM weaves the NAMES OF VICTIMS into a cloth. A magical fucking sentient (presumably) giant loom somehow decides people to kill (the weavers call it “fate”) and prints out the name, in binary, on a big sheet.

The weavers then (somehow) find the person (it is unexplained how they find them — Google, we must presume) and kill the person.

Also there is one Russian guy who ties bombs to rats, who tells the hero how to catch rats. Then rats are used when the hero blows up the weavers’ castle.

This film made no sense. The stuff that was feasible was either unnecessary to the plot or just stupid, and the stuff that was infeasible was just stupid. Please don’t watch this film, for your own good.

I was listening to the radio while I was in the kitchen getting some lunch. Matthew Bannister is sitting in for Jeremy Vine today, and I must say, apart from having a more boring voice, he and some woman he was talking to have just been bad-mouthing Saw the Ride, which I have been on, for all sorts of reasons, number one being that they are stuffy and boring and middle-aged and boring.

It’s a ride that I am liking more and more because of how much publicity there is over it. Saw is an incredibly well-performing franchise for all manner of reasons, and people who aren’t really into it dismiss it as unnecessary gore. I don’t mind that, these people are right; the gore is not necessary to watch, which is why Lionsgate executives aren’t dragging you from your homes and forcing you into the cinemas or DVD shops to pay money for their films. You don’t have to watch it if it isn’t your thing.

But people who are outspoken against it are outspoken for some rather invalid reasons. The point the woman on the radio made was that “people have become so desensitised” to on-screen violence.

Clearly she hasn’t given this very critical thought. So I offer you a chance to do it on her behalf. Tell me why becoming desensitised to violence is bad.

I don’t know if there are any good arguments for this. The only one I can think that people might use is a repackaging of “the media causes children to be violent” — an argument that hasn’t ever stood up to investigation (cf. every fucking complaint about the Grand Theft Auto series, ever).

Being desensitised to violence is probably a good thing. People are more rational when they don’t let their emotional reactions get in the way of thinking. Of course, if we’re witnessing a violent act in real life and we’re concerned for the safety of ourselves or those involved, we have a handy evolutionary asset called fear which gets us to run away from the danger. But obviously fake, on-screen gore isn’t something we really need to be ’sensitive’ to, is it?

What always bugged me, even when I was young, was when people comment on the unlikelihood of events happening in films. You know, when Jason Bourne makes an impossible jump, or John McClane runs through a storm of bullets without being hit.

Of course, saying “it’s just fiction, it doesn’t matter,” isn’t really a satisfying dismissal of those people. They nag and complain that the film is unrealistic and that makes it unenjoyable for them and unenjoyable for you.

But I had this idea when I was little that maybe all those unlikely things had to happen. That any story where they didn’t happen wouldn’t be very worth telling. There would somewhere be a version of the ‘Die Hard’ storyline where Alan Rickman kills Bruce Willis in the first ten minutes. But nobody wants to see a film like that. In a theoretical universe where every possible story is told, ones with hugely unlikely possibilities will eventually come into existence and they are the ones we read about in books and watch about in films.

Of course, these days I don’t care very much about all of that. Every now and then I’ll be aware that I’m watching something that others might be thinking is unrealistic. In which case I might wait until something relatively probable (but still a bit unlikely) happens and remark on how “this film is so unrealistic,” in a sort of terrible humour attempt.

But also nowadays, years from my initial feelings of ire at the bothersome critical appraisal of my immature peers, I realise that I’d basically applied the anthropic principle to storytelling. Woo! Young me was secretly clever!

…September 11th caused the popularity of blogging…

…then you might just be a douchebag.

My twin brother turned me on to blogging in 2001. At that time, not too many people were actively blogging. That soon changed after 9/11. Blogs boomed in popularity and On the Fritz was one of them.

Halfway down his “About” page on his website.

This guy also thinks that Rick Rolling started in 2007 with an episode of Family Guy, and that it’s intrinsically homophobic.

Do this guy a favour and drop him a line at fritz@fritzliess.com to let him know how much of an incompetent fool he really is.

It helps if you look at the five-long series of films as not a series of films, but more like a TV serial. In each one, we’re introduced to new people and we learn more about the old ones. Saw could have worked if it were a horror-plot-twisting weekly thing to tell the same story. Sort of a Dexter-Lost hybrid.

The problem is, people don’t look at it that way. They expect each installment to have its own riveting plot and have a beginning and a proper conclusion. Well, it totally doesn’t work that way. One has to look at the story as a whole.

And obviously the people who say “OH LOL SAW IS JUST AN EXCUES 4 LOTS OV BLUD AND VIALENCE ITS NOT VERY GUD LOL” are really closeminded. Maybe I should get some DVD rips and edit it together as a kind of Saw TV show. As long as I don’t tell Lionsgate about it, I should be fine, right?