WillWybrow.com

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?

I, uh, watched this mad film just now, “Cashback.” And it’s mad. Like, really mad.

It’s about a few things really. Some prevalent themes are: artistic oggling; female nudity (and one could argue that this and the previous item are basically the same, but they aren’t); and Sainsbury’s. Aside from these, there’s a peppering of love, insomnia and then there’s a plot built on that. Apparently, not sleeping gives people the power to magically stop time.

This was such a fucking stupid film. Nothing actually happens in it at all. Some guy with a really decent life breaks up with his girlfriend and suddenly stops sleeping. It’s about the fragility of the human emotional state, but it’s horseshit. These days, everyone (especially those of the male persuasion) is really desensitised to emotion. Everything rolls off people today, and nobody gives a shit. Oh no, you broke up with your girlfriend. Big whoop, far worse stuff happens to people all the time and who cares? Nobody. But for some reason, this really talented guy with a decent life gets granted magical powers to freeze time. It’s a big whole part of the film. At first I thought it was just a metaphor or visualisation of his daydreaming, but then he starts doing stuff in his frozen moments. And he cracks his fingers to unfreeze time. What the fuck? If there ever were a “Bernard’s Watch: the Movie,” where Bernard grows into a closet homosexual starving artist trying to make it in art school, this film is it. And he works at Sainsbury’s (which is portrayed completely unrealistically). Arrgh, the stupidity of this film is elevating my blood pressure a ton.

I think it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the point of this film. Obviously. Why does he have magical powers? Why, with these magical powers, does he not just take stuff from the tills at his work? Fucking hell, I always wished I could freeze time and dip my fingers into the cash drawers at work. No, all he does is strip women and draw fucking pictures of them. Yeah, all well and good if you can draw, but why not take a bunch of cash as well? Jesus, it’s not more morally reprehensible to nick a few hundreds of pounds from a multi-million pound corporation than it is to undress women without their permission and draw pictures of them. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FILM TRYING TO SAY?!

I need something to reduce my blood pressure, quick…

Oh yeah, that’s right, my superfast fibre optic internet connection. I watched Iron Man today for the first time in reasonable quality since the cinema. That’s not to say I didn’t try; the telesync (should this be capitalised?) version was awful and the VHS screener was slightly better. It was amazing, but Downey Jr. looks different every time I watch the film. Good actor, though.

So, I am pushing for financial contributions to create a really sexy Linux-based server for the house. It would store the house’s shareworthy files to save four things: 1) personal space on hard drives; 2) the need to download things more than once (which would piss our ISP off, I’m sure, all the unnecessary bandwidth); 3) the transfer of files to and from PCs (requiring everyone’s computer to be on and someone there to grant access) and 4) the insecurity of personal shares on computers.

I want to write a bittorrent program that lets users submit torrent requests and it handles them automatically and fairly (queuing users according to past use, for example). But I won’t do it without a server, so in order to encourage me to program and develop my skills, any personal donations of computer equipment (quad core processors, SATA hard drives etc.) or hard cash would be appreciated incredibly.

But without a server, we’ll probably end up with a shitty network hard drive.

Some professions just look like a really good time to me. They don’t necessarily have to be the most prestigious or well-paying jobs, nor do they have to last forever. But these are a few things I would love to at least try, and why.

Train Driver

This one might sound weird, but I love travelling on the train. Not only would I have the perks of being the one who announces stuff on the train, but I’d get the added bonuses of: free (or discounted) rail travel so I could go all over the country; a really good working knowledge of rail lines, so I can seem really useful when people are casually wondering about train times and distances and prices all around the country; and, if I’m feeling vindictive, the chance to utterly nuke people who haven’t got the right tickets, like I saw one woman doing once. I don’t remember her name, but she looked like my old Biology teacher who loved nuking kids who didn’t do their homework, to the fullest extent she could, so I will call her Zoe. I’ve been on two of her trains (I remember what she looks like), and on one of them, there was this Chinese guy in my coach who had bought a ticket using a Railcard discount, but only had some vague paperwork in place of an actual Railcard; it might have been the application form, but he was really far away. Anyway, the outcome of it was that he was absolutely buggered, and had to pay over £40 to get the proper ticket. Boom!

Astronaut

I never really “had” this when I was a child. That is, I never really wanted to go into space like it is stereotypical of children to want to do. But recently, the idea has been appealing to me more and more. It’s ever since I started obtaining all the Futurama episodes and wrote that Biomars article. So I am a late bloomer, maybe they all are? Space is getting more attractive these days. Maybe it’s subconsciously metaphorical for escaping?

Film Editor

All that slicing and splicing of film into itself… it’s only going to get more digital in the future, and digital is what I do best. Imagine how good the computers are that those guys have… With all that raw digital footage in really high definition, they must be some machines. That would make me happy on a day-to-day basis. Also, I’d get to see films in the making.

I love films. I would love to be involved in the filmmaking process. I think it might be a bit farfetched to set my eyes on the director’s chair. I have the visions for films sometimes, but I’m not sure they’d be sustainable enough to make me a good director, who has to manage the whole feel of the film, made up of all the bits, throughout the filming. But if you shoot it, I can put it together, I guarantee it.

Plus, holy fuck, I bet these guys get to hang around on set on all the best films. They get to see all the bits that might not make it in and get to see bits of movie before everyone else does. And I’d bet they get invited to the premieres. With all the stars. And when you go and see the film at the cinema with your mates, you can look at it and think, “yeah, I put that together.”

These are some of my thoughts for stuff I would like to do one day. It’s a nice and varied list. In an ideal world, I’d get to do all of them at some point. That would be great!

I can’t wait to see this film. I loved Max Payne 2. When I bought it for the Playstation 2 a long time ago, it stuck as one of my favourite games for a long time. When the game Enter the Matrix was released, I lamented that it wasn’t more like Max Payne 2.

Since those glorious days, it has taken a distant back seat, gathering dust on our shelves until its time to shine again. Well, here it is. The Max Payne movie should be plenty of fun; a dark lead character, a hot female assassin and loads of guns. Not to mention bucketloads of action and bullet-time like, apparently, we’ve never seen before:

They haven’t just ripped off The Matrix, they waited until the technology has been available to do it properly. We’ve been shooting at 1000 frames per second. And I’m not on any wires, either! All the jumping and firing and flipping and landing on my head… That’s all real! We shot it all on film, man!
 
We weren’t doing motion capture then sitting around waiting for some studio to deliver the special-effects shots. It’s for real.

Mark Wahlberg, as quoted on Filmonic.com.

Hopefully they will keep it pretty faithful to the game; the cinematics and graphic novel-style cutscenes really brought out the dark feeling of the game. It might turn out as some sort of Sin City-Matrix-Bourne Trilogy hybrid. But with Mona Sax. Anyway, yeah, things are looking good for faithfulness to the game, taking a look at the set in the shot above, it’s looking like it was copied straight out of one of the games.

I am looking forward to this movie a lot, and to get into the ’spirit’ of it, I have downloaded Max Payne and Max Payne 2 for the PC, and I’m playing them again. So far, I’ve finished the first (and am now replaying the second, with things making slightly more sense this time around). The second game is so much easier than the first, which is a little disappointing, but they are still good fun, if only for old times’ sake.

With any luck, Rockstar will capitalise on the film by releasing a new game. For the Playstation 3. With really nice graphics. Yeah, that would be awesome.

Decent animation is one of those things we take for granted these days, so when a film comes along and expects to survive looking like one of those awful ancient TV shows from a time before computers, it’s kind of like a visual kick in the nuts.

If you ever watched the animated Lord of the Rings movie, you’d be as well to start from that sort of quality when you’re picturing this. From there, however, you need to consider what it would be like if it were even worse. It was nearly offset, as well, by some pretty 3D CGI dragons. But I have a strong suspicion that funds were diverted from animation and into casting. Kiefer Sutherland had no place in this film; he should go back to doing big budget Hollywood flicks like Phonebooth and, uh, oh yeah - 24, 24: the Game, 24: the DVD Boardgame and the announced 24 movie.

But I can hope, can’t I? The Lord of the Rings animated flick in 1978 was eventually made into a live-action film in 2001; I’ll only have to wait 23 years! Mind you, by then, Christian Bale will be too old to pull off a convincing Raistlin Majere. Although, with his white hair and thin look, maybe that’s a good thing?

The film, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, to give it its full title, is an adaptation of the first book of the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy. Story-wise, it’s pretty faithful to the book, right down to some of the dialogue. There are a few things that have been changed; firstly, the Green Gemstone Man is gone. There is no hint of the three-way triangle of distrust between the elf Gilthanas, the man Eben (who was missing completely) and the mage Raistlin, nor was there the revelation of the eventual betrayer. That could have made some delicious cinematic tension and mystery. We also didn’t see anything of the Chain Room or the tumbling blocks across the gates of Pax Tharkas. Fizban was also done pretty badly; he wasn’t bumbling enough and his secret was revealed at the end (when it should have been revealed in two sequels’ time).

This should have been a live acton thing, and it should have been done well. I can’t believe that Lord of the Rings got so much money poured into it, and this was done on the cheap. I much prefer this story; the characters are much deeper, the world and environment is cooler and there’s way more magic. I will write the screenplay if they want. And do the casting. I will get someone who isn’t Peter Jackson to direct. Does anyone want to make a big old bunch of cash? All I need is a few million pounds to invest in making this film.

Ok, right, back to reviewing the film. Uh, it’s not great. In fact, I wouldn’t bother with it at all. As a standalone film, it’s not worth trying to get into, because it will be more effort than a film should be. For those of you who have read the book and don’t mind being enraged at the patheticness of this attempt to turn it into a film, check it out. But don’t get your hopes up.

At least the filmmakers had the shame and decency to keep it out of cinemas.

Holy crap, they made one. Animated. Jack Bauer is Raistlin Majere.

That’s all I can comment on just now. Review to follow when I’ve watched the bastard. I’ve heard bad things.

But come on, the screenplay was written by the writer of Xena: Warrior Princess! And it has Raistlin!

And I just checked, Lucy Lawless plays Goldmoon. Woah, that’s definitely wrong, though I love Lucy Lawless.

Anyways, yeah, more later. Much love.

As I sit here, my sister and one of her infinitely stupid friends (and I mean it to the fullest degree, as in, just now used the phrase “it’s funny ’cause it’s true!” in earnest) have stopped watching a Lee Evans stand-up routine on TV, only to swap it for a Lee Evans stand-up routine on DVD.

But I guess making a whole post about how I find Lee Evans annoying isn’t going to appeal to those of you who disagree, so I’ll move on to the actual point of the post, which hopefully you can agree would be a fun idea in theory, even if you don’t like who I’m going to do it to.

One day, when I have a stupid amount of money to burn, I will find a performer who I dislike. There will undoubtedly be some gatherings, if the performer is sufficiently well-known, of people who also dislike him. An “I bet I can find a million people who hate Lee Evans” Facebook group (with only three hundred members) or similar. Then I will buy a bucketload of tickets to his performance; not enough to sell out, but enough to make up a significant proportion of the audience. Then I will make people who hate him come. When only a third of the audience laughs at the first few cracks, they’ll feel embarassed that they’re in the minority, and laughs will die down to nothing (manipulating crowd mentality, which is a big flaw in human behaviour). Then my two-thirds will boo on command, and we’ll shame the performer from the stage. Good work.

In an ideal situation, we’d do it on consecutive days of a tour. Just to remind irritating pricks like Lee Evans that not everybody thinks that dicking about on stage like a seven-year-old is good entertainment.

Obviously the best film you are going to see this year will be the sequel to Nolan’s take on the Caped Crusader, aptly (but unusually) titled the Dark Knight.

It is the first film not to have the word ‘Batman’ in the title, and I think that reflects the difference between the films. Nolan has veered away from the ‘comic book’ style Batman that has been made time and time again and brought Batman into the modern age. It didn’t take Nolan too long to secure his dominion over comic book adaptations for years and years to come.

The Dark Knight began where Batman Begins promised to lead; the mad and cruel Joker is at large along with the residual lowlife of Gotham city and the Scarecrow. It is often remarked that the mental paths of genious and insanity have much in common, and Nolan and Ledger’s Joker seems to have perfected the union of the two into one.

More on that later, however. You are all going to see the film at some time or another, so it’s probably pointless to advocate it. If you’re still in doubt, go anyway. You have nothing to lose. Bale is amazing, up to his usual standard, and Heath Ledger has probably given one of the best performances in the history of cinema, which makes his recent death even more grim.

Since you will all be seeing the film, it seems pointless to go into further detail, as whatever I say about it will make little or no difference to what you’ll think coming out of the cinema. So, if I may, I would like to talk a little about the Joker character.

Tonight’s Entertainment

Who is he? We do not know. How did he get to be the way he is: gifted and quick-thinking whilst also insane and cruel? One of the more intriguing things about the Dark Knight is the omission of any backstory development for the Joker. While you’d think that this is a gamble normally, that we won’t understand the character and he won’t be convincing, no backstory is precisely the right backstory.

What makes the Joker so terrifying? It is his chaotic manner. The clarity of his thoughts is twisted by the instability of his goals. His methods are made up as he goes. He leaves no trace but a swath of destruction. And even Gotham’s billionaire hero has trouble tracking him down and stopping him, and he’s pitting the world’s finest resources against a homeless lunatic.

He does enough damage and becomes infamous enough to make threats to the whole city. He is fearsome because of all of that. He is fearsome because of his cruelty, his disregard for human life. He achieved so much in such a little time with the smallest drive: his own amusement.

I like the Joker. He’s everything I would want from a villain. He’s creative and clever whilst not letting that get in the way of heartless maiming and murder. He’s strong and brutal and, above all, fearless; when faced with his own impending demise, he cackles madly into the night, letting everyone know that he is the Joker, and he is mad.