Coal Pit of Movie Ideas

Project Trident is a film-making collective in the South East of England. They’re a (very) independent collection of zero-budget film-makers, but my favourite part of their site is the procedural generator of B-movie film titles. Here:

Project Trident!

Every time you click refresh, it’ll bring you a new, exciting-sounding movie title. It’s one of my favourite internet toys, and I love imagining the movies that the title-generator brings me. Sometimes I’ve loved my own ideas so much, I wrote them down. As a serving suggestion, read them out loud in your best Don LaFontaine voice:

The Skeletal Rippers from the Far Side of Time

Professor Johnson had been developing a wormhole generator. The evening before he was supposed to switch it on, something… went wrong. When his lab assistant and his wife accidentally switch on the generator, something… evil comes through. From a time of monsters, stick-thin creatures made of calcium arrive through the portal. They’re here… to rip out our skeletons.

The Amazon That Came from the Future

Professor… Gregson, had been developing a wormhole generator. The evening before he was supposed to switch it on, something went wrong. When his lab assistant and his wife accidentally switch on the generator, something… sexy comes through! Now, the Amazonian warrior from a future wasteland has to survive… San Francisco! Expect hijinks aplenty as a geeky lab assistant tries to teach this warrior woman how to be a lady, and learns something about himself along the way. A heart-warming tale of hilarity, lust and time-travel.

(Eventually she goes on a rampage until she’s subdued, King Kong style, forcing us to ask who the real monsters are. Spoilers: it’s probably us.)

Motorbike Skeleton From the Dark Side of Transylvania

In 1954, a Transylvanian biker was speeding along a dark, stormy country road. But he should have known not to refuse a hitchhiking witch! Her curse combined his body with his bike, turning him into a hideous motorbike-man… centaur-looking… monster-thing. Fifty years since he died from the shock, when a US real estate developer tries to build a luxury horror-themed single’s hotel on the site of his death, he awakens the remains of… the MOTORBIKE SKELETON!

Bride of the Robots: A Warning from the Future

In a world where cruel robotic overlords are powered by sex, one woman escapes to the past. Now it’s a race against time, literally. She must kill the man who invented the dildo-powered cybernetic intelligence that conquered the world. With a warning from the future, she is… the BRIDE OF THE ROBOTS!

Lords of the Rippers: The Final Chapter

It’s been twenty years since Professor Johnson’s wormhole generator let the Skeletal Rippers into our time. At first we thought we could fight them. Then we thought we could live with them. Next, governments of the world tried to use them to build empires. Now, in a world ruled by the Skeletal Ripper Overlord, rebellious heroes arise… to fight!

(In the final film of the Lord of the Rippers trilogy, based on the popular Skeletal Rippers franchise, we follow the last moments of the rebels that have fought against the growing tyranny. Finally, in the Overlord’s throne room, we discover that the ruler of the Skeletal Rippers is none other than… PROFESSOR JOHNSON! From the first film, right? Mind = blown! It really ties the whole franchise together)

The Secret of Walt Disney’s Head

Walter Elias Disney has some of the most controversial and hotly contested biographies. This is weird considering he’s hardly Stalin or Jesus. If you really want to piss off a Disney biographer, claim he was a Nazi. Hell, it’s even one of my pet peeves, and I’m far from a serious academic. A major source of contention amongst Disney historians is not whether his head was frozen (spoilers: it wasn’t) but where exactly this urban legend came from.

Wait... that's not Disney!

Almost all of the biographers agree that the urban legend about his cryogenically frozen head is a myth. (I say almost all because there’ll always be a fringe of extreme conspiracy theorists – Illuminati-botherers who believe Walt was a lizard man from space, shape shifted into a human form to brainwash our children and steal the brains of our leaders).

The first cryogenically preserved man was frozen a month after Disney died. Maybe this helped fuel the idea. Incidentally, we have yet to develop the ability to bring these corpse-sicles back from the dead, and until we do there’s probably no way to really tell how useful cryogenic freezing is. Until I see a revived subject in the adverts for cryogenics, smiling and saying ‘How refreshing!’ I will doubt the effectiveness of the procedure.

The privacy surrounding Walt Disney’s death has only fuelled speculation. One of the things people love to repeat is that after he died, his family waited three days to announce his death to the public. Obviously they just wanted time to grieve before the media circus started, but it looks suspicious from a certain (paranoid) angle. What does a three-day news delay have to do with cryogenics anyway? Is it one of the secret signs? Is there a three-day ritual that mustn’t be interrupted? If so, then science is stranger than I thought.

Disney was certainly capable of planning big, and a major Futurist. EPCOT was intended to be a revolutionary new city. For example, this short film was made shortly before Disney’s death, and goes on and on and on about how great EPCOT will be. For twenty whole damn minutes! It’s the kind of corporate propaganda film that clichéd supervillains can only dream about:

Personally, I can’t watch that film without imagining all the ways it could go wrong, but that’s because my head is full of twisted utopias like Bioshock’s Rapture, the Breen nation from Aeon Flux, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the civilization from Logan’s Run and dozens more. “Welcome to EPCOT, the utopia designed by Disney’s very own Imagineers! Just one rule: you only eat what you kill. Take my advice – find shelter before sunset or the Mouseketeers will catch your scent. Stay out of the centre of the city, that’s where they nest.”

Anyway, planning a city is pretty eccentric, but some people credit Walt with much more eccentric ideas. They say he planned far ahead in his city’s future, laying down plans for an entirely immortal population. They say he intended the city to outlast the Earth itself, and go floating off into space. As with any powerful man, you can imagine all kinds of crap about them.

Disney's father?

But he didn’t freeze his brain. The real secret of Walt Disney’s head is the lesson it teaches us: some academics will become furious, cold-hearted and spiteful monsters over the most petty and irrelevant issues. Historians and researchers studying his life go crazy when an opposing opinion is voiced, and they will tear each other’s work apart with accusations of being sensationalist, groundless and unfair or sanitised, white-washed, corporate sellouts. The question of who first suggested that Walt Disney cryogenically preserved his head is a good example of this: a massive amount of people don’t care, but a select few will probably fight to the death over it if ever trapped in the same room. In this way, it’s probably also a good example of most arguments anywhere on the internet.

Dear Disney historians and aficionados, let’s stop arguing about who has the bigger brain-dick. Instead let’s address the question we all ought to be asking: What happened to Kennedy’s brain? Answer: SHAPE SHIFTING SPACE LIZARDS!

Grr! Arg!

Variety is the spice of adverts

Long ago, the internet spread an infinite buffet of video before my starving attention span. I gorged myself. My neurons grew fat and rich and, in their own way, also delicious. Like tasty brain-spaghetti.You’re probably pretty similar. At the very least, you’ve spent hours mindlessly clicking from one kitten-sneezing video to another, right?

Then you’ll also have seen the adverts. It’s to be expected – after all, we must at some point pay for the buffet. A tap on our hunched shoulders and we look up startled, gravy and salad dressing dripping from our eyebrows. The waiter daintily places a slip of paper on what used to be a plate of sliced mutton gizzards stuffed with boiled jellyfish. Everyone groans miserably, clutching at their stretched, expanded bellies in sadness.

With some video sites you can skip the advert, scrunching up the bill and throwing it back into the waiter’s face. With some adverts on Youtube, for example, you can currently skip the advert after five seconds. On Blip.tv, host of hundreds of popular webshows, you must sit through them for the first thirty seconds to a minute – or mute them, for the sake of your sanity.

I don’t know why but for a very long time, the only advert I saw on Blip.tv was this:

If you’ve never seen it, it’s an Olympic-themed variation of the notorious UPS Logistics advert. A montage of UPS workers, Olympic athletes and London landmarks is set to a simple, relaxed tune. The ‘UPS tune’ is potentially quite pleasant at first even if it doesn’t capture your attention. But I love Blip.tv, which means I’ve now seen that advert over three hundred and nineteen million times (roughly). You thought you hated the Go Compare singer? You don’t know what hate is. I used to know, but it was overwritten by the advert’s lyrics. My identity is now bound to the advert. When I look at the clear blue sky, a flower or the face of a smiling baby, I see the nothing but the UPS logo. I don’t remember the words to ‘Happy Birthday To You’, or the date of Christmas. Only the UPS tune remains. I sing the song while I mow the lawn, while I shower, even while I have sex – at thirty seconds, it’s the perfect length.

Then I guess my cookies suddenly changed or I got rid of some malware or something, I'm not sure. Whatever quirk making this the only advert in my internet might have just fixed itself. The dam broke, and other adverts came pouring through. I'd forgotten that when they’re not for UPS, adverts can be fun. I enjoyed them! I’ve welcomed the cars, cookbooks, Christmas sales, anti-smoking ads and even the adverts for insurance. The nature of the tasty internet buffet changed when I realised the bill itself is also edible, and delicious.

Below is my current favourite: Generation Awake. I hope you enjoy it. It’s a positive message of consumer awareness, it’s quirky and sweet, and it has an enjoyable tune. It must be destroyed immediately and never listened to again, so it can stay that way.

This is where Josh took over

If you’re reading this, then you’re reading it in the future. Probably not so far in the future that you’re reading it in a flying car, while a robot massages your erogenous zones, but you’re certainly not reading it today. This means you read an article on this blog which hasn’t been written yet, from my perspective. It means you liked it so much that you decided to read through the archives. Congratulations, you have excellent taste.

It also means two more things. One possibility is that you’ve been clicking from previous article to previous article, reading backwards through individual posts, lured on step by step by my charm and wit. Congratulations, the proper flow of time means nothing to you now, and you’ve been procrastinating so long that whatever you needed to do is probably no longer relevant. The second possibility is that at some point, you decided to go all the way to the very beginning and read forwards. You’ve just committed to reading over one hundred years’ worth of blog posts, you poor fool (depending on when you’re from).

So you’ll either have been confused, or will be confused very shortly. See, all the posts prior to this one were written by Henneth; my good friend, helicopter pilot, waffle cook and occasional unicorn wrangler. This was a watershed moment, when the blog changed hands. For the sake of continuity and narrative, I’ll say this: Hello, my name is Josh.

To me, the name One Click Too Many implied that I should not only bring you the successful, professional stories that Henneth used to write, but also information that made you wish you could Ctrl+Z your brain. It sounded like a place we can confess the things we found when we surfed too far in the wrong direction. A place where you can find safety after being driven crazy by that one link you shouldn’t have clicked.

So, I’m sorry about doing that to your brain. But you’re partly to blame too. You helped build this. Without you and your precious page views, dear reader, how could I have grown an audience of millions, an empire of flying cars and an army of sex-robots.

3D : An extra dimension of crappiness

As I sit in my cinema seat, and put on my pair of plastic glasses, I am apathetic that the movie I am about to watch is in 3D. 2010 certainly seems to be the year of the 3D cinema, with everything from Toy Story to SAW having a go at making us look stupid in our Corrado Soprano inspired glasses.

I loved Avatar. I will always use it as a prime example of 3D being used to enhance a movie experience, rather than cheapen it with obnoxious reminders that yes, we are indeed watching a 3D movie. This usually involves things flying out at us suddenly, dirt or mud being sprayed, or maybe if we are lucky, a penis courtesy of the much anticipated Jackass 3.

I am not ripping on Jackass for using 3D. In fact, I think it is a fantastic idea, because those guys are doing it all for a laugh, and I have no doubt in my mind that seeing poop, penises and jetskis flying at me will be a visceral experience.

What does bug me, is how people seem to be substituting a great story experience, with a gimmicky and shallow attempt of spectacle over narrative. In fact, most of the time, the 3D makes things look even more artificial then they already are.

Of course, the next big thing, or the next big flop, is going to be 3D TV. Imagine sitting at home, wearing a pair of glasses and watching Eastenders in 3D. Two Dimensions of Pat Butcher is enough thank you. Saying that, before one of the many 3D movies that I have seen this year, a trailer for Sky Sports 3D was shown, and it actually looked pretty sweet. So, I guess the jury is out on this one until it becomes properly established. Personally, I don’t think it is going to be the next big thing. For some reasons I am thinking of Minidisks, and while it was a cool idea, it just didn’t take off. Do people really want to put on some goofy glasses every time they watch TV?

One thing, which at this moment in time is probably still in very early development, is 3D gaming. It does exist in limited form, with a few games supporting it, such as Valve’s ‘Left 4 Dead 2’. It doesn’t seem to have become a serious thought just yet, mostly due to price of hardware, and the ever present premium that comes attached to the novelty.

What we should do, is skip this stage and head into 4D, which according to Wikipedia is:

‘Generated by applying the rules of vectors and coordinate geometry to a space with four dimensions. In particular a vector with four elements (a 4-tuple) can be used to represent a position in four-dimensional space. The space is a Euclidean space, so has a metric and norm, and so all directions are treated as the same: the additional dimension is indistinguishable from the other three.’

Now, I don’t know what the hell that means, but I don’t think us humans will be able to manage it, without 4D glasses, some brain surgery and LSD.

I’m not even going to get into the implications of 3D pornography. That’s for another conversation, and without going into detail, you know that it will either be the worst, or the greatest invention of mankind.

Video Games - Waste of Time or Freaking Awesome

Video Games. I love em.

Sometimes it’s just fun to join in an online game, and join thousands in racing, shooting or even epic quests of nerdlike proportions. Hours fly by as we stare at a screen, moving only our fingers to control the super soldier that we are puppeting on screen. If only my sex life was as easy. Oh wait, it is, but that’s another thing entirely.

I have been playing games as long as I can remember. From jumping on enemies in Sonic the Hedgehog on the Master System to destroying whole buildings in Battlefield Bad Company 2, I am a certified gamer.

I shudder at the thought of all the skills and education I could have amassed during the many years of my life that I have spent staring at a screen, but then again, at least I wasn’t out on the streets killing hookers and shooting cops; nope, I could do all that at home, without the hefty jail sentence and overly friendly bunkmate.

At the end of the day, people do things which they enjoy. Gaming now, more than ever is a huge industry worth billions, and it is only going to get bigger. Gone are the pimply bespeckled nerds, replaced with a demographic that ranges from the age of 0-80. Mostly male though. I will never impress a female with my ability to buy full guns and kit in Counterstrike, in less than 2 seconds.

Now, one of my fondest yet most shameful memories of my time at university is the amount of Mario Kart we played. We played it for hours, every day, without fail. There were three of us, sometimes four, and nothing was more fun than screwing over your friend and winning the race. This, I think, validates games. It brings people together for a great time, in a place where nothing ultimately matters and you can kill eachother with no consequence.

As for World of Warcraft fans – That’s another thing entirely.

Youtube Link of the Day

An extremely cool music video with some amazing and creative animation.