h a l f b a k e r y"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
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I enjoy watching films on TV with an alcoholic beverage or two. Unfortunately many films have a lot of complex plotting at the end, by which time I'm too drunk to follow.
So, I'd like some straight-to-video or made-for-TV films to have most of the plot at the start, slowly degenerating into simple stuff
at the end.
This doesn't just apply to the plot, complex cutting, discussions and things like that would also be phased out.
It would also have 5 minute intervals every 40 minutes or so, during which time the screen would show the word "Drink!", a countdown and something slightly interesting, and gentle music would play. This would be time to prepare a new cocktail (perhaps one could be given on the screen).
A good suggestion someone else made would be to give all the characters descriptive names, so they could be recognised easily.
[link]
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And while we are at it. Why not give each character the name of the actor? So it is not so hard to remember Arnolds character. Arnold Schwarzenegger remains Arnold in whatever film he is trying to act. |
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In our home films are classified as "bruce films", "arnold films" or "clint films" for action movies. When a film really requires attention we call it "agnes film" from Agnes Varda who can make a movie on two women talking for hours in one house. <side note> I hate this kind of difficult films!</side note> |
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Come to think of it: there should be a warning sign on each film when the film is to difficult to follow when drinking. Like a bottle with an "X" through it. |
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Stick to commercial television, with those plots that can be followed by a child and handy advertising spots every five or fifteen minutes (depending on location). |
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[TV for alcoholics. Whatever next?] |
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Alternatively, try "Looks good, tastes awful" type films like Brazil, The Fifth Element or anything by Baz Luhrmann.* That way you can sit and stare at the images without once having to engage your brain.
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* personal opinion. |
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I thought the 5th element was god. Not so much, however, as Simon Vlies, who is obsessed with it (as with so many [other] average films). Don't quote that though. |
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[Edit:] Having said that, I now expect it to be quoted. How simple reverse psychology is :p |
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hey that NicktheMediocre chap, he used to say stuff about films. can't remember what though - nevermind. |
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Hey, I'm not an alcoholic. I just get drunk very easily. |
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And watching a rubbish film is no substitute. I want a film which will be interesting all the way through, from sober to wasted. |
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I can think of a bunch of films which start off clever and get stupider with time. Apocalypse Now is a classic example of a movie which gets more and more incoherent as it goes on. A.I., Heathers, Ginger Snaps, Pump up the Volume, and Once Upon a Time In America also all come to mind. A lot of otherwise intelligent filmmakers seem to feel obliged to end their movie with a big chase and lots of fighting and explosions. |
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NickTheMediocre... I like it. Simon Vlies is in my class at school - he's not famous as far as I can tell... |
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NickTheMediocre... I like it. |
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So anyway, as I was saying, this growth upon an old piece of cheese intrigued me greatly. So much so that I called NASA to ask if they had had any similar reports recently. |
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Much to my astonishment, they told me that this was an isolated incident, but that they had had reports of communities developing on the surfaces of old bananas and to keep my eyes peeled. |
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Somewhat crestfallen, I hung up the phone in the knowledge that I was alone in the world as far as cheese-based communities go. I ended my search for the development of primitive life on kitchen products there and then, but I vowed to myself that if such an event ever occured in the future I would rekindle my love affair with the spontaneous growth of subcultures on food. |
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Around a year and a half ago, I gave up searching for life on fruit and dairy products. However this morning something very curious occured. I went to the vegetable crisper to find half of a lemon lying there, face down, unprotected and stuck to the bottom of the drawer. I thought this to be somewhat odd, as my lemons are normally kept somewhere else entirely to prevent them from transferring their taste to other pieces of food. However, I digress. |
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I tried to remove the lemon from the drawer, but to no avail. It was stuck so firmyl that I think Mr. Muscle himself would have been unable to prize it from its surface. Wondering what was going on and anxious to find out more, I removed the transparent drawer from the fridge and placed it upside down on the kitchen table. What I saw inside that half a lemon, nothing could have prepared me for. It was in fact so flabberghasting that God himself would have let his jaw drop in sheer amazement. |
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Inside this lemon was a whole city of tiny tiny people. There were farms, growing lemons, tall buildings and pretty parks. The microscopic beings were happily going about their busines, and I felt it best not to disturb them but to report the phenomenon to appropriate authorities. |
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So I called NASA again and spoke to a very nice lady. She had a Cornish accent and sounded familiar - it turned out she was the same person I spoke to last time. She remembered our coversation of 2002, and told me that after the banana civilisation scare of that summer (which, incidentally, turned out to be nothing more than a few erroneously placed specks of dust), nothing had happened on the micro-community front for a while. Until a week ago last Tuesday that is, when a speight of lemon-related growths were reported. |
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The lady said the most likely cause of this was a mis-alignment between Venus and Neptune, causing Ultra-Violet rays to be unusually reflected from Mars and into Lemon plantations in the Antarctic, where mutations occured that were undetectable by the human eye. It seems that every Lemon from the Polar 6 quadrant - one of the biggest suppliers of Lemons to the North-by-North-West hemisphere, was incubating a series of DNA mutations. These were not noticeable unless the fruit was somehow left in the exact conditions mine found itself this morning. |
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So anyway, this lady told me she would call central dispatch immediately and that a team of Lemon-people habitatial experts would be with me shortly, and that I should expect their green and purple space cruiser to arrive outside my door in 6 to 8 nanoseconds. Now we all know what a promise of 6 to 8 nanoseconds from a NASA receptionist means, don't we. More like 6 to 8 solar orbits. |
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So I waited and I waited for these chaps to arrive to collect my super-lemon, but as expected they never showed up. As I write this I am on hold with the good people at NASA public relations and customer service as they evaluate the possibility of a site-to-site cross continental transport. I argued that such a genetic deconstruction could seriously harm their civilisation, but she came back with a vaild point, stating that any unfortunate side-effects would only be of benefit to their research, as they already have so many healthy specimens. |
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So I happily agreed, and the customer service person is now arranging with superiors to authorise the transport. Oh, he's back now. I shall have to finish this story at a later date. |
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Movies are already interesting when you're drunk. If film producers were asked to make a movie that would be more interesting to drunken viewers, the end result would probably seem pretty forced, and not good for drinking to at all. Interesting idea, but no croissant from me. |
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BTW, I agree with [calum] entirely about Baz Luhrmann. |
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The best thing to do with movies when drunk is to turn the sound off and make up your own dialogue. |
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Enjoyed the story, [Nick]. The first and last paragraphs were particularly good. Skipped a few bits in the middle. Well, most of it. Well, like I said, the first and last paragraphs... |
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"Taken" starring Liam Neeson and H from Steps is the perfect distillation of the idea: the first act establishes the relationships and culminates in LN explaining down the phone (but really to the viewer) what is going to happen in the remainder of the film, which departs from the acts structure into a carnival of briskly executed executions. Indeed, I have watched the film without the first act, starting at the explanation / prediction and found my enjoyment of it diminished not one jot. |
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Probably having the flashing bottle during the drink interlude is superfluous. If you are not sure when to drink you are done for the night anyway. As Calum notes, better would be Liam on the phone, summarizing what has taken place so far and then laying out what will take place next. |
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It might initially be confusing to have him show up in a movie where so far he has not been present, but after several of this sort people will get used to him. |
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This is a really clever idea. |
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I'd like to see a movie where everybody gets drunk,
you pick one character and drink when they drink
and have the plot and action degenerate into stupor
like slowness as they get progressively sloshed. |
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One character might be talking about the
"justification for the ontological necessity of modern
man's existential dilemma " while shipping a glass of
chardonnay at the beginning of the movie then at
the end just starts blurting "I wrote a book but the
corporate fascist publishers are all right wing pigs!"
over and over to everybody at the end. Having
picked that character as your drinking avatar, you'd
be just as drunk as the character would be as the
movie would progress. I see a lot of character arcs
into emotion either positive (Guy leaning into his
cop partner: Heeeyy! I love you man!") or negative
(Guy stands up and addresses the whole
congregation: You're all a bunch of God damned right
wing commies!) |
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Truly one of the most clever ideas on the HB. (Loris',
not mine) |
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You could always take this to cable television, with the drunkard's channel. Or is that already a valid description of most television? |
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