Go see it if you haven’t already! That is all.

There’s not much to say about this, you just need to watch it. I’ve already reblogged it via Tumblr but wanted to put it on here too. It’s a cover of Cat Steven’s song Here Comes My Baby, performed by a group of YouTube artists who are going under the name of Sons of Admirals for this project. They all have their own solo “careers”, but have combined to see what they can create as a whole.

There’s something about the voices on this group that just sound so good to me. It’s probably why I love their other works as well. As any good fan would do, here’s a link to buy the song via iTunes: http://bit.ly/soababy

Listen to it¹.

1. What are you doing? Why are you reading this notation INSTEAD OF LISTENING TO THE SONG?

Going to see this movie, I had mixed feelings. Was I going to like it for the way it reinvented the series? Or hate it for the way it butchered the original series, fan boy style? When I left the cinema two hours later, I was left still wondering the same thing, and possessing the same mixed feelings.
All those feelings aside though, it turned out to be an okay movie. I didn’t mind, and it’s good that they’re trying to restart such an amazing classic series. However, there were quite a few things that bugged me. So allow me to enlighten you with a brief overview of some of the more annoying aspects for myself personally.

Character names.

Alright, I exaggerate when I say gone. All the original main characters are still there, but the moment the opening credits said “Based on characters by Wes Craven" instead of “Based on the movie by Wes Craven”, I knew something was going to be up. First, there’s this guy:

First to die: “That guy from Twilight”

Apart from being from the Twilight series, this guy is the first character in the movie. His name is Dean, and he is nowhere in the original movie. He is the first to die, and alert everyone to the very immediate danger of the situation. It’s not bad per say, but who he talks to is important. It’s Chris. Actually, it’s Tina from the original movie with a new name and everything. They changed all the names of the characters, possibly due to legal reasons, but it’s enough to really get to me. I wasn’t able to relate them to the original characters because they weren’t the originals. The only two characters who kept their names were Nancy and Freddy (For obvious reasons, of course.). Now this really is just a fan boy bitching, but I liked the original characters, and I might of been able to overlook the name changes, if that was all they changed about some of the characters.

Personality changes.

If you saw the original movies, you’ll remember Rod Lane, the boyfriend of first victim Tina Gray. His character was portrayed as a badass; carried a switch blade on him, wore a leather jacket, and had the lone tough guy act down. When his girlfriend falls into Freddy Krueger’s hands and is tossed around their room, slashed and killed by an invisible foe only present in her dreams, he doesn’t cry. He throws shit around the dark room looking for the guy who did this, only running because he doesn’t want to be taken by the cops for something he didn’t do. In the end, he dies at Krueger’s hand when he is strangled in his sleep. Then the remake happens and we get…Jesse. Here, have a side by side comparison of the two…it’s not the best, but apparently there aren’t many photos of these two on the internets:

Left: Rod Lane, Right: Jesse Braun/Purdy mouth

Jesse is the complete opposite of Rod. How does he react to his EX-girlfriend’s death? He runs away, and curls up against a post until he’s taken by the cops. That’s right; the character has been turned into a pussy.
To top it off, when confronted by Krueger, he does what any guy would apparently do, and curls up in the foetal position and starts screaming. This of course prompts Krueger to ask, “Why are you screaming? I haven’t even cut you yet.” That’s right; this kid, the one who’s meant to be the ‘tough guy’, is screaming his head off when Freddy hasn’t laid a single finger on him. Way to be a hero man.

Freddy revamped.

Anyone mildly aware of A Nightmare On Elm Street would recognize this character, and even know the character Freddy. The man was just sinister, and you can’t help but recognize such an iconic creation; even if it is represented by the embodiment of Scottish humour in The Simpsons.

 
Spot which one is the Simpsons Parody.

But along with a new actor for the role, the creators saw fit to reinvent everything he stood for. And so we are introduced to the first of a few attempts to be realistic in a fantastical horror movie about a man who attacks you in your dreams.

Freddy Krueger, embodiment of evil in the Elm Street universe (And the Friday The 13th universe if Freddy vs. Jason remains canon in the reinvention of the franchises), originally had quite the back story as a child murderer. Though intended to be a child molester¹ by original writer Wes Craven, it was felt to be a bit too strong for audiences of the time (it was the 1980s after all), and he was brought back to being a serial murderer of anyone young.
Much like that friend of yours who bleached their hair and it looked particular terrible at the time but you grew to love it, the idea of Freddy Krueger became one with that of a child murderer to the point that there are people who, if the discussion of “evil pedophiles and child murderers” comes up, will mention they’ve heard of one murderer called Freddy Krueger².

Those in charge of writing the new version decided to go back to the idea of him being a child molester though, and made it so he was targeting those teenagers who were responsible for getting him caught when they were little. I understand that giving him more of a motive than “I love the rush from killing kids” is much scarier as is the idea of a child molester in modern society, but if they move to turn this into a remake franchise, they don’t really have any room to move. Once the motive is gone, it’s going to be a lot harder to make him move to other things. With the original series, once he got one set of children, he’d move on to another. In this movie, these kids were unique. Once he’s eliminated all the kids he touched that turned him in, it’s a lot harder to believe that he just up and decided to start murdering everyone, at least for me anyway.

As far as his appearance goes, they’ve decided to change that as well. Gone is the iconic, almost cartoonish burns that characterized him and in it’s place, a walking corpse. Brad Fuller (one of the producers) is quoted as aiming to try and make Freddy look as close to a real burn victim without being disgusting as possible, and he succeeded in that right. However, I did not find the character scary in itself. In fact, the realism took away from what made the character so macabre and evil.

Dude, what happened to your face?

At least they decided to keep the razor fingers. If they replaced them then I’d of had something to truly be pissed about.

Facts

That wasn’t the only thing that was changed in the name of realism. One of the things that startled me most in the originals (before they got silly) was not knowing when the victim had fallen asleep. They’d close their eyes for a second, and you’d think it was them just being tired, but it turns out they’d nodded off, but only been woken up again in the dream. In the remake, they’d decided to use micro sleeps too, but also wanted to fully explain the process. So while in the original we get 5 seconds of dialogue explaining how “we can control our own dreams once we realize it is a dream”, in this one we get minutes of boring dialogue explaining how “parts of the brain shut down, causing micro sleeps”, and essentially ruining the whole mystery surrounding Freddy by explaining how he could attack people when they still seemed awake.
I know this seems like a minor thing, but as a fan this sort of thing really bothers me. Would the magician you just saw have been nearly as amazing if you knew exactly how he did his tricks? Exactly.

Backstory

Speaking of removing the mystery³, I want to touch on the amount of back story present in this movie. Now, first up I believe I’ve been explaining what was in the original. Well, in the original, there was limited back story beyond a brief explanation as to that Krueger was a child killer and the parents burned him alive. Now in the new movie, you have flash backs to the past, and you see everything from Krueger at his “he loves the kids” period to “Oh no we have caught him and seen him for the evil creature he is", and a detailed scene of his death, which was also different from the original story. He was originally arrested by the police but got off on a technicality, and because of that the parents revolted and hunted him down, where as this version has the parents opt straight for hunting him instead of calling the police.

Conclusion

Now, these things by themselves could of been tolerable. However as a self proclaimed fan boy of the Nightmare On Elm Street series, the collective just serves to bug me completely. I am not saying the movie was bad; it made me jump quite a few times (to my brother’s amusement) where no other horror movie has in quite a while. However, much like reading the book before seeing the movie based on it, you notice little things which seem to no matter what, ruin the experience for you.

If you have seen the new movie, the old movie, or preferably both, I’d like to hear what you think of it all via my conveniently placed comments box (Protip: It’s right below this article).

1. Kiddie Fiddler, Kiddie Cruncher, Priest, I could go on but the list is endless and to be honest, kind of tasteless. Michael Jackson”.
2. These people also think he’s real, though I do try to inform them he isn’t…usually.
3. Man, I am seriously loving how each section just seems to naturally segue into the next. I am the king of writing flukes.

Faced with such an amount, the man does what anyone would naturally do and blame his offspring, claiming that his son downloaded over $7000 worth of “supposedly free phone applications”.

I want to attack this from two sides; first about the man and his son, then I want to briefly touch on how Brad Crouch retarded an already stupid piece of shit news.
First up, we’ll see how many applications his son would of had to download using Mr. Wortley’s phone for such a bill. Apparently it is suspected that the iPhone doesn’t have a data package bundled with the plan, which is what allows for cheaper downloads via 3G internet. The article has Craig Middleton, a spokesperson from Telstra, say “If you don’t have a data pack you’ll be paying $2 a megabyte”. This is news to me, but I’ve always had a data package because I know internet on 3G can get expensive.
So we have the rate of two dollars a megabyte. Now, iPhone’s have a feature which prevents you from downloading any application 10 megabytes or greater unless you’re connected to wireless internet, or downloading via iTunes. So for the sake of this post we’ll assume every single application was exactly ten megabytes, though it’s almost certain that many of them would of been one to five. The article has Wortley claim the two biggest “downloads in a short period” were $4000 and $3000. So we’ll assume that this is all that his son is accused of spending. So with some simple maths:

You remember my epic MS Paint skills, right?

For those who aren’t quite with it, I divided the total sum of money by the total cost of a single 10MB application ($2 for every megabyte makes it 20), to reveal his son would of had to download 350 applications. Now, an iPhone 3G has a maximum of 9 pages for applications. Each page displays 16 applications, and there are 4 on the floating dock at the bottom. This means an iPhone can only hold 148 applications, including those shipped with the phone (Messages, Weather, Settings, etc). This means if I went on a download spree I could only download 133 applications before the iPhone would stop me. After that I’d have to delete other applications before I could keep going. Why didn’t he monitor his son’s use of the phone, and did he actually use his phone during any of that month? The fact that Wortley didn’t notice that his phone suddenly had hundreds of extra applications displays just how irresponsible he is with his mobile phone.
Wortley says “I don’t think parents or children would be aware that what appear to be free applications can cost a fortune in downloading where you get hit with thousands of dollars in bills over an hour.”. This shows his complete naivety in how things work. For thousands of dollars to be incurred in downloading applications, the “child” at fault would need to download hundreds of applications without trying any, and deleting them all as they went. If they did that, then I’d be suspicious as to whether or not they weren’t just getting back at their parents for not letting them go out that day. “Can’t see my friends? Then I’ll rape my phone bill with a metaphorical rake handle.”
In any case, it is unlikely that the costs were the result of just application downloads. It was more likely a combination of that, phone calls and internet browsing. I find that excessive use of YouTube can eat through my data rather quickly. If Wortley knew how to actually use an iPhone, he might also gain the ability to go into Settings and disable the Application Store, YouTube, and even the internet browser. Case solved. Wortley, you’re an idiot.

 Also, you probably used up your downloads watching YouTube videos).

Now, I want to talk about Brad Crouch. His article, which was made to look like an article about Russel Wortley’s lack of responsibility, instead points the finger in a more generalized direction. The article uses sentences like “has revealed a phone fiasco where unsuspecting users can be charged more than $4000 an hour for so called free phone applications” and uses Wortley’s case as an example.
The article is deliberately written to make the companies (which in this case I guess would make it both Apple and Telstra) look like evil overlords who specifically designed the phone and subsequent services to rip off as many people as they can. Now sure, they’re here to make money, but by no means are they trying to trick you. At the time of the sale, Telstra are legally obliged to explain things including how 3G and their data plans work. Therefore, unless there was a problem and Telstra ACCIDENTLY charged them too much¹, it really is due to the irresponsible person rather than the sinister corporations.

In short, Mr. Wortley should of been more careful, and probably should have monitored what his child was doing with his government phone.

 Hello, is this Mr. Atkinson? You are a poo head (Photo by Nieve44/La Luz)

I remain perplexed as to how he believes he can blame it all on application downloads and still claim to be unaware, given the evidence². What do you think of the situation?

1. Wortley confessing they made the downloads, even though I still doubt it was through application downloads, means this is more than likely not the case
2. evidence I explained rather messily, but explained regardless

Today, I went and watched the atrocity that is Max Payne, starring Mark Whalberg.
I’m not exactly sure what it is that makes such a good actor as Wahlberg take on such shitty roles, but I wish he’d stop already.
For those unfamiliar with Max Payne, he is the "hero" in the game of the same name. The plots of the movie and game both have similar traits. Max came home to find his family dead at the hands of drug addicts. He spends the next few years constantly seeking retribution; investigating dead-end leads which eventually reveal plot points and twists, and then the end. The directors and writers try to move the plot towards different scenarios than the game, keeping the movie from being too much like its electronic counterpart. This is where the movie falls short though.
The movie seems to go on forever, leaving me more frustrated than wowed at the slow motion action sequences. During these scenes of course, the movie seems to act ALOT like a computer game. Max is amazingly blessed with unlimited ammo, and has dead-on accuracy, where-as his enemies have worse aim than the stormtroopers from Star Wars and lack almost any ammo in their weapons. Payne moves up each level of whatever building he’s moving through, until he reaches the end level "boss". Also, any injuries he MAY sustain the scene before are magically forgotten about, as if he picked up a health pack on the way.
The movie left me confused when BAM! Demons were suddenly attacking everyone. Like what the hell! There were never demons in the game. Makes no sense at all, and doesn’t contribute anything real to the movie, except for a chance to throw a heap of special effects in our faces.
So Max Payne goes all dark-side as he probes people and eventually gets to the root of it all (which I’m not going to ruin, just in case you want to expose yourself to this deplorable excuse of a movie). He almost dies but takes an experimental super-addictive drug which the bad guys coincidently gave him, and this saves him from hypothermia somehow. Also, it makes him see burning ashes instead of snow, and demons start flying overhead as if hell were suddenly taking over the city. The drug gives him the power to shoot his way through EVERYTHING, and forget about his wounds even quicker. "OH I GOT HIT BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER…NOTHING REALLY MATTERS…TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE". No matter how many shots are landed on him, he just keeps on moving, like the drug turned him into some Jason Vorhees/Michael Myers hybrid.
I refuse to talk about this any longer or reveal any more. Go see it for yourself if you want to put yourself through that misery.
Max Payne needs to lay off the motherfucking drugs.

Why? Because of Team Fortress 2, I found Control Point. Because of Control Point, I found the Dead Workers Party. Because of the DWP…you get the point. Eventually it brought me to a forum post by a character called Ash Williams, about his band’s new EP “We Choose To Go To The Moon.” being available for streaming on their website. The album was available for download on a “pay what you want” scheme, and I downloaded the album for free, deciding if I liked it, I’d go back and pay for it then.

After a couple of weeks, it’s grown on me enormously. Not being the best writer when it comes to describing music you’ll have to bare with me. Ready? Ready.

There’s really only one word I can think of to describe a majority of the music, and that’s haunting. The band has dual vocalists, and the way they intertwine with each other, swapping back and forth and sharing lines sounds so amazing at times it makes me shudder. Music is meant to inspire a strong feeling in a person, and this works in doing that for me. In songs like Moons So Bright, the music is slow, and in a lot of ways sounds like I’ve heard it before. The vocals though, just hook me. I really wish I could go into this more, but I can’t, I need a thesaurus.

There are some songs I have trouble getting my head around of course, like ‘Spin, Spin, Spin’. The strange style the band switches to makes it difficult to get into those songs, but they by no means are terrible or unlistenable.

If you found all that terrible to read, here’s the jist; It’s a good album from a good band. Go and buy it. From their website. Or at least download it and give it a listen. Do it. You know you want to. Peeeeer pressure. Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer pressure.

I just went back and paid ten dollars for it. Which by Australian standards, is pretty cheap for music. If you’re interested in listening to new music and this post did absolutely nothing for you, try visiting http://dumbblondedead.com/, give the music a listen, and judge it for yourself.

Previous months song lists:

• September 09
• August 09
• July 09
• June 09
• May 09
• April 09

Now, I don’t find that funny, I find it a good idea for getting criticism to get better. However, what I find funny is a certain pause in the video I made by accident.

To me, this is possibly the most epic screenshot of my brother I could ever get. I almost wet myself laughing so hard. To bring the point home:

And because I can:

Back on topic now, my brother has done this re-enactment, and will do future ones, with the idea of getting criticism and to improve. If you have a few spare minutes, please go to his video and give it a watch, and maybe leave a comment on what you thought about it.

The music video was posted on CharlieIsSoCoolLike’s channel for our viewing pleasure:

Some more information about the project, from the sidebar of said video:

The lyrics of the song are made up of YouTube comments, compiled into a song by another YouTuber. The lyrics were released and then YouTubers wrote a melody for the lyrics, and we picked our favourite. We held YouTube auditions via video response to pick the band, found the producer of the song through YouTube, and the music video is made up of literal interpretations of the lyrics, clapping and singing along, by YouTubers! It’s a bit YouTubey.
All of the money from the song goes directly to Children In Need, so I hope you’ll consider helping us by buying the song, and telling all your friends and family to buy it too! Thanks :)

It’s a good song, and it’s great to see what people can create when joined by the power of the internet.

Previous months song lists:

• August 09
• July 09
• June 09
• May 09
• April 09