A much needed day of sleeping and vegetating which passed in a bit of a fuggy blur. I was feeling a bit low, both due to exhaustion and annoyance at having to pass my crippled bicycle in the hall. If I felt this bad after being a victim of such a trivial crime then how bad must people who have been more unfairly and innocently wronged feel. I might have got up the energy to go to they gym, but then I remembered I wouldn't be able to cycle and I slumped again. I am not sure how much empathy criminals or young vandals actually have, but I think making them meet and apologise to their victims might be a more effective punishment than locking them up or fining them. My mild depression made me buy junk food and beer and thus made me even more unhealthy. The people who stole my bike wheel might be responsible for my final and ultimate physical decline.
In any case it would be nice to blame them.
I was surprised by how blue all this was making me though and suspect it might be just as much to do with having overdone it a bit recently. AIOTM in particular takes a lot out of me and is pretty stressful. I imagine I would have curled up on my sofa to recuperate even if my bike had been kindly serviced and oiled and repaired by some kindly stranger.
Though wouldn't it be nice if gangs of people went around and relieved their boredom by performing acts of random kindness rather than violence?
Destruction is an easy way to ephemeral happiness, but doing something positive, whilst usually harder work will give you a life long sense of satisfaction.
But maybe the thieves will enjoy the £3 more than they would have enjoyed doing something nice.
So I watched a lot of TV, jumping from rubbish film to rubbish film. I watched quite a lot of the Tom Hanks film "That Thing You Do!" which I had remembered (correctly as it turned out) as being a slow and quite dull look at the rise and immediate fall of a young band in the 60s. Tom Hanks is in it and wrote it and directed it as well and maybe he could have done with an outside hand to tell him to liven things up a little. It's all fairly harmless, but for me, the film is given an unwanted spin because the young male lead looks and acts exactly like Tom Hanks. So at best you are distracted by the fact that you are wondering if Hanks made him act that way or whether he cast him because he wanted to live the part vicariously through him. This time I created a fantastical and obviously untrue scenario where I imagined that Tom Hanks was secretly the actor's real dad and had given him the part as a way of being close to him and to make up for having impregnated his mother and then shirked his responsibilities. To be fair, my fantasy was better than the reality and maybe I should write that film.
I then saw a little bit of "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" which hopefully set Dickens spinning in his grave and with luck he was so riled up that he visited the screen writer and the stars and then sent three instructive ghosts to warn them of the errors of their ways. Again, a better film than the one I watched and if only I wasn't such a lazy arse, pining away on my sofa, mourning my bike saddle and eating Malteasers then I might actually get round to writing a film rather than criticising all the other ones. Then I chanced across a bit of the frankly appalling Guy Pearce version of "The Time Machine" and although my imaginary movies might be getting a bit derivative of each other I can imagine a scenario where HG Wells invents a time machine just so he can come into the future and punch everyone involved with this film in the face. Apart from Samantha Mumba who is delightful. And I think, like me, HG Wells would be distracted by the fact that she was wearing a futuristic string vest where you get a pretty good idea of what her breasts look like, without actually being able to see them properly. It's wonderful.
Of course the future people in this version live in a beautiful eco world where everything is wind powered and pan pipes and ethnic music fills the air. Because that is much better than our modern world. It seems a shame though that it takes a vast array of non-eco-friendly cameras and editing equipment and machines to show this wonderful possibility. And I didn't get to the bit where it turns out life ain't so great for Mumba and her chumbas (by which I mean her friends, rather than her breasts, which I guess would also be called Mumbas), and I can't remember what form they take in this film. But I expect they show the evil of machinery and technology.
If you hate that stuff so much surely you should write a play, which you put on in a forest. Only for the animals to watch.
I love the book "The Time Machine" and the original film isn't too shabby either. But if I invent a time machine I am going to go back in time, pick up HG Wells, bring him back to today, make him watch "The Time Machine" with me, then take him back to the set so he can kick everyone in the genitals and I can tell Samantha Mumba how wonderful she is, before feeling a bit sick with myself when I realise she is just 19, and then travel back to the time when I was 19 and pick up the 19 year old me and take him forwards to meet the 19 year old Samantha Mumba and then let them get on with it in a hut. But I will secretly be watching the 19 year old me and the 19 year old Samantha Mumba through a crack in the hut and masturbating. And I will have got the 60 year old me back from the future to watch me masturbating to myself having sex with Samantha Mumba.
That is my plan.
Then I will take HG Wells back to his own time.
Finally I watched "Independence Day" pretty much all of the way through. It is silly, but enjoyable in places, though I still don't like the line about John Lennon being shot in the back. And I think the aliens should have won.
But I don't have any ideas of making a satirical film about the making of the film on this one, and I didn't turn over once I started watching it. So it must be the best one.
Other films are available though.
