Can you generate something from nothing?

I’ll breeze over work as it was very dull, all about shader compiling. It finished with a compiler that was crashing and more questions than answers. I’ll give it one more day before I move on to something else if I don’t get any answers.

Nothing interesting happened. I went to Spin with Laverne. Did some video editing on my new video about our road trip.

Now to the title. It’s torture porn night, but I’m out of horror movies. I’d got hold of a copy of ‘Stand by me’ on blu-ray. This was a complete remaster in 1080p. Now I was quite interested in the fact it had a Dolby 5.1 sound track. This is one of my all time favourite films. Not just because I had a River Phoenix fetish (I met him once, story for another day). God I’d bang him so hard, if only he wasn’t dead. I remember that day, I woke up to the radio news. It was the day after halloween, he’d OD.’d on Heroin and cocaine outside the ‘Viper Room’, on Sunset strip. A venue that twenty years later I stood outside of. I was working at ‘System’s Reliability’ at the time. Anyway, back to the film. It’s on now. The video transfer is fantastic. Kiefer Sutherland looks about twelve, you forget that all you know him for now is ’24’. You also forget that even though it was directed by Rob Reiner, the acting is wooden and in some places bloody awful. River was quoted saying that he wished he was never in the film. It also starred Will Wheaton, who went on to do very little but have a weird part in Star-Trek next generation. Corey Feldman who went on to do a huge amount of films with Corey Haim, known as the ‘two Corey’s’. So looking back at the four actors in it, remembering this was made in I think 1985, one is dead, one is the friend of another one who’s dead, one went weird, grew very tall and disappeared with an alien and the other one I’ve never heard of again. Incidentally the film is based on a book, ‘The Body’, by Stephen King, bet you didn’t know that. It’s actually a short story, it contains two sub stories, one of which is about a pie eating contest which is on the film, the other one is about a dream sequence with lots of naked floating boys with placid penis’s, which isn’t, because it’s shit. I can’t remember the name of the book, it was something like, ‘Different seasons’. I reckon it probably holds the record though for the most amount of films generated from one book. ‘The Body’, got turned into ‘Stand By Me’. Then ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’, got turned into one of the highest rated films of all time. ‘Apt Pupil’, got turned into what I thought was a very good film, but few have heard of, then there was, ‘The Breathing Method’, which I think was also turned into a film. I bet he made a few quid from that anyway. All his other films based on his books have been shit. Apart from perhaps, ‘Maximum Overdrive’, which had Halter Graham in it, someone else who I’d bang. Film still going, a very young John Cusack has just popped up playing Will Wheaton’s brother. The film is narrated by Richard Dreyfus, who was old then and is probably older now (okay, no probably in that).

After my mild digression, can you generate a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack from the original mono and make it sound good? If you can they haven’t managed it on this film.

It’s still very weird watching a film I was pretty much obsessed with some twenty-nine years later. Things have moved on a lot, however I sometimes feel that certain parts of me are still back in 1985.

Remember folks, if you like my completely incoherent wibblings on various bollocks, you can follow me on twitter @mannmansion or you can see me talking complete bollocks in the flesh on my YouTube channel.

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