Tag Archives: Terry Gilliam

April 14, 2025 · 07:33

And now for a momentous occasion

Yes, it was a momentous occasion yesterday. For the people of my generation (that would be the generation that is old and decrepit), Yesterday it was the 50th anniversary of Monty Python. I got told this by the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250407-how-monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-became-a-comedy-legend). I completely forgot that it had been so long. I was there, in front of my TV when the birth of Monty Python was shown to us on a 4:3 screen and I saw it on a black and white TV. Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin with additions from Terry Gilliam showed us a totally new concept in Television. They called it comedy and it was magnificent. 

OK, I have to make a slight adjustment. It was 50 years since their masterpiece Monty Python and the holy grail came out. The TV series are older. Still, we forget the larger picture. The movie made them globally funny, the TV was (in those days) often limited to Europe (mainly UK, Netherlands, Belgium) but the movie made them a global household name. These younger pups think that comedy comes from some guy named Steve Carell, what do they know? Apparently a marketeer from Dutch Barn disagrees, but I have no idea what that is about. And now that idea might never have worked, there is word that the youthful young Jim Halpert played by John Krasinsky was taken to a quiet place by his wife, so that’s that. And what do those people know? Monty Python was here first and it was magnificent. I remember those days. I was one year too young for the movie (14 years and older) but I became a knight who said ‘ni’ as well. I saw it a year later and it was magnificent. Of course I already knew Monty Python from TV and as such The TV characters were known to me but yesterday’s article brought it all back to the surface. Read it, it is a really good article. For one, I never knew that funding was a bit of a problem and the legendary band Led Zeppelin brought the bread to the table. We get from Michael Palin: “I say to people, ‘Led Zeppelin gave us £50,000 – and look where they are now.’” Apparently Pink Floyd also aided in the support of the movie. And it was money well spend. I still have the movie on DVD (I had the VHS tape as well) and it was the beginning of a great comedy movie franchise. And the setting of “the film’s budget was less than £300,000 ($393,000). This wasn’t much for a sweeping fantasy set in medieval Britain, so the team had to be inventive.” The realisation that that little money got a movie made that is still a character a timeless humor is to be revered. A movie that is hopefully still bringing in the pounds, shillings and dimes and it would have been doing that for 50 years. Today the average comedy like Evan Almighty is almost forgotten after 20 years, I enjoyed that movie and several other from him, he is a good actor, but the setting of 50 years is something completely different. It matters, and it brought a nice dish to the table. In the end the actor who played the Rabbit of Caerbannog was later served as Rabbit au vin and he was completely forgotten 2 days later, except for the eater, who caught indigestion for at least a week. Things happen.

Still, this milestone brings feelings to the surface, happy feelings and it was brought about by 7 youthful young individuals that went on shaping the stage of comedy. Later Terry Gilliam would blow my socks away with Time Bandits, Brazil, and later “12 monkeys” with Bruce Willis. 

Happy are feelings of those who bring is joy and the Monty Python team brought us a lot, including the thought that every sperm is sacred, so ladies don’t forget. 

Have a great day and if you haven’t seen Monty Python and the holy grail, try to see it this week, it will be the best thing you will have done all week.

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February 4, 2024 · 11:23

The counting thought

Several hours ago I came up with yet another optional TV series. I am already working on ‘How to Assassinate a Politician’ (about the end of the politician Geert Wilders) for Al Saudiya and it has hit a few bricks. The first line setting is done, now the detail work and that meets with challenges, especially as Final Draft is new to me. Then there is ‘Residuam Vitam’ which plays mostly in New Orleans and I have for the most, worked it out in my mind and is supposed to be a mini-series. Then there is ‘Kenos Diastima’ which is mostly completed in my mind and is a series set to 3 seasons with an open ending. I did not want to dredge it on and I like the thoughts that Terry Gilliam had on 12 Monkeys and Brazil. The last setting is ‘Engonos’ which my mind is currently developing and I am somewhere in season 2. As such my plate is full and here you as readers are about to get some free IP, feel free to use it anyway you can.

The story has references. There was a TV series once (about 30-40 years ago) which centred about a special effects dude and he uses his skills to give certain targets the idea that there are aliens and exploits them to do the right thing. Then there is A Christmas Carol by the legendary Charles Dickens. This story is lovely and very vanilla, which considering it was published in December 1843 makes perfect sense. The world was very innocent those days (I miss those days) and a such my mind made an overhaul. The first target is that wench Candace Owens who called for an invasion of Australia with its Taliban government. She will do nicely. As a public person she has no expectations of privacy. As one calling for the invasion of Australia (my country) she can be made an example of. 

The stage
The stage is that the episodes start with a person who seemingly is in a nightmare, they (in this case she) are in hell. She faces her darkest nightmares according to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and as we go through 2/3rd of the story, we see her struggling with the darkest fears. Then we see that she is set into a medical coma and she is influenced by the latest technologies in a truck, so that she and the setup remains mobile. We see her being bruised by people monitoring her and it reenforces her nightmares, she is naked so that the hot air touches her skin making her darkness deeper. Brambles cut and chaff her and she is wearing a helmet with a visor making the sounds and should she momentarily wake up slightly, the images continue. After 36 hours she is dumped somewhere in a simple Jute gown that is covered in blood and tar. The blood is human and is a mix of dozens of different blood types (to keep the police busy) and the tar is especially created using brimstone (sulphurise coals) with some additional elements in the mix to boggle the mind of scientists. Then we get into the final stretch and we see how actors who were part of the process are around her reenforcing her thoughts in subtle ways outside of the ‘experience’. 

The question we leave out in the open at that point is what would a despicable wench do when we expose her to her nightmares? Now this could be a mini series (3-4 episodes) or a series with multiple people (the real despicable ones). You see, I do not believe that there is a horror story out there that uses the latest technologies for some ‘subjective’ mind screwing. I think that idea has merit and that is as far as I got in 2-3 hours. 

So, if you can make this work, you are welcome to it. The smallest request (from me) is that you use Candace Owens for this example. There should be a consequence of being this stupid and calling for the invasion of Australia. We have our pride and you better not piss us off. The 6 deadliest animals on the planet live here as someone once said. 

Enjoy a more vanilla weekend than I am at present, preferable with a someone you desire more than anything else (real, valid or not).

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November 19, 2021 · 20:29

Cacophony

It is a weird term, it means ‘a harsh discordant mixture of sounds’ and we do not always accept it, we sometimes drown it out, yet weirdly enough it can at times help with the creation of whatever your mind is conceiving. I have had it before, but not like today. Today I was relaxing (watching an old classic). I decided to watch the Godfather again, a movie I had not watched well over 15 years. The Godfather (1972), as I was enjoying the film, the mind went from “I wonder if James Caan (Sonny) and Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen) can remember that they were once THAT young” towards a movie I had designed ‘How to assassinate a politician’ and for some reason, I suddenly added two cogs to the machine, two cogs adding story to the machine, intersecting with other parts of the movie, I suddenly added 15-20 minutes to the movie. As they intersected with other parts, the dialogues would add a decent amount of script to the setting. It can after my mind recalled a quote by Milton Jones “I believed words could never hurt me, then I fell into a printing press”, the thoughts crossed left to right (and vice versa), all parts of something I had seen before and before I knew it, the two cogs added themselves into the story machine and added a section to the movie, several actually as they intersected with other parts. 

I then thought of another part, but the mind rejected it for the movie, yet now I saw an option to add it to the mini series ‘Residuam Vitam’ a play that happens mainly in New Orleans. But there is still several parts to consider, but the addition was new, I had not considered that before. All whilst I continued watching the Godfather. So whilst my mind was dealing with ‘a harsh discordant mixture of mental sounds’, the events that started it all were too deep in my mind, and I was watching a movie, yet the back of my mind, and you mind too does not care. A true multi processing system was doing its job on the fly and now I am considering the events that happen when Meng Po is no longer merely one play, but her activities sets up a few politicians in the process? The trick is to prevent complications, not some twist every 5 minutes, but a stage, a loom with a tapestry of politicians, merely two that are in that game, yet the idea to add a political field is important. Not for the twist, but to make them part of the tory, part of the equation. Perhaps a setting where to opposing politicians tend to share a cup of soup, but how to enable the larger story? You see, I believe in the slogan of FX, the story is everything. So it must shine, and not be bloated by interactions and too many faces. The latter part is already a little bit of a problem as the cast is set to 20 people at present and that is before we consider special effects. And I am not even close to act 3 at present, so I need to rewrite parts to set them over the 4 acts, over a stage of disjointed stories which need to fit together like a puzzle before we get to act 4. By that time the image should be decently complete and the watcher can connect dots of the story and not get overwhelmed in the final episode (like some stories do). 

I wonder what happens if I watch another classic tomorrow. So far watching one has given me a lot of juice for two plays and as I am in a holding pattern for my IP, I need to do something, as such I might as well be doing this and perhaps a new play comes from that. In this I still feel the pressure from within to leave ‘Kenos Diastima’ at 3 seasons. A story with an open ending. It is my love of Terry Gilliam movies that seems to press for that consideration at present and there is something balanced about an open ending. Like nearly all we believe that any story has a beginning, a middle and an end. That does not mean that the story needs to be a closed ending, does it? Time to do a little more brooding, especially as I had an idea towards a few elements of a whole new approach to TV’s and displays. It is weird that this is based on 1985 technology and hat is before we get to evolve it into something more and serious. I wonder why DARPA never considered it, the open ended evidence is all out there, and there is no longer a patent protecting it, so what gives? Well, their loss and my opportunity, that is if I get the other parts done. 

I am on fire today (ice water is here next to me to cool me down).

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October 8, 2021 · 17:17

Paradoxical thinking

This is not reality, this is not what is happening, but it could have been. Surprised? I actually was when my mind (the back of my mind) came up with a third idea for a TV series. Perhaps that is the wrong setting, a mini series is better. You see any story needs to have a beginning, the substance, optionally with twists, plots and loads of question marks. After that we get an ending, the satisfaction of any story is that there is completion. Now, I love the works of Terry Gilliam and as such I loved 12 monkeys and Brazil, they leave question marks. It is not a fine refined story from beginning to end. A setting I homaged to in the third season of Keno Diastima. The series needs to keep a question mark or two in place, let the watcher, the reader, the appreciator of any story find their own epilogue in this. If a story draws in the person taking notice of that story continues and sparks their own imagination, the story goes beyond success. That is how I believe that stories need to go at times. Here I giggle towards Jimmy Carr who stated more than once that women watch porn movies to see if they get married in the end. Or as I see it an alternative to ‘Try before you buy’ or is it ‘Fit before you commit’?. So in any paradoxical setting we need to take the stage of ‘a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true’, here we see the use of ‘perhaps’ and that is fine, only history is to some degree is set in absolutes and even those are at times debatable. You see, in the two elements of what could be we need to see the stage of what could be possible and that is where we need to go. A stage where it is not about what happens when X and Y do not happen, but a stage where we see what is happening because X1 and Y2 never did happen, and we can set a stage to adhere to this and that was the stage my mind was tinkering with the last 2 days (it might have been longer but I was not aware of it) and seeing this come to pass is important. 

It does not interfere with any of my IP, so I have no issues making that public now. Yet is it interfere or inter phere? Weirdly enough it is a larger setting that applies and there my mind keeps me out for now. 

So when I stated in the past “being able to test” there is a stage where we see what happens, but because some elements are in play it did not happen. So when I talked about the assassination of a fictive character named Marty Walsh there was a larger stage, that stage was that fictive character Patrick Pizzella would have served longer and he would have given his seat to a person named Julie Su in 2024. Because that is no longer happening certain labour adjustments were never made and that is the rub, for some players that change would have been detrimental to their profit margins. Yet how can you set the stage of what never happened? Well if you think of the Patents in play, if the change happened, the stage for 2026 would alter slightly, not a lot but enough. Because of a stage Julie Su favoured, 3 students would enter the halls of ISG, they started having lunch together and they come up with an idea that would set the foundations of 5G in a new direction, it would create 4 patents setting a new direction that creates the partnership of Rogers Wireless and Amazon and that 5G goes into new directions, this never happens but the changes towards that were really small and even if you cannot prove it, the stage was close to alter economic boundaries and more important Technological settings on nanotechnology and 5G, three people were essential to that part and as Marty Walsh the threshold is shifting towards the not happening. A paradoxical stage that becomes a non-event and Julie Su would never know, because she was not where she needed to be for the events to happen. 

So when we see the story evolve we do not merely see when did not happen, but we get a glimpse of what else was never a reality and what more is on the stage to be considered an option. Paradoxical settings are never the stage of one stone in a pond and watching the ripples, they are the second, third and fourth stone that interfere with the ripples seen. The caster will hope that the second stone will create enough chaos, but that person knows that more might be required. The story is then an almost given certainty, and the story evolves as it had the caster, the stones and the ripples to focus on, and as such the paradoxical parameters are set to the audience. Yet in all this there is a finite amount of actions that we can take and that too sets the stage towards a maximum stage that any story can hold. I believe that this is a stage that American producers can never comprehend, they watch the story and see how the spreadsheet goes green, yet that part had nothing to do with either the caster, the stones or the ripples. That person needs to trust the finite approach to the storyteller and so far they either over manage or merely cut off hoping to get better grounds elsewhere. A sad stage, but in this the storyteller does not care, that person can revert to books to tell the story for those who care, for that person the story was everything and in this FX has always been right from the moment they gave that slogan to their audience.

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May 31, 2020 · 21:49

Not the Country

Yes the day is growing dimmer and here I am daydreaming towards June 1st, the first day of winter in Australia. Yes, here we are considering the cold and in that stage the news made me rewatch Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil. Thank god for Bluray at times. I saw the initial release in the cinema 35 years ago, it was an amazing piece of work and it adds up, it was never judged ‘relevant’ in the US, yet 20 years later it was as a cult movie judged as the 54th greatest British film of all time. In 2017 Time Out magazine saw it ranked as the 24th best British films ever. I always wondered how Robert DeNiro saw his role in this work. Yet let’s get back to the beginning where the bulk (mostly Americans)saw it as a not to be considered as a relevant piece of work and that is where we get to today’s BBC who gives us ‘Microsoft to replace journalists with robots’ , in light there we see “I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs – now it’s taken mine” yet the cornerstone here is that AI actually does not (yet) exist. We (experts too) seem to rely on the setting that AI is the field where “machines mimic cognitive functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as learning and ‘problem solving”, they currently cant, they merely follow a guidance path to make decisions yet new materials are not learned, it is added in scripts and data. New decision data is not added by the computer, it takes human interference, which means that any reference missed will be a larger failing in the AI and this is merely the beginning. The problem here is that the decision makers wont make any as such the AI field will be falling to a much larger degree. 

And now we see that Microsoft is relying on a field that does not really exist. The problem is not the delusion we observe, the problem is that they set a stage of optional scripting and machine learning as the default towards what is AI and AI is actually a lot larger. As such they will miss opportunity after opportunity, optionally we might see that the Toyota Isis, a large seven seater CVT automatic will not be found on Bing as it is terrorist equipment. And that is when we look at it with the funny glasses. The real danger is misalignment of different information, and that is merely a first. McKinsey and Company gave us in 2018 issues like: ‘Economies stand to benefit AI, through increased productivity and innovation’, so whose innovation? Which increased productivity? Is reality part of that situation? McKinsey (and company) seem to paint it as “Even in the near term, productivity growth has been sluggish in developed economies, dropping to an average of 0.5% in 2010-2014 from 2.4% a decade earlier in theUS and major European economies. Much like previous general-purpose technologies, AI has the potential to contribute to productivity growth” How exactly?  We see some conceptual babble, yet the direct impact is not there. Will shoes be sold quicker? Will there be more laptops sold? Not really, the consumers are not there, as such it is a machine that services no one. And since October 2018 there has not been much change. The difference between expected and factual is not a small leap, it is the size of the Grand Canyon. 

The promise of something that represents AI is still years away, but Microsoft is already laying off its journalists. I wonder whether this is about AI or about the setting of what some should not be doing. Just like President Trump who states that the WHO is no longer to be paid for all kinds of reasons, yet might it be possible that the US cannot pay the bill? It is merely $25,000,000,000,000 in debt. And that was before the riots and all these companies folding. Even now that the G7is seen as ‘outdated’ and other invitations are handed out, the stage is not the G7, the stage is that this would be about results and the new invitations will make the meeting, an expensive meeting about meeting and greeting larger economies and ‘their’ face value. So whilst we see the G7, the G8, the G20 and all these meetings, none of them are about stopping the US (and Japanese) debt. In all this, the people in the movie Brazil are getting the better deal here. We are heading to a cliff and there is no coming back from that. The Fiscal cliff that is and as we relabel things and call them other things and waste meeting after meeting on how to call things, things are not getting solved. I wonder if Russia, China and India are in similar stages. In all this there is a much larger game in play. It is a stage where I do not feel like Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) fighting a machine, I am nothing more than Mr. Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller) getting thrown from system to system on a mere typo, and that was without the AI that some call AI and is not AI, I reckon things will go increasingly worse for some soon enough. In this I wonder if the US will be around to see it happen, the riots are pretty interesting, the fact that the US police officers are holding international journalists at gunpoint is a first indicator that their centre is rather unlikely to hold. If you want to see just how weird the world could become, watch Brazil and see just how amazing this piece of work is, and lets not forget, this movie was made in 1985, 35 years before the insanity truck was driving around.

 

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