NSN: Movie Flops at Box Office
28th February 2003:
NSN Block­bus­ter Flops at Cine­mas
By P.Fezza

This all action, cgi, big bud­get, shoot ‘em up, action move / comic romance sta­rring Arkie Swarz, Syl­via Alone and Vin Unlea­ded was expec­ted to make millions at the box office. Its easy to unders­tand con­cept and step by step story­line was per­fect for a wide audience brought up on a manu­fac­tu­red pop cul­ture. Crane Attack was perfect.

Basic Synop­sis: Ale­xan­der Trump (Arkie Swarz — Term Mater, Com­mand Oh?, Prey), an ex-green beret has been sent to Cam­bo­dia to stop his wife (Syl­via Alone — Des­truc­tion Girl, Judge Judy, Rambi) from being attac­ked by large angry gene­ti­cally engi­nee­red crane fly. Armed only with bug spray, a mini gun and sweat band, Ale­xan­der must track through thick jun­gles, deep swamps, ice cold gla­ciers and under­wa­ter caverns to save his love and pre­vent the evil scien­tist (Vin Unlea­ded — X0X, The Slow and the Pea­ce­ful, Pitch is Green) from taking over the world.

Reviews:
“The Best Movie of the Year” — Bar­bie Weekly
“An Action pac­ked thri­ller which will rip your heart out” — The Sun
“Watch This Movie” — Play­girl
“Killer Sound­track. Killer Flies. GREAT Acting. *****” — Metal Blow­back
“If you liked No Retreat No Surren­der or Colla­te­ral Damage, You’ll Love This” — Pho­to­graphy Experts
“This. Is. Shit” — DVD Review
“Do Not Watch This Pile of Crap” — Pro­fes­sio­nal Movie Magazine

So why did this epic movie not suc­ceed at the cine­mas? It had everything requi­red for the public to lap it up like a cat stuck in the land of milk and mice. The rea­son it fai­led is simply because it had abso­lu­tely no sup­port and as a result, was not scree­ned in cine­mas. The com­pany pro­du­cing it, (20th Cen­tury Chic­ken) refu­sed to dis­tri­bute it due to fears that parts of the movie were not sui­ta­ble for the public as a result of the current poli­ti­cal cli­mate. The offen­ding sce­nes? The film’s cli­max was a geta­way in which the evil scien­tist, ‘Dr Terro­rist Scum’ tried to escape in a pri­vate jet from his under­ground lair. The plane is shot down and it crashes into the labo­ra­to­ries where the Crane Flies were being crea­ted, com­ple­tely des­tro­ying them in a large explo­sion that would impress any teen. A happy ending all round, we thought. 20thCC thought dif­fe­rently — the plane crash was sup­po­sedly too simi­lar to the events of 9/11 and the $269 Million Dollar movie went straight to video, a video only avai­la­ble from a second rate, poorly desig­ned fan site.

It has been recor­ded as one of the worst flops ever. The direc­tor who spent 90 days shoo­ting this video and 90 days wri­ting the script and screen­play has vowed never to create another film. The actors who dedi­ca­ted their time, heart and soul to this movie are dis­traught and are see­king coun­se­ling. Only the pro­du­cers and edi­tor felt com­pe­lled to carry on wor­king with movies — howe­ver with Crane Attack to their name, they are fin­ding it inc­re­dibly hard to get work on even the lowest rated movies des­pite their expe­rience and talent. NSN has deci­ded to stop crea­ting movies and focus on other aspects for making money, this movie has almost crip­pled us des­pite our des­pe­rate efforts to try and get a pro­per release for it.

It’s sad that this is not the only movie that has had such treat­ment. Many movies didn’t even get off the ground and had no source for fun­ding. Even if the movie only had a slight refe­rence to a plane, or even a terro­rist. Many movies were dela­yed, some had only a select few sho­wings at the sma­llest of pri­vate cine­mas, hun­dreds were taken back and re-shot, re-scripted, re-worked and re-made. NSN can only hope that the gui­de­li­nes for movie makers do not get stric­ter, we hope that good movies can still be made, watched and enjo­yed. Remem­ber that you have your free­dom of speech and no one should be able to take that away from you.

I feel great. Not only did I get 12 hours sleep… I woke up at a whop­ping 4pm! Mea­ning I mis­sed pretty much the whole day; but I also had to fix the dri­vers on my com­pu­ter. Follo­wing the manual defrag I per­for­med late last night, I was given a 4bit coloUr scheme and an 800x600 reso­lu­tion. *shud­ders* And STILL I have all those pro­blems I men­tio­ned ear­lier. What a laugh, eh!? Conc­lu­sion is XP sucks balls. Ball-sucking.Grrr. I am almost temp­ted to get a Mac. Shock Horror!

Lis­te­ning to: “David Bowie — Ashes to Ashes”

This site

My com­pu­ter seems to have pic­ked up an assort­ment of bugs, each of which being a bur­den on my loa­ded back. I would appre­ciate it if anyone could help me with these errors.

Inter­net Explo­rer:
- I seem to be get­ting a regu­lar bug when saving pic­tu­res IE saves them as .bmp bit­map ima­ges. This hap­pens a lot and sem­mingly ran­domly (not spe­ci­fic to a cer­tain file type), although I sus­pect a pos­si­ble link to pages using javasc­ript. But meh, what do I know?
- Ina­bi­lity to “View Source” for pages using PHP. The view source but­ton simply does nothing. This is the only type of page that I have des­co­ve­red it doesn’t work, so far.
- IE goes men­tal when I try to view something irre­gu­lar with it, i.e. a gif/jpg/xml from my hard­disk. It attempts to down­load a file which it attempts to do repea­tedly for a long period of time. The down­load fails, it tries again. I have no clue what is going on with this.

MSN:
- Pos­sibly rela­ted to the pre­vious inci­dent, MSN no lon­ger logs chats and ins­tead comes up with an error saying something along the lines of “Can­not find archive”. The archi­ves of MSN con­ver­sa­tions are .xml files which can no lon­ger be vie­wed within IE. Thus a pos­si­ble rela­tion.
- Zone​.com games will not load in MSN, I get a run­time error with the script and a “cri­ti­cal 3″ error. Yes I have ins­ta­lled the latest msn, no I am not using the beta. No tri­llian sucks balls.

Explo­rer:
- “Loa­ding times” when brow­sing fol­ders with programs/archives(tar/self extra­cing usually) in are uni­ma­gi­nably long; not only do they take fore­ver, they also leech the sys­tem resour­ces and cpu usage is maxed out at 100%. I often have pro­blems with Page­file usage going to about 700mb, for abso­lu­tely no appa­rent rea­son and this also makes the com­pu­ter into­le­rably slow.
- I no lon­ger have the abi­lity to view files in par­ti­cu­lar fol­ders by the last time they were modi­fied. This option has been repla­ced by use­less fea­tu­res that I do not use, i.e. sor­ting by artist for music, sor­ting by pic­ture dimen­sions for ima­ges and so on. When I want to see the newest files in a par­ti­cu­lar fol­der I am now una­ble to. once again, no clue as to where this fea­ture disap­pea­red to.

Movie play­back:
- When watching movies the first five or six minu­tes are always jit­tery, pic­ture pau­ses and then waits a few moments to catch up again. This hap­pens in WMP9, ‘ze old wmp’, BSpla­yer and Crys­tal pla­yer. My com­pu­ter has a 128mb GeForce 4 and an AMD +2700 XP… it shouldn’t be doing this.

There are others but they currently escape me. I regu­larly run Spy­bot spy­ware checks and virus scans via McAfee.

Further pro­blem:

Explo­rer:
- When I try to use the find func­tion I get the error: “Com­po­nent requi­red to run search com­pa­nion not found”

Now I have an UBER error:

“MMC can­not open dfrg.msc
This maybe because the file does not exist, is not an MMC con­sole, or was crea­ted by a later ver­sion of MMC, this may also be because you do not have suf­fi­cient access to the file”

= no defrag­men­ting pos­si­ble

Write a Story, Go to Jail

“Brian Rober­tson was just months away from gra­dua­tion at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, last year when he found the begin­nings of what he thought was a short story on a school com­pu­ter. He copied the file to another com­pu­ter, added some para­graphs to the ini­tial text and then promptly got arrested. ”