Name: Brock

Web Site: http://www.brockwilbur.com

Bio: Brock Wilbur is a writer, actor, comedian, musician and producer living in Los Angeles since 2007. He graduated from Northwestern University and was born and raised in Salina, Kansas. In 2011, he releases two feature films including Your Friends Close (a video game dramedy) and Act Naturally (a nudist colony comedy). See how he gave all that information out of order? He's going straight Tarantino on this profile. Keep up with all his activities and/or contact him at his website: http://www.brockwilbur.com

Posts by Brock Wilbur:

• Brock’s One Year Comedy Anniversary

  June 11th, 2012

  Hey. It's my anniversary. I'm not sure what you do for a one year, but imma get drunk.

  I wrote an article on why you should try standup immediately, and I also posted this, which I feel like a lot of you might enjoy.

  Kisses,

   
  

  Brock Wilbur - Allpocalypse Now from Brock Wilbur on Vimeo.

  2 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #9: Pontypool

  March 7th, 2012

  "It's not the end of the world. It's just the end of the day."

  

  The Devil's in the details, but what's between the lines?

  In 2001, Dilbert creator Scott Adams penned a small novella entitled God's Debris: A Thought Experiment. This pocket-sized volume never shook the foundations of the theological community, but it resonated deeply with me, if only as an introduction to Socratic discourse. The narrative concerns a lonely man visited by an "angel" who engages him in conversation about the nature of God, human interaction vs. purpose, and destiny. The take-away concept was that an all-powerful being would get bored of having total control of the universe, but what if he made himself a lesser, yet more intriguing, force? What if God existed as probability? Popping in and out of existence; moving the universe towards a goal but on an uncertain path, exerting will in unknowable yet noticeable ways?

  The opening monologue of Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (2008) references a similar theory by Norman Mailer: "In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details, they spasm for a moment; they sort of unlock, and when they come back into focus, they suddenly coincide in a weird way. Street names and birthdates and middle names, all kind of superfluous things appear related to each other. It's a ripple effect. So, what does it mean? Well... it means something's going to happen. Something big. But then, something's always about to happen."

  Both of these notions side equally with the idea that the unknowable "beneath" is more powerful than overt control, and that the great mystery of life may also be the purpose of life. But is the reverse true? If so, does understanding equate to death? Read the rest of this entry "

  4 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #8: Blindness

  February 29th, 2012

  The entire planet loses its sight in a sweeping plague of white blindness — the story of an Apocalypse within.

  

  More than death, cosmic horror, or the darkness, we fear our own frailty.

  Sure, warheads raining nuclear annihilation upon our cities and melting the flesh from our skeletons is not preferable, but as we talked about with On The Beach, isn't it much worse to know you've been made into grilled cheese because two bureaucrats you never met couldn't get along? The frailty of society is the basis for so many great films, because unlike aliens or zombies, it isn't a concern the general population actively grapples with on a daily basis. Unless you're me. But I'm the outlier.

  While the frailties of a civilization are fascinating to explore from new angles (That's what we'll do if we run out of gas? Jesus!), rarely do we focus on weakness at a personal, or cellular, level. Surprising, considering the human body is the worst designed machine imaginable. We have an organ that does nothing except burst and kill you, if it so desires. How has no one made a horror movie called Appendix yet?

  To properly review Fernando Meirelles' 2008 film Blindness, I adopted a process to highlight my physical frailty. I gave the film two viewings, once without the viewing.

  Blindness follows a worldwide pandemic of, well, blindness. With this in mind, I stripped the audio track from the film, and listened to it on my iPod in a dark room. A few days later, I went back and watched the movie. Throughout the review, I'll mention when there were divergences of emotion or narrative between what I saw in my head and what I saw on screen. Read the rest of this entry "

  2 Comments "

  #GamerTV: Another Brock Wilbur Portmanterror

  February 21st, 2012

  

  Yesterday, to distract from that awful "real life", I started a hashtag exploring gamified TV shows: #GamerTV

  Instead of being a couple of jokes, it wound up spanning seven hours (in the background of my real work) and I was notified multiple times about hitting my daily limit? Which I guess is a thing that happens on twitter? Anyway, here's the complete list, for your enjoyment. And at the end, I've included some highlights from friends that joined in. Please add your own in the comments below.

  For future time-line jamming nonsense, please follow .

  

  My So Called Extra Life

  Portalandia

  Happy Days Of The Tentacle

  Heavy Rainbow Brite

  Crackdownton Abbey

  The Colblip Report

  X-COMmunity

  According To Earthworm Jim

  Once Upon An Ocarina Of Time

  Scrubs The Zombie

  How I Metroid Your Mother

  That's So Riven

  Dawson's Creed

  The Secret of Monk Island

  Eternal Darkwing: Launchpad's Requiem

  Men Of A Certain Rampage

  Left 24 Dead

  The Braidy Bunch

  Starfox & Hutch

  Caroline in the Vice City

  Read the rest of this entry "

  7 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #7: GAS-S-S-S!

  February 16th, 2012

  It's weird to describe something as Sub-Corman, but this is it...

  
  I don't do well with empathy.

  I found Punishment Park an upsetting viewing experience for many reasons, not the least of which being its ability to force an emotional connection between myself and hippie culture. For a man with Cartmanian opinions on the movement, this was nothing short of a triumph in filmmaking. Longhairs and Commies, spouting free-love rhetoric and getting bashed over the head with nightsticks? "Comedy gold!" thought I. Two hours of man-weeping later, I feared Brock Wilbur might be broken.

  Today is about correcting this discomfort, by diving into a film which celebrates my nightmare scenario: yippe take-over. Apocalyptic stakes indeed. Let's set the world right.
  
  Gas! or Gas-s-s-s! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It was a 1971 film, and schlock-master Roger Corman's last directing credit for eighteen years. My love of Corman knows no bounds, so I revel in this excuse to watch him rip off Wild in the Streets, which was produced two years earlier by the same film studio, AIP. While that film shares a concept, and could easily have been a double-feature for this entry, Gas-s-s-s! projects a more post-apocalyptic vibe.

  And... huh.

  Change of plans, guys. I'm ten minutes in and I have little to no understanding of what's occurring. This is... just a disaster. Uh. Okay. Let's... I don't know. I'll just describe what I'm seeing and we'll put it together later? Read the rest of this entry "

  2 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #6: On the Beach

  February 10th, 2012

  The cool embrace of sudden death.

  
  

  When I moved to Los Angeles, the hills were alive with the sound of inferno.

  Forest fires raged, and consumed subdivisions whole. Smoke covered the smog that covered the city, and on several occasions, my friends from the Valley evacuated and crashed with me. Darkness never blotted out our sky, but if the wind hit just right, you could smell the embers. One morning my car was covered in soot — a surreal image I'll never shake.

  In an op-ed piece which ran at the time, a coastal contrast was highlighted. New Yorkers had to deal with 9/11, taxi drivers, extreme weather, and other New Yorkers on public transit. Los Angeles was jealous of this threatening lifestyle, but overcompensated. Our people proved we could hang by fully embracing the Apocalypse, in whatever form it took that week. Californians never ran from their own burning homes, but stood out front in sunglasses, gin and tonic in hand, smiling and humming "Light My Fire" as the flames took control.

  What the op-ed writer drew attention to was a city-wide inferiority complex, but the image remains cool because it personifies exactly that: an acceptance of that which we cannot change, and the mildest of revelry in the face of doom. Maybe LA refused to accept the emotional undercurrents of the moment, but at least that one homeowner opted for a sense of humor over pitiful rebuke.

  Directed by a pre–Inherit the Wind Stanley Kramer, On The Beach (1959) broached the subject of nuclear Armageddon with nary a degree of hope. resigned to the unbeatable of the inevitable. The same gin would fill our glass, we'd hum a different song, but we'd also been the ones burning.
  Read the rest of this entry "

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  Filmpocalypse #5: In The Mouth Of Madness

  February 2nd, 2012

  "A reality is just what we tell each other it is."

  

  I hate loving Lovecraft.

  While H.P. is responsible for modern horror as we know it, I must respect and loathe him in equal measure. Firmly rooted in the idea of cosmicism, he believed the universe was too gigantic to care about humanity, much less be understood by us. Hence, his work operates around the central device of terror too incomprehensible to be committed to words. Each monster "indescribable," the ever-present dread "unknowable," the crushing weight of universal truth "unrepeatable." At points, his characters are even to frightened to describe architecture. Architecture. It all reeks of a cheap trick to lazily avoid definitions. Such a hack move, he'd be laughed out of any writing workshop.

  Cthulhu-damn him for making it work.

  Leaving the nightmare-creating duties to the darkness in the reader's mind, Lovecraft's stories are more frightening today than they were in 1917, if only because his readers have an extra century of insanity in their blood. Doesn't matter if you see the turn coming from a mile away, "The Music of Erich Zann" still keeps me sleepless in a way the works of King, Koontz, Poe, Barker, and Matheson never have. Does this reveal too much about the frightening functionality of my own internal process? Yeah, maybe. But it applies to the rest of you in equal measure. The bump in the night is automatically your greatest fear, whereas the tangibly-defined murderous automobile in Christine is laughable.

  Rounding out his Apocalypse Trilogy (preceded by The Thing and Prince Of Darkness), John Carpenter approached 1994's In The Mouth of Madness with the goal of distilling the oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft into a single work capable of transcending forms (on several levels). With the greatest actor of this or any generation, Sam Neill, in the lead, Carpenter crafts a literary love letter to the Grandfather of Terror — simultaneously presenting weighty issues about the consumption of media and, I believe knowingly, asking us to laugh at the entire production.

  Read the rest of this entry "

  5 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #4: Masters of Horror

  January 26th, 2012

  

  There's that project you discuss with friends, probably over beers, that never comes to fruition. An idea you all love, believe in, and promise to dedicate time towards. Then, when the buzz wears off, or responsibility returns, it falls by the wayside — to be rekindled at the next gathering, and embarrassingly discarded repeatedly. Knowing this experience well, I curse my social circles from some pit of bitter jealousy deep within, for depriving me a Mick Garris.

  Garris, a director with limited recognizable credits to his name, threw a dinner party in 2005 for his closest friends... who just so happened to be the biggest names in the world of horror: John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, John Landis, and five others. Garris decided to create an anthology series with these guests, and it didn't take long for Showtime to pick up his pitch.

  For thirteen episodes per season, Masters of Horror allowed each director to produce an hour-long film with a reasonable budget and no studio notes or involvement — a glorious opportunity for the names who invented the genre to explore concepts not appropriate for a full feature, and free of the budgetary gamble. With the kind of distribution offered by premium cable, I guarantee Stuart Gordon's episodes "Black Cat" and "H. P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House" were seen by more Americans than his career theatrical numbers combined.

  It was a fanboy wet-dream, mixed with one of the greatest business models of all time. (They sold each of these episodes as standalone films at full price. Anchor Bay, in the mid-2000s, I gave you entirely too much money.) The final product was what you'd expect: a less-consistent Tales from the Crypt, with flashes of brilliance amidst low budget gore and nudity. Masters of Horror proved why certain directors hadn't worked in years, whilst those with more recent success didn't give it their best.

  Of the original run, two films dealing with the apocalypse have always stuck with me. One exemplified such idiocy, I was sure it would kill the series. The other was a perfect example of a compelling concept given its opportunity, fulfilling the promise of the show's thesis.

  What a fantastic surprise to find both films share a director and a writer.

  Read the rest of this entry "

  3 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #3: The Divide

  January 17th, 2012

  In glorious celebration of our inevitable demise, Brock reviews a different end-of-the-world film each Wednesday until 2013, or the Rapture, whichever comes first. (Okay, we're doing this one on Tuesday cause the Internet is on SOPA Blackout tomorrow, so get while the gettin's good.) Today, the director of Hitman totes redeems himself with The Divide.
  

  
  Jean-Paul Satre said "Hell is other people," but in the post-apocalyptic world, his statement becomes a question.

  End-of-the-world fiction is often built on the assumption that humanity is responsible for its own demise: we made our bed and now we must sleep in it, while it incinerates around us. But in the aftermath, where does one seek comfort? There is safety in numbers, and the re-birth of civilization is not a private endeavor. If our end product turned out to be self-annihilation, why rebuild that machine with the same parts?

  Director Xavier Gens makes a case for abandoning humanity with The Divide (2012), a film which which re-invents the genre as a terrifying time-lapse history of our existence.

  Read the rest of this entry "

  8 Comments "

  Filmpocalypse #1: The Darkest Hour

  January 4th, 2012

  Apparently, I have written nothing on here in one billion years. I tend to only do that when Lisa Foiles stays in touch. For example, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to review the birthday present she got me back in September, but I think she kept it. *Vengeance fist shake* Despite all that, I'm doing a year long film review series called FILMPOCALYPSE, and knowing how much you all love terrible movie reviews, I think the first one belongs here. Feel free to follow me @brockwilbur if you want to stay updated about the rest. Or let Lisa know she owes me a goddamned birthday present.

  In glorious celebration of our inevitable demise, FILMPOCALYSE has Brock review a different end-of-the-world film each Wednesday until 2013, or the Rapture, whichever comes first.

  
  There are few fantasies more relaxing than the Apocalypse.

  Upon glimpsing the un-making of all existence, one feels a profound sense of validation for one's choices — or, should there be an inhabitable post-world, the Peter Pan–like wonderment of adapting to life as a child in a new reality. In either scenario, the slate is wiped clean, and the impact of your life is rendered null and void. The reverse It's A Wonderful Life. If you aren't dead, the wasteland doesn't ask you to use, or even pay off, that worthless degree. Your exes are incapable of calling, due to both the lack of electricity and their sudden vaporization. For the first time since the dream died in second grade, you can have whatever job you want, albeit between the two choices of hunter/gatherer. Freedom granted from the people we were, lives we've lead, and, if we're lucky, some element of spectacle that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

  We should sell vacations to the end of the world. Relief washes over me just from typing on the subject.

  Read the rest of this entry "

  18 Comments "