Clash of the Titans
A brief(ish) note on my moving reviewing system
At the minute when I review films they are only movies in the cinema. The rating I give to a movie in the cinema refers to the cinema viewing experience. By that I mean that some films were made to be big screen blockbusters and when done right they can be truly entertaining. Sometimes one of these films is so cheesy they are good. Other films were never meant in that fashion and are good because they utilize good film making technique. Michael Bay's Transformers was a terrible film; cheesy writing, mediocre acting and a paper-thin plot but yet if you watch it in the cinema guzzling down a gallon of carbonated suagar water and tossing high quantities of e-numbers into your mouth, you can break the nasty spell of a hangover pretty successfully.
Obviously this means that a rating I would give to a movie is not the same as I would give to a piece of good film. The original Terminator is in many ways groundbreaking. The use of suspense, fear and action are brilliant. It's a film I can watch multiple times over. The fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation is nothing special. There is nothing new about it. Christian Bale plays Batman.. sorry, himself - an angry young Welsh man who yells at people on set with a husky voice. That doesn't mean it isn't a half decent download-from-piratebay-get-high-and-watch-on-a-midweek-night movie. It just can't compare. I might rate them 4 stars each based on the viewing experience I had at the time but they may still mean different things.
Again, if I were reviewing DVDs, the rating system would be entirely different. A DVD has to have longevity, replay value, excellent film craftsmanship. I've got to want to spend money and space on my shelf for it to be worth it. For that reason City of God gets ***** whilst Bad Boys II gets **. If I went to the cinema to see either of them, the scores might be swapped. That being said Cidade de Deus will always be a treat. With no more confusing mumble to get through, here's my review of Clash of the Titans.
--
Movie Conditions: One joint smoked between three people, pick n' mix to the balls, pain meds to handle the circumcision (more on that in a later post), film was in 3D
Synopsis: Greek legend Perseus seeks revenge for the demise of his family at the hands of the dark God Hades and must go on an epic quest with a band of warriors who must stop the Kraken before it destroys Argost (the Greek city, not the catalogue based retail chain)
First off if you're looking for depth, look elsewhere. Just as Avatar was Ferngully in Space (or Ocarina of Time meets the Matrix), this is Gladiator meets Hercules. Yes, I am well aware that it is a remake of a 1981 film, but I never saw that so I prefer to draw comparisons from films I actually have seen. You kind of know what to expect with this kind of film. It's very much of the fantasy genre. You already know the soundtrack - dramatic bassy strings and the occasional clash of cymbal when somebody swings a sword. It's no Lord of the Rings - it's more like like live action Heroquest. If that reference is too early 90s for you then it's God of War the movie. If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, roll some percentile dice and you've found out pretty much the monsters the characters end up fighting.
That's partly because the characters are pretty much the same throughout the film. There's a benevolent princess that cares for the people and is wiser than her God angering parents, there's the warriors out of 300 who thankfully have decided to get dressed this time round, then there's some Turkish guys who go around hunting beasts and make kebabs. As for the Gods, Liam Neeson does his "I'm so wise and shiny" bit and the bad guy may as well have been referred to as "He who must not be named" Fucking Voldemort.
From what you've read, I may not sound too enthusiastic about the film but that's because there's nothing about this film that will blow you away. Once it gets over the slow start it ends up being damned good fun.
I like sword and sorcerey tales and this film gives one with gusto and solid pace. Character development is not long and drawn out; you get about three lines of backstory to each face and that's it. You're not looked upon to identify with the characters. There's no complex message about the nature of morality hidden in some dispute between Smeagol and the hobits's's's and you can't relly apply the religious themes of the film to real life. It's just Star Wars in AncieNT Greece with Chewbacca made out of wood.
My one bit of advice about this is that unlike Avatar seeing this film in 3D has no benefit to your viewing experience. In fact at times I felt that it made the film look more 2D. Ever seen one of those Christmas cards where the background is on the card itself then other stuff is stuck onto the foreground to make it look 3D. That's what this film looks like in 3D sometimes. It's as if you can see the projection of the blue screen background then there's moving pieces of paper. You can see the edge of people in a way.
I'm gonna give it a decent 3 and a half muffs out of 5.
In my next blog entry I'm going to talk more about that crazy operation of mine, show you some VLOGs and maybe review Kick Ass (which actually just plain kicks ass).
Friday, April 09, 2010
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Stop faffing, just write
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.