Quiet, innit?

I don’t know about you, but to me, 2011 seems to be shaping up to be year number five in the UK advertising slack streak.

But what seemed worrying a couple of years ago has now become the status quo. It’s been five years since the Gorilla put away his drumsticks. Yes, there have been a few very good ads, but nothing truly great.

And I worry that that means the spinning of the vicious circle continues: crap ads get made, the standard falls, the best ads of the year are less good, clients and creatives are less inspired, crap ads get made…

So there is absolutely no reason to stop it and anyone who tries will be a lone voice in the wilderness.

It feels a little like we’re looking out of the window at a grey rainbow and no one seems to think its unusual.

That sounds quite sad.

Any ideas how to improve things?

Failing that, what’s your favourite ad since Gorilla?

Here.

I think this ad should get all the media placement awards going (sorry I haven’t posted the picture directly. WordPress is being a bit of a mardy tit today).

Anyhoo, I like it because it’s clever, funny and ‘un-PC’, by which I mean that some oversensitive person could take offence at it and complain to Channel 4 (I assume this hasn’t happened yet).

But let’s take a look at that possibility of offence: dwarves are short, therefore the placement of an ad that might appeal to them on the lower part of a wall is an idea that makes sense. An overly sensitive person might say that 4C is patronising said dwarves and making a mockery of their diminished stature by placing an ad where only a very short person could read it. Further, they might say that no dwarf would really see this ad, and therefore the only point of it would be to give regular-sized humans a bit of a laugh at a dwarf’s expense.

But then what if the programme were about tall people and the ad placed at the top of a tree or tall building. Would that be a cause for complaint? Unlikely, because we generally think of additional height as a positive attribute. But isn’t the situation the same? I understand that we might find the small ad funny and the tall ad less so, but it’s simply acknowledging that dwarves are short, which they are. Whether we find that funny or not is up to us, and is entirely separate from the facts of dwarf stature.

Which gives me a chance to bore you with my theory about compensation for damages: if you say something bad about somebody that is not true, you are liable to pay them money for the damage you have caused to them. The extent of the damage is assessed and a financial equivalent decided upon by some random people. But why then, if I were to lie about you in such a way that might benefit your reputation should I not be able to charge you for the financial equivalent of the benefit gained?

You might say that without a system to curtail or disincentivise damage there would be nothing to stop people harming others for their own possibly questionable motives. But if I were to improve, for example, the sales of an album by lying about who wrote it, would that not be harming other artists whose albums would be left on the shelves in favour of the one I lied about?

Harder to measure, I suppose, but another example of focussing on the redress of negative rather than the remuneration of the positive.

Does any of that make sense? Possibly not.

25 greatest improvised movie scenes:

Duct Tape Tron (thanks, P):

Phil Collins weather prediction site (thanks, K).

A great way to feed the homeless (thanks, P):

Life through the eyes of Jim Carrey (thanks, P):

The trustworthiness of beards (thanks, O).

Great footy posters (thanks, J).

Pornchestra (thanks, J).

Famous lives in pictograms (thanks, M).

The hand drawn Schwarzenegger trilogy (thanks, P):

Movie sounds of silence (thanks, G):

Obama shakes hands like the Fresh Prince (thanks, G):

The reason I haven’t posted over the last few days has had nothing to do with the French weather and everything to do with my purchase of Keith Richards’ autobiography, ‘Life’.

My wife and I have both found it to be as addictive as the substances he enjoyed throughout much of the 1970s (also, reading it on an iPad means you can play the songs he discusses as you read).

For once, the dull ‘early years’ part is actually very interesting. With everything written in Keef’s inimitable voice, schooldays in Dartford become infused with a laconic attitude that elevates them above anything you did between 8 and fifteen. His time in the scouts is told with particularly surprising enthusiasm, and the knots he learns there come in very handy later on.

But of course, it’s the Stones years that are the most compelling. If you are looking for any kind of lessons in there, his incredible dedication to his music leading to his ultimate success is a clear echo of what I wrote about Stanley Kubrick last week. He makes the excellent point that recorded music democratised the art form, finally allowing almost anyone to listen to almost anything as often as they wanted (before then you’d have to pay a lot of money to see a concert, and that would only be possible if the artist you were interested in happened to be within travelling distance). Keith (and Mick and Brian) would spend their waking hours picking apart every song they liked until they understood how to play it themselves. With no money, they would do this down the pub, listening to the tracks and trying to make sense of the chord progressions. They did this for years, to the exclusion of almost anything else, honing their skills to a level of brilliance that served them so well for decades to come (this echoes Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory of how the Beatles became similarly brilliant).

Other lessons are less valuable: how to use the doctors and nurses kit from a toy shop to shoot up; how to marry a supermodel by throwing a guitar at her parents; how to bring up your son by exposing him to his junkie mother’s new boyfriend’s suicide etc.

But you can’t help leaving the book with the impression that Mr. Richards has lived a quite extraordinary life and miraculously has lived to tell the tale.

But here’s a video essay on the decline and fall of action filmmaking.

After last week’s Stanley Kubrick advice, we can now hear the thoughts of the director with the next greatest hit-for-shit ratio.

Considering how long he’s been working, Paul Thomas Anderson has made very few films. But then they are Hard Eight (the only one of his I’m not keen on), Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood.

So that’s pretty good, really.

As you’ll see in this interview, he’s a lot more like motormouth Tarantino than taciturn hermit Kubrick, but there are some interesting lessons here, particularly about his reaction to having his first film messed with by the financiers. Instead of deciding that the business wasn’t for him and flouncing off in a huff, he said the only thing that made him able to cope was to start making a new film (Boogie Nights). That is the attitude that makes you one of the greats instead of one of the also rans.

There are also many insights into his perspective on the porn business and a clear demonstration on how a huge chunk of pizza can always be made to fit inside a mouth (by the way, I found this via Graham Linehan’s Twitter feed. He’s well worth following):

And just for good measure, here’s Tarantino talking about There Will Be Blood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmWNJl0wCzc

Ross interviews Van Damme (thanks, J):

Subtle yet necessary grammar rant (thanks, P).

Play Steak House Or Gay Bar (thanks, J).

Much better timewasting stuff than anything I post (thanks, M).

Ever wondered where you’d end up if you tunneled to the other side of the earth? (Thanks, M.)

Before they were famous: 25 actors in 3 minutes (thanks, G).

Sexy A-Levels.

And the rest are a bunch of film related links from P:

Kittywood Studios:

A brief history of CG characters:

Movie line rhymes:

On Sunday night I watched the excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes.

It was a brilliant insight into the meticulous files of research that the greatest film director of all time (he is; just check out his hit for shit ratio: all great films, no shit ones – and yes, that includes Eyes Wide Shut) built up on movies both made and unmade.

At one point we discover that he was researching Schindler’s List for the same amount of time it took Spielberg to research and make the film. We also found that he send his photographer nephew around London for a year, taking 30,000 location photos for EWS. The icing on the cake was the fact that all these documents were packed into boxes that were ordered with a similar attention to detail: ‘lids to be not too lose or too tight – JUST RIGHT!’.

Anyway, the point of all this seemed to be that there is indeed a way to achieve greatness and, unfortunately for the lazy amongst you, it’s hard work, and lots of it.

It’s always tempting to be led by the rare example of people who created something excellent by simply turning up on the day, making it up as they went along and catching everyone on their best day – after all, that takes much less time and effort, and it also seems much ‘cooler’. Unfortunately, those victories are few and far between. The ones that happen by working your tits off may still be rare, but they’re far more likely than the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, hit-it-and-hope variety.

Mr. Kubrick could only create 2001, Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, Lolita etc. by putting an enormous amount of time into getting every single part of every single aspect of every single moment exactly right.

So that’s what it takes to be the best.

Just in case you were wondering.

Also: RIP Alex Melvin, one of the founders of 180. Our paths crossed only briefly when I worked there for a couple of months, but he certainly gave off the ‘really good bloke’ vibes. As far as legacies go, that agency is a fine reflection of a good man.