Five years ago, Lowe produced two ads for Stella at the same time.

One was Ice Skating Priests:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8qty25EPk

While the other was Le Sacrifice.

Before they were made I was aware of the two scripts going around town and of the high-calibre directors who wanted to shoot them. I may have got this wrong (I don’t think I have, but I’m going to cover my arse anyway), but I believe Frank Budgen had first pick, with the other one, assuming he wanted it, going to Jonathan Glazer.

Now, I am fully aware that history has declared Ice Skating Priests to be the victor – it has won far more awards than Le Sacrifice and seems to be recalled with greater alacrity and fondness. I am also fully aware that its craftsmanship is superb, with faultless cinematography, casting, direction and music.

However, as a script, and as an idea, I think Le Sacrifice is by far the better of the two, and have always been surprised that it is comparatively unsung. It is crazy, brave, original, different and an unexpected departure for the brand, whilst being entirely consistent with its European movie connections.

Whereas the plot of ISP is really quite poor. Priests fancy a beer, get a lackey to bring a case, lackey and beer fall through ice, priests insist lackey retrieves them. It’s not exactly Nouvelle Chaussures or Pilot, is it?

So I can see why Frank took on Le Sacrifice, and I very much prefer it, but I can also see that I’m in a minority.

Assuming more of you like ISP than Le Sacrifice, perhaps you could tell me why.

It’s the new VB ad, the follow up to the one with the parade of people that won two D&AD Pencils.

It’s the old ‘be masculine’ thing but done really, really well. I think it’s much harder to make the older strategies feel fresh than it is to come up with new ones. Or is it? I don’t think I’ve ever tried comparing the difficulty of the two. But there’s only so many ways to sell beer and we’ve all seen ‘masculine’ done really fucking badly.

(Interest declared, my old AD, Cam, was one of the creatives. Is that declaring an interest? I haven’t seen him face to face in a while but we’re on Facebook and all that. Hi Cam. Nice ad. Stop making it look like you were the good one. Smiley winky face made out of punctuation.)

The 100 greatest moments in cinema.

The regrets you will have when you die (now’s your chance to do something about them).

I kind of enjoyed Diablo Cody interviewing Megan Fox. Maybe you will too.

Get rid of that song that’s stuck in your head.

How Lego is made.

Here’s something you could nick to win a pencil (via Hey Whipple on Twitter):

Those crazy Indians:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhDcd8DZK_o&feature=player_embedded

The best songs inspired by movies.

An amazing film inspired by Blade Runner.

And saving the best till last, the crazy movie reviewer who did the Star Wars prequels has now done last year’s Star Trek.

(Thanks to K for both.)

Have a look at pages 12 and 13 of this week’s issue.

It’s on the IPA’s Future Of Work report, which details the changes advertising needs to make in the future in order to thrive (I’d use the word ‘progress’. ‘Thrive’ is a long fucking way away right now).

Without wanting to climb too far up my own arse (it’s not a happy place to be), much of it echoes my own ceaseless whingings and witterings on this blog.

‘…all of which makes a advertising a considerably duller place to make a living…’

‘…employees are expected to be flexible to suit the company, not the other way round…’

‘Agencies admit to being increasingly nervous about telling clients how to run their business.’

‘For new recruits, we need to present working in an agency as significantly more exciting and empowering than working elsewhere.’

‘Agency bosses must make major changes that won’t come easily.’

‘Agencies are finding it difficult to make their businesses profitable and most admit that much agency profit comes from non-core services.’

‘The pyramid structure and cult of career progression, which results in people leaving the industry in their thirties…was singled out as another major issue.’

‘One client sums up the structure as agencies making money by employing three very clever senior people and “500 five-year-olds”‘.

‘Digital has made the portfolio offered by agencies more complex. It has shortened response times, and though it’s perceived as cheaper to buy, it’s more expensive to service. It’s also breeding a 24/7 access culture and getting in the way of face-to-face meetings.’

So now it’s official.

By the way, no one, and I mean no one in charge is going to give the first fuck about all this.

Sorry.

Things will just continue to worsen until the toilet backs up with months of undigested chicken jalfrezis.

By then, anyone good will have left and the whole industry will resemble a Siberian whorehouse on Christmas morning.

You need an out.

*Oddly enough, despite the massive slagging I gave them in March, Campaign have seen fit to put one of my posts in this week’s ‘Best of the Blogs’ section. My title for this post is not a reciprocation for that ‘kindness’.

…The Stewart Lee book, ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate‘.

There was a passage in it that caught my eye:

‘Whether something is a homage or an act of theft depends on the relative fame, status and wealth of the homager and the homagee. When advertising scum rip off Bergman or Wenders or some obscure brit artist for a campaign and say that it was a homage, the real effect is that simply by virtue of the mass audience their adverts achieve as opposed to the minimal audience enjoyed by most actual art, it immediately renders the subject material a cliche by association rather than validating it in some way.’

I have to admit that I can see where he’s coming from. You do a nice little scene in your classic movie and someone ‘homages’ it up the arse, suddenly transforming it into a work of turdage.

And it’s hard to justify. Someone creates a little bit of genius, you borrow it and it becomes, to some degree, a scene out of an ad that you borrowed because you couldn’t think of something yourself and in the process devalues the original work to the point of shitterama.

Instead of choosing a recent example of this, I thought I’d find the highest ranking film in the IMDB top 250 and its most pathetic rip-off.

I know most of you are too young to remember this, but the throbbing cunt-faced cheek of this ad was the talk of the town in the mid-nineties:

You might also be too young to be aware of the point of homage:

Anyway, I guess that’s the tricky thing about art: once it’s out there, it’s out there, and there ain’t much you can do about it.

UPDATE: Sorry, I didn’t realise that the Schindler’s clip I originally chose had no red girl in it. The new one is much better.