If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I went to see Ted on the weekend (pretty funny, thanks for asking). Before it started there were trailers for three British films that you’ll soon be able to experience in your local multiplex. All looked depressingly bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2uaz3Qr1W0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3cahcu09k4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4aaxIH-nQ

I’m not saying that every movie ever made has to be Tokyo Story or Citizen Kane but those three look so utterly awful that I want to cry.

Look at The Sweeney. The trailer actually contains the line, ‘The ramifications of your careless actions are going to have severe repercussions’. Ramifications ARE repercussions! They’re both fucking consequences! So the consequences of your careless actions are going to have severe consequences! What sort of shit is that? How did it make it to the final script? How did it make it to the trailer? A lot of people must think it’s a really good line, whereas it’s a really, really, really shit one. And it’s directed by serial turd provider Nick Love, the man who has inflicted many, many dreadful Danny Dyer movies upon us. Who thought he’d make a film that wasn’t awful? Who gave him the fucking money? I want answers.

The Keith Lemon thing is as you would expect: dismal cameos from ‘stars’ whose list goes way beyond Z, dire plotting, woefully unfunny jokes. I think this one depresses me least because I can see where they were going with this: ‘Hey, the Inbetweeners movie was ridiculously successful and cost £10 to make. Let’s take another popular character off the TV and see if we can replicate the effect’. Good luck to them, but it does look like someone with a very dicky tummy decided to make stool on a cinema screen.

Last and most depressing is the post-Hangover shitpile with the bloke from the BT ads… Comedy sheep! Comedy gimp suits! Drawings of tits! Cocaine! Olivia Newton John! The thing about this one is that it’s an ‘original’ story (by that I mean it has not come from another source. Of course a story of a wacky wedding going wrong is not in the least original), which means it has nothing investors can cling to beyond its script. Which means the script, the very best results of which you can watch in the trailer, was deemed to be good enough for some people to consider putting what I would guess to be a few million quid into. Now, it’s really, really hard to get a script made into a movie (I’d estimate that well over 99% of those written don’t make it), but this excremental cack-fest has not only been made, it’s coming out in the cinema and it has big cardboard cutout posters all over my local Odeon. I have racked my brain to find an explanation for all that, but I keep coming up empty. Sorry. Maybe I’m just out of touch.

I think I shall lie down in a dark room that isn’t a cinema until they all go away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0fT0U7oKo

Keifer, who was used so well in that Lynx ad earlier in the year, is now gracing another commercial, the point of which eludes me.

So he likes cupcakes and uses his laptop to pursue that passion? But why is he such a crazed arsehole? Why does he blow that car up? Why does he run that van down at the beginning? Why is he so into cupcakes? What can Acer do that any other laptop can’t? Why would I buy one? Why would I care?

Answers on a postcard, which you can then use to wipe your arse.

Shocked to hear of Tony Scott’s suicide.

In recent years he had become best known for being the director of big, ballsy action movies starring Denzel Washington, but a look at his career shows that he was so much more than that.

Like many people my age, I was very taken with Top Gun. At 12 years old I had no idea there was a roaring homosexual subtext to the whole thing, so I just loved the fighter plane excitement and the Kelly McGillis sauciness. It takes a deft hand to make that work, and Tony had just that.

The Last Boy Scout was also excellent and really established the Tony Scott Movie as a genre all of its own: dripping with testosterone and chopped apart with the kind of cuts that made you suspect the editor was an epileptic woodpecker, the emphasis was on masculine ACTION. And why not?

Crimson Tide was also very good, but I think most of us really look at True Romance as his best film, and indeed one of the greats of the 1990s. It’s cool, funny, full of great characters (hello, Brad Pitt) and repays endless repeat viewings, particularly this scene:

He was also responsible for a lot of good stuff beyond the films he directed (for example, he exec produced The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford), and for that we owe him another big old thank you.

Cheers, Tony. You will be missed.

If you’d like to know my five favourite books, have a look at this piece on It’s Nice That, which features exactly that.

The ones I chose were somewhat arbitrary. If I had decided to really think about it and give a weighted points allocation based on longevity, style, ideas, presentation etc. I’d never have got back to the nice people at INT.

So those five were selected, but many others were left out, for example:

D&AD 1993.

The Song Of Ice And Fire saga.

Catch 22.

Lots of PG Wodehouse.

Adventures In The Screen Trade

Great Expectations.

Wine: A Life Uncorked.

The Freak Brothers anthology.

I Am Camera.

Any Paul Strand collections.

Casino Royale.

Story.

The Stanley Kubrick Archives.

The Black Swan.

Americana.

High Fidelity.

The Biographical Dictionary Of Film.

But I do like to learn from this blog, so what are your favourite books? Classics, pulp fiction, novels, cook books, instruction manuals, porn and those books you used to find by the till at Borders all welcome.

When Cartman grows up and becomes real, he will be this guy:

The wonderful Unconscious Homeless Man (thanks, J):

Best Olympic commentary ever.

Great football diving gifs.

The cost of a logo (thanks, J).

Video for Emily (thanks, W):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLBBtFSW8TE&feature=youtu.be

Kind of as you’d expect, really.

I found it interesting to watch the dynamic between O’Keefe and his old boss, Hegarty. Would there be old boys back-slapping or little niggles? Watch and find out.

(By the way, if your work is up for one you might not want to watch this. They’re quite rude about some of the entries they are asked to consider.)

D&AD have kindly compiled a list for us.

And here are the art directors.

Interesting lists, in that they feature quite a few retired people, and that’s despite the fact that with the recent proliferation of categories it is now much easier to win more pencils.

Oddly enough, the Craig Allen/Eric Kallman inclusion is the only evidence of this.

It seems that these days it’s either harder to put a run of many excellent years together, or people are leaving the industry sooner. I understand that John Webster (on both lists, the bastard) had a longer time to put a run in, but I don’t think he featured in an annual in the last ten years.

Another interesting trend would be the bias towards TV. TV ads entered in D&AD have always had the chance to win more pencils because their craft categories number far more than those for printed work (the Art Direction category only began in 1996).

I’d like to see another list separated into print and motion picture. I’m not suggested Craig Allen is any less of a print AD than, say, Dave Dye or Paul Belford, or that Tom Carty is any better or worse at writing than, say, Nigel Roberts or Indra Sinha, but I’d be interested to know who won the most awards for writing and art direction, not just who created one TV ad whose Pencils came partly via the skills of others.

Of course, the job of Art Director encompasses all these aspects, so this list is no more or less valid than what I’m suggesting, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and lists are there to be argued over.

Another list: 7/20 of those in the above lists worked at AMV, 6/20 worked at BBH, 5/20 worked at CDP, 3/20 worked at BMP/DDB (I’m counting Webster twice), 2/20 worked at Saatchis, 2/20 worked at HHCL, 2/20 worked at W&K.

Update: more D&AD all-time lists here.

Beck is releasing his new album.

As sheet music.

How brilliant is that?

This brilliant.

(Thanks, V.)

Try this simple test: watch the YouTube clip below but try to forget it’s for Audi and that it has a big Audi logo on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD6yU8P-4i0&feature=player_embedded

Now try to remember who it’s for.

Impossible, isn’t it?

It took me four goes to notice who was behind it, and that was in a cinema, where there is nothing else to do.

It could be for a million things. When it starts I always think it’s another boring manifesto ad for a mobile phone company, or internet service provider, or bank.

Then it turns out to be a boring manifesto ad for something else.

But I can’t remember what.