Sorry about the self-promotion, but I could really do with people buying this thing. (Or just this thing, if you have already have the first two series).
Also, all those Americans who have been downloading the show, now you have the opportunity to show us some love! (Seasons 2 and 3 coming soon.)
I feel dirty now. Carry on. (Gah! Forgot to say, the DVDs for series 3 are region free! So everyone everywhere can watch them immediately instead of waiting for some mysterious process to complete.)
As always, Videogum says it better than I ever could.
“Once in a while, a video of a kid singing a song to a webcam transcends its one-note brethren and just gets better and better for the entire 3:30. This is one of those times (the turns! The prop! The fake crying!) This is a daymaker.”
Indeed it is. They should make it the official video for the song.
Have some awesome! The playlist is on the right. (Ta to Boing Boing for Seeqpod tip and to Bazaarrgh(?) for the pic).
Well, that sort of semi-worked! True, I broke Twitter, probably lost a few hundred followers, was utterly confounded by the whole hashtags business and never properly coordinated proceedings with @badmovieclub, but people seemed to have a good time anyway. (More details here).
Pressing the ‘play’ button at exactly 9.00 proved a MASSIVE rush, for some reason, and by the time my heart rate had slowed to a manageable gallop, we were fifteen minutes into the film. The rest of the evening was insane–my focus was constantly torn between laptop and movie, and I never really worked out a good way of staying abreast of things. (Monitter, for example, was just a blur!). I hadn’t seen the film before and I presumed I’d be able to wing it, but I just couldn’t catch up with all the silliness. Nothing makes sense in ‘The Happening’! Every time I looked up, something preposterous was, well, happening, and by the time I’d thought of what to say about it, typed it, and looked up again, it was a new scene. I still feel like I only half-saw the film. (I want to go back and hear that whole speaking tube/mood ring conversation. Holy cow, that sucked!)
And there’s a Tweet limit! Who knew? I wasted a lot of Tweets by nattering on about the countdown etc and one hour into the film, Twitter shut me out without my knowing it. This was really disorienting because I was sending stuff out and getting no feedback. After a few minutes I realised that I was doing the written equivalent of talking to myself like a crazy person.
I don’t want to sort out another one until I’ve had a bit of a think about how to improve it. The BMC is a nice idea but the implementation was all over the place. That said, I am deliriously happy about the way other people took the idea and ran with it…Kat’s brilliant badmovieclub site, complete with GMT countdown clock (so we could all ‘synchronize our watches’)… Lauriepink’s cheerful logo (and T-shirt!)….the thousands of tweets that everyone contributed….even the ways people chose to enjoy the evening. It truly felt like a happening, in the hippy sense of the word, and I was absolutely chuffed to be part of it.
Ah! By the way, the super secret competition was won by @lauriepink. I was looking for the most creative take on the experience and I could not let her go unrewarded for the logo/t-shirt/cartoon comments. A signed box set of ‘IT Crowd’ 1-3 will be in your hands very soon, Laurie.
A few words from me on how to get the most out of this evening.
1. Grab whatever substance/liquid usually gets you through a Friday night and fire up your laptop.
2. Pause the film where the BMC site tells you to. Open your Twitter app of choice.
3. This is a good place to follow, using @Glinner and @badmovieclub and one other thingy! (If you’re ‘down’ with Tweetdeck, just use the search function). I shall be using the Firefox broswer and I suggest you do too. If you’re anything like me, you’re gonna need those tabs.
4. At 9.pm, when the clock on the BMC site hits 00.00.00.00, press play!
5. Enjoy the evening in whatever way you wish. No pressure to contribute if you don’t have anything funny/interesting/silly to say. There’s only one real rule: If something disturbs your viewing of the film, DON’T PRESS PAUSE, just Twitter about it.
6. It would be great if this doesn’t just descend into a sneery snipefest. I would be just as interested to hear what you think does work about the film. You might even like it! I wants to know!
7. There will be a contest, but I can’t tell you what it is because it will make you self-conscious. The prize is IT Crowd-related and pretty cool. And unlike most things in this heavily lawyered world, it’s open to you all, wherever you are.
8. Thanks for all the suggestions for future bad movies, but if there is another BMC, it won’t be run by me. At least not for a while.
9. If you can’t make it, don’t forget that Phil Jupitus will be hosting another screening at 12.00 (I’m sure the BMC clock will be updated)
(Thanks to Laurie Pink for the logo and Katoi for setting up the brilliant BMC site.)
Interview from Der Spiegel with Bishop Richard Williamson (pictured above), the creepy Holocaust denier supported by the Vatican. Via Cynical C, who also offer this nugget from Wikipedia.
“Williamson holds strong views regarding gender roles and dress. He opposes women attending college or university, the wearing of trousers or shorts by women, and has urged greater “manliness” in men. He is quoted as saying: “A woman can do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be thinking properly as a woman. Did this lawyeress check her hairdo before coming into court? If she did, she is a distracted lawyer. If she did not, she is one distorted woman”
Get that? She’s distorted.
Dick Cheney in his highschool yearbook, looking like Biff from ‘Back To The Future’ after reading Ayn Rand. (More here)
I’m having so much fun on Twitter, it’s unreal. I signed up about two years ago, but I didn’t really understand it until Jonathan Ross ‘outed’ me and my followers list went from 4 to 3000 in 24 hours. Suddenly, everything I wrote in that little box had an audience…an audience that responded! Instantly! Share a link on Twitter and within seconds someone will send you something back that casts it in a new and interesting light. Tell a joke and dozens of people are suddenly trying to better it. Ask a question and people trip over themselves trying to help. And that’s just scratching the surface–the manifold possibilities of Twitter are enough to make you giddy. This is a new world, people! We are officially in the future, not with jetpacks, but with something much cooler–the hive mind. Ignore those grumpy luddites in the broadsheets and elsewhere, who don’t understand it, can’t be bothered to learn how it works and are frightened at the prospect that people are entertaining themselves in a way that doesn’t involve accepted media forms.
By way of illustration, I’m organising a Bad Film Club event online for Friday night (13th Feb). At exactly 9.00pm, myself and some like-minded Twitterers will be pressing ‘play’ on M Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’, and blogging our responses to the magic as it unfolds. Now, this is uncharted territory for me, and I have no way of knowing whether it’ll work, but dammit, it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? Isn’t this what ‘Why Don’t You’ told us to do, all those years ago? (Actually, it’s the polar opposite to what they told us to do, but never mind).
If you want to be part of what should be a vaguely amusing evening, here are the steps you need to take.
Sign up with Twitter. Click ‘follow’ on whoever takes your fancy. If you have a friend on it, check out the list of who he or she is following and build up your list that way. Send a few Tweets and get a feel for it.
Download Tweetdeck, for free, for Mac or PC. It’s a beautiful App and gives you a much better idea of how Twitter works than the slightly bare and functional homepage. (If you have an iPhone, download Tweetie).
On Friday night, at 9.00pm GMT, line up ‘The Happening’. I don’t have the DVD yet, so I’ll grab a copy and see where the best place to start is. We can’t time it exactly, but we can be pretty close. There are a few more details I need to iron out, but we’ll fine-tune the details on Twitter.
By the way, I chose ‘The Happening’ because it should be relatively easy for everyone to get their hands on it, and by all accounts it’s a massive stinker (thanks to @skinbro for the suggestion!).
To see how Terence has been getting on since then, have a read of his enlightened take on Twitter.
(also from Everything is Terrible)
Why, That\'s Delightful! 