Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade

2002-05-31 - 1:50 p.m.

ARGH!!! Bloody student films!! >_<

Yes, I know I'm a student film-maker, technically, so it's some kind of hypocrisy for me to say I bloody hate student films. But I don't care. When I make a film I know it is a film intended for people to view and enjoy, not an "art form".

More on that later. Films I was forced to sit through today:

- One on vivisection and Huntingdon Life Sciences
- One on Hare Krishnas which was a lot better than ours was
- One on football, which I slept through because football is bollocks
- One about a string quartet
- One about "Straight Edge", a subculture within heavy metal, apparently. So while normal metallers get drunk or high and beat the shit out of each other, Straight Edgers beat the shit out of each other because they aren't allowed to get drunk or high.

Now, the last two that I objected to.

The first was a documentary which was, presumably, about people who had gradually lost their sight. But for some reason it was cut together with information about sleep paralysis.

No-one knows why. No-one addressed it either. The lecturer went on and on about how wonderful it was and I was just thinking "what was it about, really?!"

Then came the worst of the lot. It didn't even meet the brief. We were told to make a ten-minute documentary. And I don't know what this was but it most certainly was not a documentary.

It was shot in black and white and featured an old woman going to a phone box, dialling random person and saying "I'm holding a coconut! I threw it out the window and tried to eat it!" Then they had this kid shoving a slice of pizza into this bloke's face, and that was the end of it.

Once again the lecturer said "wow, that was really stunning, I'm very pleased with that" and so on. And everyone else crooned about how wonderful it was.

And I was sitting there saying "bollocks on a big flaming stick."

The guy who came up with the idea then proceeded to go on and on about how it was art, it really really was, and it was perfectly valid as a documentary because there are plenty of films where documentary and drama clash. And I was sorely tempted to turn to him and say "just to clarify: you are a complete and utter twat, aren't you??"

It had about as much artistic value as Tracey Emin's unmade bed. And while I have no objections to docudrama, this had no documentary to it. Furthermore I don't think you can really consider the drama to be "drama" since it was surreal abstract nonsense.

If the guy had been a professional film-maker, I'd be chopping him up into little pieces so I can feed him to some undernourished dogs, possibly the ones in the Huntingdon Life Sciences film. As it is, I can only hope he finds a way to pull his head out of his own ass before it's too late.

Grrr.

Now the other thing that's annoying me. It hasn't happened today because I've not been on the tube yet, but all yesterday I was being stalked. By a poster advertisement. And the poster advertisement I'm talking about is the one for Yop.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's got a photo of an ugly man about to put a maggot in his mouth. It's disgusting, and all yesterday I kept seeing the damn thing.

I'd get on the tube, random train, random carriage, and it was always stuck up where I could see it so I spent long journeys forcing my neck to stay in one place the whole time. Almost every tube station I stopped at, it was up on the platform walls. In some places there were two or more of the damn things on the walls.

I would like to be able to go on a trek around London without being followed by a nauseating poster advert, thank you very much. It's a stupid advertising campaign, anyway. It was off-putting enough when I saw one ad, but having seen it around 15-20 odd times yesterday I can safely say I'm never buying Yop. EVER.

Some people need sound smacks around the head.

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