Fluke Skywalker
Posts: 9540
Joined: 23/4/2006
From: the dark side of the sun
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ORIGINAL: DancingClown
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ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker
We done 'em for humour and music but some scruffy victorians and chimneys popping up - while undoubtedly unexpected I thought looked a bit amateurish.
I really liked that bit, as a visual interpretation of Blake's Jerusalem I thought it looked wonderfully unique; the choreography was mind-boggling.
Mind boggling choreography? 
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The house with the images projected on it - no ones gonna convice me that wasn't crap, it just plain was.
I liked that bit. House could've been a bit bigger but just remember the great music that was displayed. Did Beijing have The Prodigy and Sex Pistols? No. Because that kind of stuff is censored. Forbidden.
No the house was crap, undersized block in the middle of the Olympic stadium with stuff projected on it - as I said already the music was superb
Like you say each to their own. You wanted something with less substance that didn't engage you cerebrally. It's a shame that so much of the subtext of it went over your head because you wanted more pretty fireworks. Oh, well.
I wanted something with that exact level of substance but with more wow factor as we come to expect from Olympic ceremonies - some of it looked done on the cheap. Still a good ceremony.
I'm not saying Beijing wasn't spectacular, but it was too forced and contrived. The Chinese were desperate to show the world that they weren't just about oppressing Tibet and human-rights abuses on a staggering scale. It was more like an obscenely expensive public-relations exercise. As a consequence it lacked heart and humanity. And humanity was what ours was all about; it's such a shame that some people can't see that.
Yeah totally agree - those were big positives.
I'm getting annoyed now so I'm going to leave it to Roger Ebert:
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As the world watched the incredible opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the same thought was on many minds: How in the world can London possibly top this in 2012? Faced with that challenge, director Danny Boyle seems to have been inspired by the title of a Monty Python film: "And now for something completely different." I don't know if Boyle's opening ceremony was good. I don't know if it was bad. I know it was surely the sort of event for which the British invented the term "gob-smacking." It was truly, deeply, British. It was by the Brits and for the Brits. Poor Matt Lauer and Bob Costas labored heroically to soldier through their notes, helping clueless NBC viewers to identify a speech from Shakespeare's "Tempest," recognize the 19th century industrialist Brunel, and spot topics they might not have been familiar with, such as the Sex Pistols and the Industrial Revolution. I am not quite sure they ever quite explained Mr. Bean, although luckily Rowan Atkinson comes with his own explanation built right in.
I enjoyed the ceremony enormously. It was...fun. It seemed deliriously close to satire. It was like a cheeky send-up of the very notion of such a ceremony, going right to the edge and then prudently saving itself by hauling in apple-cheeked childrens' choirs from the four nations of Britain.
Sometimes Boyle seemed to be doing several things at once. Consider his salute to the National Health Service (which came at a time when health care is "currently being debated" in the U.S., Lauer and Costas helpfully observed). Only Boyle might have thought to combine sick children in hospital beds with platoons of Mary Poppinses, parachuting in with their umbrellas. Then a gigantic (presumably sick) baby appeared, which Lauer undiplomatically described a "creepy." As the dozens of beds moved in synchronized harmony, I was reminded of the number in Mel Brooks' "The Producers," with the old ladies doing a song-and-dance with their strollers.
It was "the most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen--more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state!" said the Conservative MP Aiden Burley, missing the point. The Beijing ceremony was an expression of pinpoint mass discipline, as countless well-drilled performers hit their cues like so many pixels on a computer screen. The London ceremony was an expression of good-hearted enthusiasm, not always lucid but always cheerful. It would have been unthinkable in Beijing.
I agree with some of those sentiments about Beijing - but fuck me it looked spectacular
Anyways we're both mostly on the same side so no need to get annoyed - I also thought it was a good ceremony, just pointed out a few crap things about it which could have been rectified with a bit more cash but hey - I just wanted the UK to kick arse in the eyes of the world
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RE: Olympic Opening Ceremony - 
, there are many more people of course but why ignore our own heritage. I'm not saying it should have all been that but there should of been more if you ask me. 
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