Well done Danny Boyle: reading the London Olympics opening ceremony 2012

I'm not so sure Danny Boyle's expected establishment gong is as much of a dead cert as pundits assume now we've had a chance to unpack the movie director's critical state-of-the-nation London Olympics narrative. Last night's £27m opening extravaganza temporarily won me over from furious cynicism following the games' hijacking by Locog's pet corporations and their civil rights clampdown.

I should have realised — trust the creatives. The CREATIVES, not the crude showmen who might have turned in a vapid series of set pieces going no-where. I'm sorry I misjudged you Danny — the boy done good. This ceremony may have begun with a bucolic paradise with peasants tending their flocks but it ended with a vast setting sun as troglodyte primitives danced it into extinction.

Among the crowd-pleasers were woven some awesome subversive elements. Our unique selling points as a nation may be our musical back-catalogue, James Bond and the Queen, but even these were nicely handled. After watching Her Maj parachute into the stadium, I was hoping she might turn out to be the mystery cauldron igniter, maybe kicking a flaming football into the target, but Boyle had far more democratic plans for his climax.

He started with Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a benign engineer kicking off the industrial revolution before top-hatted capitalists (reminiscent of the ones in Eisenstein's Strike) mess it up, tearing up the turf and turning the peasants off the land.

Branagh recites Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

As some have noticed, this is what Caliban says just before he tries to kill "an imperial innovator who took away his island". Hmm, I wonder what Boyle is saying here.

Filling the stadium with five huge chimneys and factories and foundries to the sound of 1,000 drummers, we're reminded that British power came from its industrial (r)evolution and the people who laboured in it. Of course, most of yer actual working class were working their arses off on stage for free, not sitting in the comfy seats they couldn't afford.

But they were represented, hammering drums and metal, actually making things, while the tool-free capitalists worked thin air, much as they do with their banking tricks.

What they eventually end up with is the forging of the five rings of the Olympic symbol (yeah, the one we're all banned from using even though we paid for most of it) rising above the audience like something hellish out of Mordor.

A parade of Windrush immigrants, 1960s cultural explosion (Beatles), cockneys and the ordinary people who helped make Britain, made the most of a diverse range of the population and ensured they weren't rendered invisible. Boyle might have had an eye on Brecht who asked, "Who built the seven gates of Thebes?".

However, it was the NHS segment that gave me the most squeeing pleasure as Boyle stuck it to Richard Branson and the privatisers. Melding the NHS and children's literature, a battalion of nurses and doctors wheeled in hospital beds occupied by children (two to a bed — how it will look when the Tories get through with it).

A childcatcher (Maggie Thatcher?), a terrifyingly oversized Voldemort and assorted monsters (coalition creeps and Big Biz) harry the children while NHS staff attempt to fight them off.


Best of all, who did Danny choose to read during this scene? None other than JK Rowling herself, not only creator of the monstrous Voldemort and most successful commercial British writer, but famously a supporter of the welfare state who sends her own children to state schools. What's more, she doesn't avoid tax on her vast fortune but spreads it out. Unlike certain others now running the nation. Danny, this leftie salutes you.

Rowling read from J M Barrie's Peter Pan. J M Barrie donated the income from his book to children's hospitals.

And the music to accompany this warning to the forces of evil to get their mitts off our NHS? Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Significance? Tubular Bells was the phenomenal seller in the early 1970s which made Branson's Virgin empire (he even named one of his Virgin America Airlines planes "Tubular Belle"). Branson's Virgin, now scheming to run the PRIVATISED NHS SERVICE, including children's healthcare!!! Kudos, Danny!

Also noted: national hero in his own head, Tony Blair, who's been jonesing for inclusion in the Olympics all week and is looking to carve up the NHS with his Mee Healthcare company, didn't even get a mention.

(Pic montage by Eddie Truman)

But the CND did, its symbol formed out of multi-cultural dancers — including some disabled — to a musical medley of our greatest pop and rock hits.

As did Tim Berners-Lee who invented teh interwebz. (Brits also invented carbon-capture coal-burning technology but we haven't built even one.)

Abide With Me was sung to an Anish Kapoor-influenced dying sun, a reference to Boyle's movie Sunshine. The song is not only used as the rugby anthem and at FA Cup finals, but it's sung at the funerals of miners. Or mines. Or our entire productivity and everything we've known.

After the athletes paraded in, the event ended with a spectacular cauldron-lighting ceremony, carried out, not by a tired old sleb, but by the next generation of athletes: seven young men and women.


Rupert Murdoch tweeted that it was 'a little too politically correct'. At least he wasn't as crudely reactionary as the Tory who complained about multi-cultural representation and was buried in an avalanche of tweets.

Meanwhile, outside the Olympic Park, the Critical Mass bike protest was being kettled and intimidated — so unlike Beijing which British commentators never tire of sneering at. The furious cynicism is still there for Dow, McDonalds, Coke, G4S and the rest of the greedy tax-avoiding exploiting bastards (only £700m out of the £9.3 bn cost is funded by the sponsors), but the performers and athletes are the stars of the show from now on.



I noticed after I'd written this that the Arctic Monkey's first song had the lyric refrain "1984", so Orwell was present last night. Here's another gem I missed from Alex Wolff in Sports Illustrated: "Somewhere in the cacophony of last night, during what might have been the world's largest Twitter storm, this nugget emerged: Hey Jude was No. 1 on the charts the day Smith and Carlos raised their fists -- and that single's B-side was Revolution." Thanks to Noel Currid for this.

[Okay, okay, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, not the internet. I'm still impressed.]

Not forgetting Danny's writer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce who did such a great job, including introducing Boyle to Henry Jennings's Pandemonium.

Ian Sinclair in LRB: My Olympics.

I wondered when this was going to happen. Danny Boyle Backlash: London Olympics 2012

Must read Chris T-T's hilarous sharp take on the gruesome Closing Ceremony.

Anna's Olympics Experience 2012: Stratford site and torch in Ipswich

View of the London Olympics site less than a month before the games, passing through on the train. Plus the day the Olympic Torch arrived in Ipswich.

This is as much of the live stuff that I want to see of the Dystopian Olympics. The rest will be enjoyed from my sofa where I can eat all the non-McDonalds chips I want, and drink any bottled stuff without having the Games fash on my tail.

Anna on the Dystopian Olympics in 2008.

Anna on the Dystopian Olympics last month.

3D pix of Olympic venues in an interesting virtual tour.

Shiny phallus dominates London: Shard puts Tyrell Corporation in the shade

Children, I was there when the Tyrell Corporation opened its mega-building in London, dominating the city skyline with its architectural statement of intent.

Skynet were the first occupants of the tower and now look where we are: terminated by the technocrats who serve the elite, skulls cracked under tank treads, children barely surviving in whatever cracks they can find in our crumbling society.

But what a pretty laser show they put on, a fitting match for the Unethical Olympics and the end of the Elizabethan era of plenty that came to a close with the Diamond Jubilee that year, 2012. If only we'd known that the lasers would soon be replaced by Skynet's working models, first tested out on a populace taken by surprise by missiles placed on the roofs of tower-blocks occupied by people who'd once had jobs and had shared in the wealth of the nation in their own humble way.

They told us it was all the fault of angry youth, the feckless over-breeding poor, the elderly who clung to life for too long, the dole-scroungers (but not the royal family or the lucky few at the top who resented paying for the shirkers in the form of tax) and the immigrants who worked for crumbs to shore up the remnants of our infrastructure. And then they set the Cyberdyne Systems T101s on us, the ones who looked like Jeremy Paxman and Allegra Stratton, only their hatchet faces and thousand-yard stares giving the game away.

The Mayans may not have been totally correct in predicting 2012 as being the year the world ended but it certainly felt that way.

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!