We’re going to do this. We’re going to have a conversation…

Man, I love Filmspotting.

Every week, Adam Kempenaar (30-something, married with children, pretty fly for a white guy) and Matty ‘Ballgame’ Robinson (20-something, distinctly not married, fully-trained thesp) broadcast a show that was one of the first podcasts I trialled when I first obtained an iPod in 2007: it’s my most eagerly anticipated download each week. So, as my homage to these guys, this is my

Sam Van-Perbole Memorial List: The Top 5 Reasons I Love Filmspotting.

5. They are film lovers not professional film critics. For a start, they rely largely on their listeners for donations. But because they do this for the love of film, cinephiles from around the world, from ‘Cino to Melbourne and from Finland to China, offer up our hard-earned Euros, Dollars, Pounds, Kroner, whatever, to keep the show going. Because Filmspotting is interesting. In proper conversations rather than a scripted monologue, Adam and Matty dissect Bergman or neo-realist auteurs, or (like this week) a 35 minute discussion about Inglourious Basterds. Now I’ve seen the trailers for Mr Tarantino’s latest, and to be honest it looks awful. But their appreciation, description of scene construction and the dialogue was tremendous. I may even check it out.

4. Everyone’s Favourite Part of The Show. And then, amidst the film buffery and occasional geek-outs, they do this, or this.

3. Top 5s. As the name suggests, lists are important. One of the main ways Matty & Adam interact with their audience, and indeed the Filmspotting Nation interacts, is the Top 5 List. In the past few months these have included Best Movie Dads, Movies About Poverty, Bad Job Movies, Cinematic Obsessions… Their lists always throw up something I’ve never heard of, and often omit something obvious. But that’s the fun of it.

2. It’s not about them. It really isn’t. Filmspotting really is a conversation between film-lovers about films. And that includes us, the beloved listeners. Large parts of the show are dedicated to our feedback. I’ve had a couple of emails read out, and it seems certain to me that Adam & Matty really do read and think about every email. I recently had a bit of trouble ordering a Filmspotting t-shirt (yes, honestly). It had taken weeks to arrive from the US, and the suppliers weren’t able to track the order. I wrote to Adam & Matty, explaining the problems, mostly concerned that their sizeable overseas contingent of listeners might also have similar problems. Within minutes of sending the email, both Adam & Matty replied independently from their personal email accounts, promising to try and help sort it out. That personal touch matters.

1. Filmspotting is a course in self-improvement. Both for the presenters and the listeners. It’s not just a review of all the latest studio schlock, but an appreciation and exploration of film in all its forms. The themed Marathons are a wonderful device for them and us to share the discovery of unfamiliar genres or directors, watching several. My recent favourites have included Heist Movies, Angry Young Men Films, Silent Films, and Pedro Almodovar films. Filmspotting has genuinely introduced me to a whole raft of films I would never otherwise have seen, which have filled me with joy, rage, excitement, horror, and sorrow.

So in true Kempenaar fashion, a top 5 within my top 5. Films I wouldn’t have seen if I didn’t have Filmspotting. I recommend all of these unreservedly.

5. Sunshine – A Song of Two Humans. From the Silent Films Marathon. Beautiful. Made in 1927, it’s truly fantastic. I couldn’t find a trailer online, but you can watch the whole thing on Youtube.

4. Once. A gorgeous, poignant love story, sort of.

3. (a tie) Rififi / Le Cercle Rouge. From the Heist Movies Marathon. Fantastic French Films, Alain Delon defines cool, Tony Le Stephanois the ultimate crook, in a very good way. These films left me stunned, mainly for their massive influence on countless later films.

Alain Delon makes macs and moustaches look good

2. Away From Her. Acting masterclasses from Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

1. Grave of The Fireflies. Surely one of the great anti-war films. It’s magical, and yet gave me the most immediately moving and visceral reaction to any film I’ve ever seen. I bawled my eyes out for the last 20 minutes or so. It’s simply fantastic.

Honourable Mentions: Juno, Billy Liar, The Seventh Seal, Talk To Her, The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Not a bad list. But in truth I could have made a Top 20. Indeed, there are loads of other reasons Filmspotting is terrific. But if you don’t already know, you’ll have to listen in order to find out.

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boys play rock and roll…

Apparently it’s not fashionable to like U2: their website and online shop is a huge corporate beast populated with adoring fans, they carpet-bombed BBC TV and Radio to launch their latest album, and their recent switch from Apple to Blackberry seems at the very least to be having their cake and eating it. Oh, and that Bono bloke has an ego that could blot out the sun.

I saw U2 play at The Millenium Stadium in Cardiff last Saturday night. And to be blunt, they are an amazing live band. They performed ‘in the round’ under the most impressive stage I’ve ever seen. ‘The Claw’ (as it has been named) practically filled the inside of the stadium, making for amazing sight lines from almost everywhere and giving the concert a much more intimate feel than anything else I’ve been to.

Thanks to tony_sodp for this gorgeous shot - uploaded from Flickr

The lighting in the centre of that stage photo also served as high-quality screens, so there were terrific close-ups of the band as well as other projected clips, including a piece from Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Thanks to Bigwave - moderator at community.u2.com for this amazing shot

This was a show on a huge scale, and at least we could see where our money had gone. The engineering in the stage, screens and lighting was astonishing. The sound and vision quality was brilliant. And for all the corporate sheen, U2 genuinely seem to give a sh*t about their fans. The website is a massive piece of work with fantastic content. Their Facebook page has 1.3m fans and is updated regularly with all sorts of news, videos & links. And their concert was designed to please the fans.

The mix of material across their repertoire was terrific. The new songs sound great, in contrast to other long-lived bands like, say, The Rolling Stones. U2 also seem to love playing together as a band, and love playing live, responding to the audience. The way the crowd sang the first verse and chorus of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For reminded me of Queen in their pomp more than 20 years ago. The remix of I’ll Go Crazy was a brilliant reworking – almost unrecognisable from the album version, in a very good way.

And there were surprises – snippets of Oliver’s Army, Two Tribes and Blackbird were all fitted into U2 songs. And in over 2 hours of playing, there was almost none of the preachiness for which Bono is allegedly infamous. The main ‘calls to action’ focused on the ONE organisation, and on the continuing house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, hardly unexpected and both impressive causes.

U2 are a fantastic band. There, I said it. So sue me.

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This is the modern way. Faking it every day…

I like Haiku poetry: by reducing the form to 17 syllables over 3 lines, it forces the writer to express the very essence of their subject. This is something I wrote (at a low point) in a previous job…

Blackberries vibrate,
mouses click, keyboards crackle
like Geiger counters.

The work environment has changed immeasurably during my career. In my first market research job as a graduate we created slides of results, and printed them out onto acetates, which then had to dry, before being slotted into holding frames. Any changes and you had to do that slide again. Printers took 5 minutes to produce a single slide.

Tools to ‘enhance our productivity’ are rife. We create ‘decks’ with far more flexibility and creativity than before. We obsess about images and builds, about ‘the message’. Death by Powerpoint and Analysis Paralysis are phrases born in the last generation.

My Reckon today is that these tools often inhibit and distract us from more rewarding, direct, and meaningful interactions. By which I mean we could talk to each other, face-to-face, rather than hiding behind a presentation or an email.

Powerpoint comes with built-in protocols and assumptions how charts should be laid out: titles and bullets, graphs and commentary. My profession of marketing has created its own language and terminology, because…

• marketers are innately aware and guilty that their ‘profession’ is largely Applied Common Sense, so create technical language to lend it more credibility (noone likes to admit this)
• as in other spheres, the jargon is a defensive mechanism to hinder or prevent ‘outsiders’ from realising that marketing is largely Applied Common Sense (see above)… In markerting parlance, it’s a strategy to create barriers to entry in order to add value to our own core proposition and thereby add value. See what I did there?

Now I know I’m simplifying here, but just go with me, OK…?!

There are two main marketing strategies…

Trial / Penetration = get more people to buy some

AWP / FOP / Loyalty / Share of Requirement etc = Get some people to buy more

By speaking in tongues, by overlapping objectives, strategies and plans, surrounding ourselves with TLAs, we get bogged down in our own process. As I’ve said before, clusters and segements don’t buy brands and products, people do. And all the tools, applications and acronyms simply divide and isolate marketers from the people they claim to want to understand.

If we can get past the jargon, we can start talking as people, in human terms, about what people want and why they want it. Then we can start thinking about how we can give it to them, and make them feel better.

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…and they say that we’ll have fun if it stops raining…

In what was perhaps the antithesis of our corporate experience on The London Eye last week, we spent a much simpler and cheaper weekend camping at The Cotswold Farm Park . Apart from a trial run in the garden, this was our first camping trip as a family (we used a borrowed tent & stove) but all round it was a success, and we’re planning the next weekend away already.

Based on this one experience, here’s a few things I’ve learned. Think of them as the ’12 Essential Tips for A Great Weekend Under Canvas’. Or don’t (I’d prefer that actually). Anyway…

1. If a pan watched won’t boil, a pan on a camping stove in a strong breeze with no lid on definitely never boils.
2. Picnic rugs on the floor make your tent a home.
3. Packing the car is important. HA! I told you so.
4. China plates & mugs and real glasses make a difference.
5. You’ll always wish you’d brought something you forgot. The best you can hope for is that it’s the frisbee, not the matches or loo roll. We forgot clothes pegs.
6. It’s not difficult to eat really well. With a bit of advance planning, we had fresh trout from a few miles away at Donnington Trout Farm, wrapped in foil with lemon slices and barbecued, with potato salad and a mustard & chive dressing. The next night we had burgers with blue cheese and bananas with white chocolate buttons, also wrapped in foil and barbecued to a gooey sweet mess.
7. It will be hotter / colder / wetter / windier than you expect. In our case, all of the above…
8. No matter what level of Camping Pro you might be, there will always be something that someone else has that you immediately covet. It could be a plastic cricket set, a kite, a wind break, funky fairy lights…
9. Stuff takes a while longer when you camp. But that’s a good thing.
10. Your body clock changes very quickly. We went to bed very early and got up early, but this meant we were on a fabulous nature trail by 8am on Sunday morning – spotting wildflowers and butterflies, dodging very large bulls.
11. It won’t all go back in the car the way it went in.
12. Try to see the camping experience in the same way the children do. Our girls and the kids in nearby tents simply ran up to each other, introduced themselves and asked ‘do you want to play?’. They didn’t form  judgements based on the tent, or the car parked alongside, or whether the family were caravanning geeks.

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Money makes the Eye go round…

The Merlin Entertainments London Eye is an engineering marvel: 135m high, its immense wheel and 32 pods weigh over 2,100 tonnes, and can carry 1600 passengers per hour. It silently, gently carries people high above the River Thames, offering jaw-dropping views of London. So, to be clear, not only is the construction itself a thing of beauty and wonder, it offers an unrivalled experience to view our Capital, its varied architecture and history. It offers a chance to reconsider, appreciate and celebrate London for what it is, a brilliant city.

So why is it such a soulless corporate experience? Don’t get me wrong, the staff are all helpful and professional. The queuing system is tightly controlled for good reason. But despite the fact that The London Eye is one of the most amazing tourist attractions in the world, let alone the UK, it’s just so … uninspiring.

The online booking system is efficient, but having sweated over a specific ‘take-off’ time (can we get the kids up early?), we arrive to discover this is virtually irrelevant, and certainly doesn’t mean we don’t have to queue with all the ‘walk-ups’. The pods themselves are clean, but all identical and clinical. No themed decoration or personality? No commentary to enrich the experience, just the opportunity to buy a Viewing Guide.

And then the coup de grace – An Official Photo Memory of Your Flight. An engineering marvel with unique views of London that costs £15 per person for a 30 minute Flight, and you get an identikit experience with little or no personality. And the first thought of Merlin Entertainments is to flog you a digital print for £12 afterwards. If you delay, you’re deleted, erased from the record, as if you had never been. And apart from your credit card details and ticks in the opt-in boxes, you might as well not have been.

A few hundred yards down the South Bank we discovered the spotty trees.

Part of the Walking In My Mind exhibition, they are immediately eye-catching, playful, exciting. My daughters love them, I love them. They brighten your mood, lift your spirits. Beneath the trees is a small booth, part of The SouthBank’s efforts to engage the swarms of people who meander through ‘their patch’ every day. A lovely, smiling lady invites us to scribble whatever we want on a board, then have our picture taken. We get a website reference and a time to search for, and the next day we’re on Flickr. And it’s all free, just a bit of fun.

As you can see, Eleanor was really excited with this experience!

A word in the ear of Merlin Entertainments… stop looking up at your immense wheel, take a break from worrying about pod occupancy, and take a stroll along the river. Pause at the spotty trees, observe the smiling faces, and reflect for a moment. And stop taking your visitors for granted.

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When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk…

A spoilt child, a fearless acrobat, a romantic adventurer, a narcissist with little or no regard for those around him? Philippe Petit is all of the above.

Before I watched Man on Wire I was vaguely aware of news footage from my childhood of daredevil tightrope walking, and I had heard stellar reviews from film critics I respect. Even then I was swept away by the opening sequences, caught almost breathless by the imagery, the beauty and the flights of fancy… Richard Nixon declares from the TV set “I am not a crook”. The foundations to The World Trade Centers are laid: despite any explicit references to 9/11 within the film, these shots immediately resonate – the beginnings of the mighty superstructures look eerily like the remains. And then in a whimsical, fantastical flashback we see a child Philippe dressed as a circus performer, fleeing the dentist’s waiting room on a unicycle. This is no ordinary documentary.

The grainy archive stills of his ‘performances’ above Notre Dame in Paris and The Sydney Harbour Bridge are stunning, set to The Lark Ascending, Michael Nyman’s eclectic scores for Peter Greenaway’s films and the lilting beauty of Satie’s Gymnopedies. The lack of technology makes his planning seem almost amateurish, and yet he never doubts his capabilities for a second. He appears carefree to the point of being slapdash. His team seem to take the burden of responsibility for him, for the equipment, for everything. Tensions become insurmountable, and gradually his companions feel no longer able to make excuses for him.

And yet this self-indulgent, childish protagonist can be immensely charming and charismatic. The whole story plays out like a magical Boy’s Own Adventure. The graphics of planes crossing the Atlantic from France to New York remind us of Indiana Jones and classic tales of derring-do. He does magic tricks, he acts out his dreams in the meadow at the end of the garden. When devising the idea of shooting the initial wire from the top of one tower to the other, he looks like he’s playing bows and arrows, like Robin Hood. To get into the World Trade Center he becomes a spy, with fake ID (and everything!). It’s a heist movie, but one created in the mind of a child…

Even though we know how things end, the storytelling is exciting, recreating the tension and raw insanity of this escapade. Yet Philippe Petit never looks like he’s even capable of falling from the wire. His achievement earns him an almost awe-struck respect from the NYPD, but just as we are basking in his glory, he runs off with and beds a pretty stranger, seemingly unaware of or uncaring about how this might affect his partner and friends. This is a beautiful, exhilarating, bravura piece of film-making about a remarkable story. It was on BBC2 last Sunday night. I strongly recommend it – watch it on i-player, rent or buy the DVD.

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My favourite waste of time…

A few weeks ago I read an entry in Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog, decrying Baroness Susan Greenfield’s perfect storm of scientific credibility, media training and glamour, that makes her every utterance fodder for mass media scare stories.

This particular two-day hurricane concerned how the internet is not only responsible for childhood obesity, but could actually cause a change in our evolutionary progress as our brains develop differently (in a bad way).

As Mr Goldacre’s witty t-shirts attest “I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that”.

I want my kids to love playing outside, as I did, riding bikes and inventing competitions, adventure and excitement. I want them to learn how to get along with other people, by actually getting along with other people. I want them to nurture and expand their own imagination and physical capabilities by getting outside and doing stuff. But that doesn’t mean the internet is rubbish.

Baroness Greefield (or at least the media purporting to speak in her name) attest that kids who climb and fall out a tree will learn not to make the same mistake, but that if they ‘die’ in a console game, they just start again and keep playing… This is such a weak argument it invalidates pretty much everything else. Most video games are a learning experience. They reward the ‘best’ strategies and techniques. Players learn how to win, or else they keep losing. Like climbing a tree badly.

More importantly, the interweb is a non-negotiable skill for my daughters. Moreover, it’s a wonderful gift that my generation never had. I’m sure my parents and grandparents were equally concerned about kids becoming ‘goggle-eyed’ from hours watching TV (“we had to make our own fun in my day…”). Best of all, it gives children and adults access to express their creativity in countless ways, unimaginable even 10 years ago. We can experience other people’s ideas, copy them (that’s a whole other post…), and be inspired to make our own.

Some stuff I can only aspire to in terms of ability and ambition, but I can definitely admire and share with my children, hopefully to inspire and excite them as to what is possible. If you have any particular favourites, please add links here – I’ll be eternally grateful.

First, the beautiful and simple InBFlat: mix your own ambient chill-out soundtrack…

An oldie, but still wonderful: Kutiman mixes YouTube…

Too much time on their hands possibly, but tremendous nonetheless.

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