Via Adland TV

But there is another category of films – films that are so bad, they’re good. To celebrate these ‘car crashes’ of celluloid, we stupidly decided to set up a club – a bad film club – an opportunity to have a drink, a laugh and revel in the acting horror.

Each month we will be showing a ‘special’ screening. Our opening film was no exception having become an internet and cult legend. Here is our resident film boffin, Robert Ball‘s assessment of what has been described as ‘the ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad films‘: The Room…

You are tearing me apart Lisa!

The Room (2003)
There are films during which you can feel the obsessive precision of a master craftsman at work. The films of Kubrick, David Lynch or Hitchcock. The Room is their terrible dark twin. Whereas truly great films are perfect in every detail; framing, pacing, screenplay, visual and sound design, The Room is monotonously, heroically unperfect. In every last detail. All of the time.

The star, producer, director and probably caterer of this meandering debacle (Tommy Wiseau) gives himself the plum role of Johnny – a benevolent, teetotal philosopher and adopter of street kids. He is misunderstood, betrayed, and cuckolded in turn by those around him. He cuts a tragic figure. In fact it’s possibly the most tragic screen performance ever committed to celluloid. Imagine Christopher Walken wandering lost after near fatal electro-shock therapy in one of Cher’s old wigs reading a pile of Clinton Cards through a mouthful of cold porridge.

The rest of a central love triangle is, quite literally, rounded out by a femme fatale (shot from such consistently harsh camera angles and in such cheap dresses that she looks like a pound of pork sausages spilling out of a Christmas cracker) and the handsome best friend (A walking piece of MDF with a beard). And talking of cheap furniture, The Room looks like it was filmed in an MFI showroom. During business hours. Which perhaps explains the characters that randomly appear out of nowhere only to look confused and and wander off again without serving dramatic or expositional function.

So, take some terrible acting, a screenplay written by a horny teenager (two stomach churning sex scenes occur in the first ten minutes that feel about as erotic as watching a giant snail trying to fondle his sister), cheap sets, a handful of stock footage, production values that would shame a school nativity and this is the result.

And I’m just scraping the surface. A thin veneer of mere awfulness covering depths of ineptitude studded with pearls of unrewarding crap just waiting to be discovered. The worst film ever made? Perhaps. I’d give it six out of ten.

Nokia viNe Brand Design from James Temple on Vimeo.

However, fret not, as deliveries of the important stuff – the parcels and presents ordered up to the 11^th hour from on-line retailers such as Amazon and John Lewis are destined to find their way to their recipients in a timely and reliable fashion. These businesses you will not be surprised to hear have opted to drop Royal Mail in favour of alternative providers. There are unfortunately some on-line retailers who won’t have that choice.  Just as Britain is trying to fight its way out of recession, not only will Royal Mail potentially lose over £100m of combined letter and packet business, the disruption could cost general business over £220m in direct lost business and increased delivery expense not to mention damage to reputation and customer loyalty.

So it would seem that the current dispute of Royal Mail employees with the management over pay, conditions and modernisation plans continues to erode not just the trust and reputation of another institutional brand but ultimately drive it closer to the edge of an inevitable precipice.

Sure, the history, politics and organisational issues that underpin the machinations of Royal Mail and the current dispute are complicated but the stark reality is much simpler. This is a business model that makes little commercial sense or in its current guises delivers a relevant consumer service for modern Britain.

Royal Mail was created in 1516 by Henry VIII when he established a Master of the Posts. It was no doubt of formidable use in days gone by for sending threatening letters to the French or Scots, communicating with your army, courting another potential wife or demanding taxes and favours.

But today, my letterbox at home is rarely straining under the weight of anything of such urgency, value or contempt.  Bank statements, mobile phone bills, energy bills,  tax returns, passport and driving licence applications are all now managed on-line. In our fast-paced digital society, we can’t wait a few hours, let alone a day or two to for a piece of communication to wind its way through the ‘Snail Mail’ plumbing.

So what future for our postal champion and its significant army of foot soldiers?

The solution for Royal Mail is to leverage its capabilities in a more effective and innovative manner.  It benefits from an amazing local community presence and infrastructure. It just needs to mobilise it and charge for it in a more valued and valuable way.

Perhaps Royal Mail should consider stopping those daily letterbox deliveries of increasing amounts of junk mail.  Household mail only accounts for about 10% of volume anyway.  Apart from certain government departments, rarely do we send anything of real urgency or value through the postal system.  Perhaps we need to be educated that we should go and collect our mail from the local Post Office.  Use the Post Office as a micro-sorting office from where we rent our own PO Box for a convenient Saturday morning collection before popping to the coffee shop next door to peruse it.

Equally, Britain is a universe of micro and small and medium sized enterprises. These smaller businesses need to move things around and most often within a fairly narrow geography and relatively minor window of time.

Couldn’t Royal Mail do this? Couldn’t Royal Mail be exactly the kind of local community logistics champion that we could really use on a daily basis.

With assets out on the roads local independent grocers or traders who can’t compete with the likes of Ocado can offer to deliver direct with Royal Mail. Plumbers, electricians and tradesmen can call suppliers for parts and have them picked up and delivered by Royal Mail within 90 minutes. For domestic customers, dry cleaning can be delivered or collected and  those cakes you’ve baked for old Mrs Jones who lives on the other side of town can be sent and received and still be warm.  Maybe if I’m really running late, they can pick up and deliver my kids home from nursery.

Now that really would indicate a level of trust and give valued meaning to those letters within the Royal Mail brand name that make it a service we can all be proud of.

After the success of our make-it-yourself catalogue for last year’s Jerwood show ‘an experiment in collaboration’ (featured in the Creative Review annual, Design Week Awards runner up and winner of a Platinum award at Graphis) we were asked to make a catalogue for Jerwood’s latest show: Laboratory.

The Laboratory is an experiment: three artists take over the gallery and, starting from nothing, build a show as they go – a totally unpredictable process, with no way of knowing what the work will be like from one day to the next. Everything they do exposed to scrutiny and comment, from the resident writer and photographer to the public and press.

With an experimental show that is one big work in progress we set out to make a catalogue in the true spirit of the show: unpredictable, exposed and experimental. We decided not to design a catalogue. Instead we designed a process,  a way of creating a catalogue that we couldn’t predict and couldn’t control, a way of gathering and documenting everything that happens in the show in real time, built, like the show, in the gallery itself, and only finished as the show closes. We’ve just let it unfold…

Blog
The process started with the Laboratory blog. The artists, curator, writer, resident photographer and designers posted real-time updates on the show to the blog which also automatically draws in related content from external sites like twitter and flickr. Each post has a print option which we use to output content in real time for the printed catalogue. Every post prints the size it appears in the blog, so no two pages are alike.

Catalogue
Each day’s posts are added to the catalogues which are on display in the gallery so you can see the them growing as the  show grows. Posts are joined vertically to make one continuous chronological document. The catalogue kept growing right up until the moment the laboratory closed its doors.

We’ve seem our fair share of dramas unfold from our view on Morton Street in the last year, including two plane crashes (the most recent with a less happy ending than the first, unfortunately), a faked Airforce One fly-by and more beautiful sunsets than you can shake a stick at.

It’s hot and humid at the moment in NYC and this brings with it some pretty spectacular storms. This is one from Friday afternoon: watch New Jersey disappear (complete your own joke here).

So it wasn’t a surprise to us, that the day that we planned to hold our annual summer party, the weather would play it’s part and decide that we would have ‘torrential rain’ and be five degrees lower than the rest of the week, then clearing up for Saturday and Sunday.

We would not be beaten! Come rain or shine, we had worked long and hard (booked caterers, ordered the beer and had invited too many people) to cancel, so we pushed on regardless.

Luckly for us the rain went quickly and the sun rose in the sky – okay, it might have been made from foam board but it all gave us hope!

You can view some of the pictures from the night on our Facebook page.

And here is the ever-so-frighteningly accurate invite that we sent out back in spring:

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.