As eager as I was to catch up with it, and sad git that I am, I watched the Paris Olympic Ceremony yesterday in a couple of chunks. I was eager to see if there was anything I could get my analytical teeth into. Now that I’ve watched it though, I must admit I found it a bit boring: there were parts which, frankly, I didn’t see the point of, like the use of The Minions (an American franchise), and overall I found it all rather drawn out. It didn’t really seem to go anywhere. I also think it could have made far more use of Paris’s cinematic history, although I still wasn’t feeling a hundred percent so I may not have picked up on everything.

Mind you, there is one part which I think I should say something about: Checking Facebook after I’d finished watching the ceremony, I saw that various people had grown indignant because they claimed part of it ‘mocked’ the Last Supper. Bemused, I went back to rewatch the section of the ceremony they were talking about, and instantly saw they were talking utter nonsense. It was a single, two or three second shot of about eight men in drag lined up beside a catwalk. To claim it was alluding to anything else was just deranged. This was clearly a case of religious idiots attempting to shoehorn their narrative of victimisation into a current event in order to get attention. There was no way that the shot in question could have anything to do with the Last Supper, and claiming it does is just pathetic.

Of course, I’m glad I took the time to watch it; the ceremony just didn’t have much to get my juices going though. Obviously there were quite a few remarkable technical aspects, such as the use of lasers and the image of a mechanical horse galloping up the Seine, although it occurred to me that it could have all been pulled off just as convincingly inside a stadium. At least there are still three more to look forward to.