Olympic Opening Ceremony

[TheGreenKnight]

Watching the opening ceremony. AIBU in finding it boringly grim. Especially when compared to London 2012.

Maybe they thought it would titillate everyone who thinks French people just spend their time having steamy affairs 😂😂

That pianist actually properly rolled his eyes and looked really pained at one point. He must have been thinking 'Fuck my life. This is beyond a joke.'

Just replayed the 2012 James Bond and then Queen moment! Then watched the Paddington and the Queen from the
jubilee.

I can't believe how they have failed to showcase Paris 😟

I gave up after just over an hour. I was underwhelmed by Lady Gaga as the performance aspect seemed small and I couldn't understand why she was doing it. I liked the headless Marie Antoinette and the heavy metal rock band as that part had meaning and was on a decent scale. The rest seemed disjointed. Nobody wants to see people waving on boats for hours.

The Bejing ceremony was absolutely spectacular and i don't think can ever be topped in terms of scale, but we did a surprisingly fantastic job at ours. That said, i think that there were a lot of insider jokes and info and that the primary audience was us Brits. My American friend found it boring because she didn't know about or appreciate our history.

Is it worth revising any of tonight's ceremony that i have missed? The horse sounds intriguing.

I think it’s very French 😀 inasmuch as they don’t really care what it looks like from the outside, and I kind of admire that attitude. Huge numbers of Parisians will have participated at street level which is cool.

The downside of that though is that it’s not very televisual, and so spread out that it’s hard to film from a practical pov.

They would have done a better job! At least it would have been amusing.

Honestly the amount of people raving about the London opening ceremony as if it was the greatest artistic achievement of humankind. I recall watching it in 2012 and being as bored as I am tonight!!

No idea, I would have thought that the opening ceremony would be family friendly viewing. Fortunately my four year old was distracted by her dolls house so I didn't have to explain throples/threesomes.

They missed a trick- Asterix, Obelix and Getafix would have cheered us all up.

At least in a stadium you can see the whole show. Admittedly many more people could be accommodated by doing this river bank thing, but they've only been able to see the spectacle going on directly in front of them. So you sit there in the sodding rain for hours to get a distant glimpse of Can Can dancers on the the other side of the river, or you get to see the very wet, pissed off pianist, or the wobbly women waving around on giant sticks, but that's all. Just that one thing and probably nothing else.

There has been no one show that could be appreciated by everyone, just a bunch of disjointed mini-events in different places.

I fast-forwarded through the Seine stuff in about 10-15 minutes and rather enjoyed it. What I saw was mostly simultaneously dull and bonkers, which is par for the course in Olympic ceremonies, but doing it on the river in an absolute deluge made a change. Is it still going on?

Oh come on. Danny Boyle diD an exceptional job☺️

Aw Rafa is lighting the torch

This is more like it

Liked the athletes going past in boats, better than marching around the stadium. Not sure about some of the other bits.

You clearly weren’t in the U.K. in 2012 because the majority of the population thought it was going to be a disaster - we were so pleasantly surprised at how successful the London Games were.

I only remember Daniel Craig from London 2012. All opening ceremonies are bloated.
Watched some tonight and it did make me want to visit Paris again.

I thought the music for Rafa and Serena was JMJ for a mo.

(John Michel Jarre)

No enjoyed it.
Why does it have to be like the London one?

It doesn't but this one has been naff.

@PassingStranger it doesn't. It just needed the be entertaining and not so disjointed

Okay… when is the boat trip ending!,,

Very dull

Gawd…to be clear I am a great lover of Paris, France, and the French…just now as the boat with Nadal, Zigane et al with the Olympic flame took off, the commentator said ‘where will it end’ …more like ‘WHEN will it end ?!’ And the dancing ?!

London ceremony was fantastic - with the speech from the Tempest, the Queen bailing out of the helicopter, and the music from TDCC at the end, when the cauldron was lit. This is also channelling the Tempest, but not in a good way.