Olympics Opening Ceremony

Last night was the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympics Games in London.

Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor did the opening voiceovers - their voices were very recognizable and the accents made it a little less cheesy.

I have a soft spot for London, having spent a semester there in college, so it's great to see it in the spotlight.  London gets a bad rap for its rain and bad food.  In reality the weather is part of its charm, and it makes the sun that much brighter when it comes out.  The food can also be really good if you know where to go.  Some of my favorite British dishes are typical pub food like bangers and mash and beef and ale pie, and also great Indian food.  The best umbrella I ever had was bought in London, and I was so crushed when I lost it two years later.  They really do know how to make their umbrellas there.

Danny Boyle, the Slumdog Millionaire director, is in charge of the Opening Ceremony tonight as the Artistic Director, and he said that he was not even going to try to outdo the sheer spectacle of Beijing's Opening Ceremony.  Instead, he was going for sentiment and national pride.  The Opening Ceremony was titled, "Isles of Wonder," referring to the four distinct areas of Great Britain - England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. .

Best moment:

Daniel Craig as James Bond fetching the Queen from Buckingham Palace to open the Olympic Games at the Olympic Stadium, and then the two of them sky-diving off the helicopter.  The corgis were very cute.  The Queen looked like she was about to laugh when she was escorted by James Bond out of Buckingham Palace, which lends credence to the story that she is very funny and has quite a sharp sense of humor.

Other Highlights:

- Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie performing (she had also shown up on Sesame Street playing with Oscar the Grouch)
- The five golden Olympic rings being forged and then rising and shooting sparks down from the sky
- J.K. Rowling reading from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan
- Rowan Atkinson playing a bored musician in the London Symphony Orchestra
- Hundreds of Mary Poppinses "fighting" villains from children's literature, including Voldermort, Queen of Hearts, Cruella DeVille, and Captain Hook
- LED pixels attached to the seats that basically turned the seats into giant LED screens
- The exuberance of the Independent Athletes from the Netherlands Antilles, who was competing under the Olympic flag
- David Beckham driving a boat to bring the Olympic torch to the Olympic Stadium.  Too bad he was fully clothed.
- Lighting of the Olympic cauldron by young British athletes - they put the flames to copper leaves that had been carried in front of each delegation, and over 200 copper leaves were then ignited and rose together to form the Olympic cauldron

Not-So Highlights:

- Kenneth Branagh dressed like Abraham Lincoln citing lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest and then standing around among people dressed in Victorian garb doing some sort of weird mix of kung fu and dance
- Taking such a long time moving the sods and other pastoral set pieces to indicate the end of the agragrian era and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
- Dancing nurses and doctors?
- Creepy giant baby
- The boring story of Frankie and June
- Mr. Y called Kobe Bryant LeBron.  I just died.

Fashion:

My favorite outfits were from Cameroon and Mexico, who wore very colorful and bright outfits, and a guy in the Solomon Islands contingent had dyed his beard blue yellow green to match the flag colors, and also put the flag on the back of his head in color.

The ugliest outfits included Germany's pastel blue and pink jackets, Malaysia's yellow pants with black animal stripes, and Sweden's Where's Waldo outfits in the Swedish colors of blue, yellow, and white stripes. Canada's outfits are also surprisingly ugly - very 80s.   By far the ugliest was actually the host country's outfits, white with gold accents.  No wonder Stella McCartney immediately tweeted that she was not the designer behind these clothes.

There has been a lot of controversy over the Opening Ceremony outfits of the United States contingent, from  how they look to European to the fact that they were made in China.  The outfits actually don't look that bad on the athletes, especially the tall basketball players.

Overall the Opening Ceremony was just OK for me.  Many parts were pretty boring, with occasional burst of brilliance.  It's definitely not as good as Beijing's Opening Ceremony, which was amazing and spectacular. Thank God for the Queen and James Bond providing the best moment.