Caxton Awards 2012 finalists announced in Nollywood ‘Enter The Caxton’ movie trailer
Caxton Awards finalists and judges for 2012 are the stars of a trailer released today for the forthcoming Nollywood action movie ‘Enter The Caxton’, currently in production with Chini Productions in Lagos, Nigeria.
Enter The Caxton will premiere at this year’s Caxton Seminar and Awards, with the ultimate winner revealed in the film. The movie also stars Emmanuel Tubiyele as the evil chairman Keogh, and his 8 judges.
Says Nnamdi Ndu, executive producer on the project: “I found the idea of doing a Nollywood parody of the rivalry in Australia’s Caxtons ad festival fresh, exciting and fun. I also saw it as a way of celebrating Nollywood internationally.”
51 Comments
WTF was that? Are you serious?
Ha-ha-ha! Actually looks like Ant Keogh. Genius.
Well, i laughed.
So completely inappropriate it’s hard to know where to start.
Please Blackface, explain why is it inappropriate?
Oh, and great work. Like nothing else for this type of thing.
Blackface:
Your reverse racism is absolutely fucking hilarious.
Both naive and stupid, you’ve not only completely misunderstood the concept, you’ve actually sunk to wonderful new levels by somehow thinking that the use of Africans is somehow morally reprehensible.
When a white man blacks up, yep, that’s racist.
When a black man appears in a parody, it’s in his own skin.
http://tiny.cc/ekasjw
That was bloody hillarious.
Your explanation of what is and is not racist couldn’t be more ignorant and ill-informed, but that’s not surprising. What ‘reverse racism’ means, you’ll have to explain. Racism is racism.
Black actors, and let’s hope they’re using their own skin, along with an African production company are enlisted by a nearly all-white advertising community (at least the Aussie side of the Caxtons) in a country that all but exterminated it’s own indigenous population and to this day treats those still alive like second class citizens, to make a parody trailer depicting a contest in which the names of the actual all-white participants are given to the fictional black actors who then proceed to use the metaphor of tribal warfare, dressing themselves as primitive savages (precisely how they are prejudicially viewed by a large portion of the non-black world), to lampoon the fierce and bloodthirsty nature of the contest.
The fact that the Caxton committee were able to find a willing African company and black talent to play this idea out, and that they did so willingly, taking money presumably and participating in this act of self-ridicule of their own volition does not in any way erase the fact that this parody would be offensive to most people of colour in the world and serves to further stereotype them as savages, and entertainment for white people.
If nothing else, this exercise is insensitive, certainly to the black Australians who are not part of the Aussie ad industry by-and-large and who weren’t even asked to play the roles of the savages, instead being excluded in favour of a team several thousand miles away.
Play this around the ad world in the US and Europe and see how it goes over. Play it out in the mainstream media and judge the reactions from blacks and whites alike. In fact, play this anywhere outside the bubble of the antipodean ad biz and see just how funny everyone else thinks this badly misjudged skit is.
Surely there were other ideas on the table, and given the history of race relations in this part of the world, nearly any other idea might have served the creative industry far better. It’s a bad reflection on us all.
What the fuck.
In the last three months, the blog has become some sort of angst ridden yelp fest.
Hundreds of hand-wringing posts are written by, presumably, the same nervous, easily shocked, letter-writing bunker dwellers.
If you’re so shocked by absolutely everything on here, just fuck off.
Oh, and don’t read the papers, play video games or watch the telly.
Go for a long walk, have a nice cup of tea and stop thinking about terrorism, blacks, women, gays and religion.
Oh, and don’t read Shakespeare – it’s full of stuff about Jews, murder, incest and women’s bits.
Maybe you could start a campaign to have them banned or something.
After all, they’re a bad reflection on us all.
This is the only response any sensible level headed person would give to that rambling.
Jesus. Give us a break.
it’s not racist, it’s just awful.
‘level headed’ says it all
Anddddddddd, it’s not racist for you to lump black Australians and Nigerians together:
“…this exercise is insensitive, certainly to the black Australians who are not part of the Aussie ad industry by-and-large and who weren’t even asked to play the roles of the savages, instead being excluded in favour of a team several thousand miles away.”
Your assumption that black Australians and Nigerians are fully interchangeable is the most racist statement yet made in this thread. Hands down.
I look forward to your wildly illogical 2,000-word response (you get 10 points extra for using the word “subtext”), or alternatively, pull your finger out of your arse and lighten up, mate.
@Heh and probably ok as well:
As far as confused, foaming moral outrage goes that wasn’t bad. Allow me to give you some examples of what racism actually is:
Assuming that Indigenous Australians have something to do with a Nigerian film because they’re black.
Your assumption that this film has something to do with “tribal warfare” because it’s made in Africa.
Assuming the actors are “playing the role of savages” because they’re African.
Thinking you have the right to put words into the mouths of entire races of people – actually, that’s just being a dickhead.
Paternally assuming that this film is an act of ‘self-ridicule’ because the cast and production company are black and don’t know what’s good for them, racist again.
You’ve gone and got yourself all worked up and projected all over the place.
p.s you should probably look into some Nollywood films, they’re awesome.
@Heh, If you research into the world of Nollywood, which you clearly haven’t, you will notice that tribal culture features heavily in many of the stories and is certainly nothing Nigeria is ashamed of.
Feels like your’e projecting your own slightly concerning views onto what by all accounts was a fun collaborative project.
Long-winded ranter above, sorry but you’ve got it all wrong (a bit like you did in your hysterical posts about the ‘gay’ PR shot last week).
The joke here doesn’t rely on the fact that they’re black people portraying savages (with lasers in this case) – it’s that the people in the clip are clearly nothing like the people they’re ‘playing’. You could have done the same idea with an obscure piece of Scandanavian or Japanese film.
Which I’m guessing is how they did – sourced a piece of film (possibly from a stock source), paid the rights and then added their own captions. I don’t think the ‘evil’ Caxton committee flew to Nigeria with directors chairs and whips to film members of the repressed local populace.
You really need to get a slight grip and stop bursting into tears on this blog about what you perceive as social ‘issues’. This isn’t the Melbourne University Student Union Debating Society.
And once again, the blog gets itself all worked up over fucking nothing.
What does Nollywood have to do with Australia or it’s ad industry?
How is African tribal culture a metaphor for a creative competition In Australia?
Projecting?
This is great. Farkin random but great.
“Your assumption that this film has something to do with “tribal warfare” because it’s made in Africa. Assuming the actors are ‘playing the role of savages’ because they’re African.”
Maybe it was the shields and the spears and the the tribal warpaint . . . hmmm.
“Paternally assuming that this film is an act of ‘self-ridicule’ because the cast and production company are black and don’t know what’s good for them, racist again.”
No, the assumption of self-ridicule was because the trailer is patently ridiculous, and the participants willing took it upon themselves to be a part of an absurd script that on a number of levels ridiculed their tribal heritage.
What any of this has to do with Australia, the local creative industry and why Nollywood is being used as a metaphor for any of the previous is still more than a bit unclear.
The relationship between Australian Aboriginals and Nigerian actors and producers here is that the Nigerians are working in service of a group of white people who think it’s funny to appropriate the tribal culture of the Africans to promote their industry.
The local Aboriginal community on the other hand may think that there is not much to laugh about when an organisation of predominately white people from their own country find it humorous to use the trappings of a primitive tribal culture, and a black one at that as a skit to promote their creative adventures.
Far less than 2000 words.
How are things in Richard Gere’s ass?
Must be enough oxygen as you’re quite a ‘ranter’ yourself.
3:58 PM
So shields, spears and warpaint make these characters “savages” involved in tribal war? Can’t that costume just be the cultural norm for the role of warrior in Nigerian film?
“on a number of levels ridiculed their tribal heritage.”
what levels are these? Even if you’d seen the movie, and this was true, why do these Nigerian filmmakers need you to act as custodian of their tribal heritage?
“What any of this has to do with Australia, the local creative industry and why Nollywood is being used as a metaphor for any of the previous is still more than a bit unclear.”
So everything must be explained because you’re experiencing a sense of humour failure?
@4:06 PM
you’re at it again! why assume that the Nigerian team are working ‘in service’ of their white masters? why couldn’t it be a mutually beneficial collaboration, born out of an interest in their style of filmmaking?
Your explanation of the relationship between Nigerians and Indigenous Australians doesn’t stand up either. Perhaps the local mob wouldn’t laugh at this, and perhaps they would. The only thing connecting them is your determination to be offended on both their behalves.
So from this logic, I take it kung fu films and bollywood movies are meant to be racist. Not to mention german art house movies! Sounds like a load of bollocks from some white hipster born and raised on the northern suburbs who’s so worried about what the aboriginals might think when they’ve never actually spoken to one themselves, except for that time they had a 2 minute D&M with a drunk they gave $5 to in Devonshire tunnel on the way home from the abercrombie. LAME.
Why couldn’t the Caxton committee have just commissioned a local production company to recruit some actors to play ad execs with spears to attack some other actors playing suits or planners and given them all the names of the local creative mob?
At least white people would be playing white people, and the blood bath would have been allot funnier to watch, especially half naked . . . a good deal more relevant too.
Your apologist nature for this stunt is rather endearing, however. You’re just as good with sexism and homophobia. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, eh Reg?
The notion of any of the creatives at Caxtons being able to do anything other than fight their way to the bar is the most amusing thought of all.
My bet still stands. Broadcast the trailer on YouTube and see how it goes over anywhere else. Ridicule and condemnation for the entire industry I reckon.
“that time they had a 2 minute D&M with a drunk they gave $5 to in Devonshire tunnel on the way home from the abercrombie.”
Sounds detailed enough to have been your personal experience, and speaks volumes about your own prejudices. DISGUSTING.
@5:26 PM
is that it? you my friend, are a disgrace to the fine institution of anonymous trolling.
Great work. Similar to the Volley shoes universal thing where they got production companies in Cambodia and Pakistan etc just to make their ads for them.
What’s wrong with seeing a bit of the rest of the world. It makes a change from the usual introverted Aussie stereotype adwank we get troughed up in this country.
Good on you guys! Love it.
Why is no-one picking up the subtext clearly directed at homosexual dolphins? WHY???????
Black spearchuckers in tribal make-up holding hands like a gay couple are just fundamentally funny . . . yes, and transgender dolphins too.
It’s like an undiscovered law of physics or something. Things are different in Australia.
We don’t know why, but then we don’t know why allot of things are the way they are, like gravity, and Tony Abbott, and Pauline Hanson and Kyle Sandilands, and Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt and Gina Reinhardt, Rupert Murdoch, Clive Palmer, and those Packers, just look at the the boy, he’s hilarious, and . . . well, like I said, they’re all just very, very funny, especially gravity.
http://www.mudsonline.net
Still time to get in on the Hamish Malcolm Cup Competition. They’re debating whether the ultra-conservative dominance of the media in Australia has succeeded in completely undermining what was once a very creative advertising community.
The formal topic, and they’re taking all comers is “Have the Bean Counters taken over the Creative Workshop?”
Ha, ha. Nice idea.
Cultural stereotypes do not a parody make.
Put simply, this is just rubbish. Hardly the calibre you expect from The Caxtons. The advertising for any award show should be good enough to be entered into an award show. This clearly isn’t.
Oh, and by the way, being a black Australian doesn’t necessarily mean your aboriginal these days.
Christ its a bit of fun isn’t it?
50 years ago people were enraged if someone didn’t employ minority groups. Now it’s “exploitation” if someone does – get over it, we are all people, not Nigerians, aboriginals, blacks or whites, we are people man… The sooner you get over yourself the better the world will be.
I happened to grow up in a community full of people from every walk of life, I know and understand their values well. They wouldn’t find this in the slight bit racist in its intention. They see themselves as people too… Like us… People. Not special interest groups.
PS I’d go as far to say that Australia’s unique brand of humour and taking the piss is markedly influenced by the first Australian’s culture as it’s very similar to their humour and quite different to anywhere else in the world.
And I’d implore anyone to get out into rural Australia and meet the real Aussies before screaming about genocide and the rest. There’s no ‘they’ or ‘them’ – just normal people, like the ones you read about on Wikipedia.
And fuck whoever said is an all white advertising community. You put shit on some of the most talented people in our business.
But please, try and think of these guys as people, not blacks / Asians / pigmy possums.
Ho hum! I’m outraged, I am.
@Can’t win can you:
The correct term is “differentially-sized” possum. Please.
When I was watching that on YouTube, I had the uncomfortable feeling a Nigerian phisher was simultaneously hoovering all my bank account details from the laptop.
Nobody’s picked up that Rocky’s surname is spelt incorrectly?
One upside to the whole thing is you never hear people complaining about those exceptionally talented Jewish (stereotype comedian) writers in the industry.
Oh no.
Huzzah!
The actors seem pretty pleased with the project:
https://www.facebook.com/kolawole.serrano
My feeling is that this more a case of a bunch of rich Westerners taking advantage of a film making solution so cheap that the grammatical errors and misspellings, (Bee Carrassco?), actually help the idea.
The joke is not just that the actors look nothing like the people they are playing, it’s that there’s no way we’d expect them to be because they’re all black and we all know the production values will be poor.
We’d expect the same from a film made in Bangkok, or perhaps, to a lesser extent, India. So I don’t think it’s racist. I do think it’s patronising and I don’t think it should have been made because, personally, it doesn’t make me think better about the Caxtons.
Plus WTF has it got to do with print media?
The people making an issue out of this because it features people with different coloured skin than their own are the real racists here.
No matter how much of an apologist you are, you clearly have never met anybody outside your white sheltered life. So be outraged, but realise, you’re actually the racist for bringing it up.
Now there’s an intelligent argument.
The real racists are not the people employing minorities to act in a stereotypical fashion to mine the humour in a parody of their own culture as a promotion for the predominantly white and first world ad competition who are commissioning their work (work that they’re happy to have frankly as they live in Lagos and could use the money and the exposure, at any cost apparently to their dignity), but those who bother to point out to these pinheads (the Caxton creatives who came up with this repulsive idea, over several drinks we’re betting) how their actions serve to perpetuate those stereotypes in the world at large.
And these are people who presumably make their livings in the communications industry . . . like Goebbels.
Next time you’re looking for a funny skit to hype the bloodthirsty nature of your competition (as if), look to your own histories, your own cultures, like the violent white extermination of the Aboriginal population of Australia, or the British annihilation of the native cultures in South Africa, or India, or you name it. Those stereotypes of murdering white colonials in uniforms with firearms against spears would be a far more apt metaphor for your little contest on Hamilton than any black tribal parody your could muster.
Wrong is right. The sheer stupidity is astounding, not to mention the breach of any kind of logic.
Thick and thicker.
superb work, not only have you proven godwin’s law, you’ve uncovered a racist plot hatched by a bunch of scheming nazi drunks.
better contact the cast and crew and tell them to stop being vocally stoked about the collaboration, and start behaving like the undignified down-trodden victims you’ve decided they are, you complete asshole, and remind them that they’re not a people or a nation, but a “minority”.
better let each of the over a thousand people who’ve enjoyed the trailer that they need to assume your own prejudices and become immediately, hysterically offended.
should probably get in touch with the wider industry to let them know that you have decreed, in your seemingly limitless dick-baggery, that no idea shall be entertained, unless it it is a strictly logical story of australian history also taking in british colonial massacres, or some other ridiculous bullshit.
So, this is what happens when formal education is substituted with talkback radio, the gene pool becomes painfully shallow, and there’s a bogan invasion that hijacks public discourse.
‘Dickbaggery”? Hilarious if it weren’t so painfully pathetic. Show this trailer, viewed by hundreds, on the air in the US, the UK, even here in far Australia, tell them that it’s a promo for a piss up where the white admen booze it up at a holiday retreat, and see how the public reacts to the racial overtones in this little narrative.
Paint youself in blackface and show up at the fancy dress party with your mates on the island and have a good laugh. I’m sure that the staff will be impressed, as they spit in your drink.
yeah, knew you had no argument.
The very humorous way everyone attacks everyone else.
Keep it up.