i am sparticus: Paul and The Incident With The Muffins

Paul and The Incident With The Muffins

Exclusively, for the first time to the general public, to the amazement of dozens;
Paul and The Incident With The Muffins (1.6mb playable in Quicktime (Higher quality iTunes version suitable for iPods can be found here) )

May I thoroughly recommend you watch it all the way through many many times? I have!

And now for the future generations of teenagers who are going to have to write essays about this legendary piece of early 21st Century comedy, here's a play by play break down of it all.

Synopsis:

This movie has two key characters; Paul, a young man with a fine taste in clothes, is who the movie is obviously centred on. The camera rarely leaves Paul and the action clearly happens around him. The second key character is the director of the movie. This man is often heard but is never seen, he exists to drive the film along and provide someone with whom Paul can interact and bounce of with. As well as this, three other characters exist, Paul's two older siblings and a mutual friend of Paul and the director, who, for some inexplicable reason, is ginger.

The plot is deceptively simple, the director and the ginger friend turn up at the end of a party to pick up Paul and his siblings and take them home. Paul takes a plate of muffins home with him and causes much mischief with them.

Play by Play Break Down

• 0:02 Immediately the director shows us all four key elements of the movie; Paul, muffins, the director and Paul's stupidity.
• 0:07 The director decides that he does in fact, want a muffin. While at this stage a seemingly meaningless expression of hunger later on the true impact of this statement will become clear.
• 0:12 "Yeah, I want a plate of them". In an unexpected twist we realise that actually it was the director's greed who encouraged Paul to take the muffins in the first place. This serves three purposes, firstly it makes Paul seem that much more endearing in the eyes of the public (a feat already somewhat accomplished by picking such a rogueishly handsome young man to play Paul). Secondly it makes the director that much more evil, something which is otherwise only suggested at by his crude manner and uncouth accent. Finally it makes the muffin violence at the end of this play feel that much more deserved. It leaves us wanting to applaud Paul as well as cheer the downfall of the director, justice has been served, if only by a muffin in the face.
• 0:17 Paul takes the muffins. Nothing can add to the horror of this moment
  
• 0:25 "I hope you don't post this on flickr". Paul here is worried that his reputation as an upstanding gentlemen will be compromised by having these images uploaded to the image sharing site http://flickr.com. No chance of that then.
• 0:27 Here we get the first proper view of the ginger friend. As you can see, she's ginger.
• 0:25 "Ssssh Get in, Get in the house!". At first glance it seems that Paul is eager for the director to get inside so as not to cause a disturbance. Later on though we realise that the only person Paul care's about disturbing is his parents. This makes Paul's words encouraging everyone inside very suspicious. Was Paul planning something?
• 0:27 Here we see Paul huss the first of three muffins over the director's head and at the foot of his brother. It's a very technical shot, perhaps hinting at a level of training and skill that Paul never admits too.
• 0:46 Muffin two hits the director of the head and bounces off. Paul manages to keep his nonchalant appearance up despite obvious guilt. This is in obvious contrast to the rest of the cast, who are variously in hysterics, confusion and anger. As the video heads towards it's climax we can see the director artfully weaving an atmosphere of chaos together.
• 0:53 The director slows it down here, giving the viewer time to pause and giving himself time to build up the tension. Something's going to happen here. Although Paul taking off his coat is fairly exciting.
• 0:58 "He just threw a muffin in my eye". This phrase serves two purposes. Both of them are too much effort to report upon here though. Needless to say, directing genius!
• 1:00 KABLAM! That's how to pull of a money shot! An argument could be made that the director didn't actually go down to the muffin in the eye, as a muffin in the eye doesn't really hurt that much, but rather he went down because of the fits of laughter he was in. This is a very valid argument, but it misses the heart of the movie; someone getting hit in the face by a muffin. Pure comic genius.