Guy Goma Gets His Own Pointless Movie

Do you remember a couple of months ago when BBC News 24 made a balls-up of things and interviewed a confused man with a first language that clearly wasn't English about a lawsuit between Apple and The Beatles?

Do you remember how that clip was funny the first time you saw it, and then got progressively less and less funny as everyone you know emailed it to you with the message subject 'Har har look at dis funny black man'? And then do you remember seeing Paul Ross almost wetting himself while introducing it on This Morning and wishing that he'd set himself on fire and throw himself in the Thames, never to be seen again?

Yeah. So it's being turned into a film now.

Everyone in the entire universe has seen the clip of Guy Goma, an unemployed computer technician from the Congo, looking a bit confused as he was wrongly introduced as Guy Kewney and interviewed live on BBC News 24 about a copyright lawsuit between Apple Computers and Apple Corps. And everyone, at one point or another, has thought that it was a short diversion from their otherwise agonising working day. Well, that brief smile that the clip possibly inspired has given a bigshot Hollywood movie reporter a sterling idea - why not stretch that moderately entertaining two-minute clip into a two-hour film and charge people £7.50 to go and see it?

Alison Rosenzweig, who produced dreary old Nicolas Cage movie Windtalkers, is apparently keen on developing the story of Guy Goma into a feature-length movie. She says:

"He's a fun, kind of internationally famous person that I think is an interesting source for movie material. We're developing the project, and hopefully we'll be able to set it up on a major studio."

Now there's a whole bunch of reasons why we don't want to a Guy Goma movie. These include the fact that it smacks of lazy, opportunistic, bandwagon-jumping movie making; the fact that we already kind of know what happens because we've seen the clip about six billion times and the fact that the film's big payoff - a man pulling a funny face on the telly when someone asks him about iPods - is hardly up there with Brad Pitt revealing that he was a figment of Edward Norton's imagination all along, is it? 

Still, we might be wrong about the Guy Goma movie. After all, just because we don't want to go and watch a film about a foreigner being made to look stupid because a researcher wasn't very good at confirming names, it doesn't mean that everyone agrees. And look on the bright side - if the Guy Goma movie becomes a success then people will want to make movies about other people who have achieved notoriety on the internet. And although a film about Guy Goma wouldn't rock our world, a two-hour, explosion-filled blockbuster based on the Mental German Kid most certainly would.

Read more:

'Wrong Guy' could inspire movie - BBC

[story by Stuart Heritage]