Interesting video. I'm enjoying it from the cinematographic aspect; it's well-filmed and that appeals to the photographer in me. I like that it's 'real' in some sense. I don't see what's terribly different about what we do in the dojo - we wear pads, but not that much and we don't hit each other with keyboards or chairs, but I'm not sure that's necessary. I get the entire bonding thing - I made a post about that recently - so I'm good with that.
On the other hand, this seems a little over the top for me. Another typical California trivialization of what it means to be a man. Sometimes I get this feeling that they've recognized that they have lost their manhood somewhere along the way, but they're grabbing at the outward trappings of what men do - fight, hunt, fish, drink, curse, carouse, or whatever, and trying to distill it down and bottle it, commoditize it, sell it in a way. You can't take hours of sitting in a tree with a bow and arrow, waiting for a deer to pass by and make that into an 'experience' that you can make a ride at Disneyland, you know? You can't take backyard brawls and schoolyard punch-outs and turn it into something that you can recreate in a garage as adults to make up for the childhood you were cheated out of. What's next, military veteran in a can for guys who never joined up? Maybe that's what the whole paintball thing is about, I never thought about it that way.
So I kind of like it; I kind of don't like it. There's something real about it that I get, but there is also something fake about it that whiffs wrong to me.
No offense to the guys fighting in the video. I totally get that they are really fighting.
