In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean used an Ace Comb and suddenly every cool teenaged boy in American had to have one, which meant a huge bump in sales for the company. Product placements in movies are way more effective than traditional advertising because when placed within the context of a storyline, we become emotionally invested in the image. Plus, you won’t fast-forward through the movie like you would over a commercial.
Man of Steel made $160 million dollars before it was ever released in theatres because there were A HUNDRED products either scattered throughout the film or tied-in afterward. Did you catch them all? Nikon, Budweiser, Sears, 7-Eleven! The producers were all over free money like it was Star Jones’s wedding.
Not all product placements are so cringe-inducing. In Steven Spielberg’s E.T., 
Reese’s Pieces were actually part of the plot. In the original script, it was M&Ms Elliott used to bribe E.T., but Mars wouldn’t allow their candy in the film if they couldn’t see the final script, so Reese’s Pieces stepped up and made history. Hershey didn’t pay a cent, but they did provide the movie with 1 million dollars worth of free tie-in advertising. Worth it? They saw a 65% increase in sales during the film’s run, so I’d say yes.
The James Bond movies have always been a potpourri of product placements, from fancy-schmancy BMWs and Omega watches to elaborate vacation destinations. But Heineken trumps them all: they paid a reported $45 million dollars to be in Skyfall. And it would be worth a pretty penny to see James, 
renowned for preferring a martini, to be caught drinking a beer. It’s a sad day when film makers are willing to forgo characterization, history, tradition, and story for the all-mighty dollar, but it’s not just one dollar, it is after all 45 million of them. How many cars can you smash up for 45 million? They destroyed about $34M worth in Spectre.
Speaking of cars, let’s segue to The Italian Job and their iconic use of the Mini 
Cooper, which became the star of the movie. BMW provided 30 Minis to be used in the film and they saw a 22% rise in sales that year – not bad for a feature-length car commercial. I even rode an Italian Job roller coaster once where the cars were in fact little Minis. The movie made people reconsider the Mini Cooper – what was once thought to be a ‘girly’ car was no rebranded as sporty, speedy, and cool.
Cool is always being sold in the movies. In 1983, Ray-Ban was thinking about 
cancelling their Wayfarer line when it suddenly got a big bump thanks to Tom Cruise in Risky Business. He made the sunglasses cool again, and the brand attributes the sale of 360 000 pairs to the 
movie. So you can bet that 3 years later they were only too happy to enter into partnership with Top Gun, which this time high-lighted their Aviator line, which gave them a nice 40% increase.
There’s a battle in Hollywood for King of Product Placement: will it go to director Michael Bay, or to Adam Sandler? Michael Bay is notorious for cramming his movies full of products for sale so they look more like fast-moving catalogues that films. Adam, on the other hand, is much more frank about his brands. And that’s because, embarrassingly, the products in his movies are usually there because he loves them, not because he makes money off of them. “Sandler Marketing” is the shining beacon of product placement, because it’s not a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it can of Diet Pepsi, it’s a blatant shout-out. In Happy Gilmore, 
it’s actually a plot point that the golfer becomes a spokesman for his favourite sandwich shop, Subway – he’s seen eating a sub while wearing a Subway t-shirt and SHOOTING AN ENTIRE SUBWAY COMMERCIAL. It’s unclear whether Subway paid a dime for this, but that movie was also responsible for increased ratings for The Price is Right, so anything is possible.
Michael Bay, on the other hand, goes another route. You may consider that his Transformers franchise is already advertising since the series was created to sell toys. But that’s not enough anymore. Transformers #4 was nicknamed Advertising In Disguise for the sheer amount of branding jammed into its bloated corpse. The use of GM cars for all the Autobots is obvious enough, but Bay doesn’t have time for subtlety. What he does have time for: a transforming Xbox, Mountain Dew vending machine, and Nokia cellphone.
This stuff is so rampant that there’s actually an awards ceremony to pat people on the back for managing to stuff brands into movies: the Brandcameo product placement awards. Age of Extinction of course took home the trophy the year it was released (ironically it was still sued by a Chinese company for failing to include their logo), with Gone Girl a close second. Apple took home a special prize for overall product placement, having appeared in The Lego Movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and in fact in 9 of the 35 highest-grossing films last year. The Theory of Everything also took home an award for marrying an Oscar-bait biopic with product placement (remember the bit about Tide? It wasn’t Tide in the original script.) These awards are always held on Oscars Eve, and this year it wasn’t Apple but Mercedes taking home the overall prize, having appeared in Furious 7, Jurassic World, Spy, 50 Shades of Grey, Focus, and Spectre. Meanwhile Apple managed a paltry Daddy’s Home, Sisters, Our Brand is Crisis, The Last Witch Hunter and The Intern. Achievement in Shameless Product Placement, a title I can’t help but love didn’t go to a movie this year, it went to a person: Mark Wahlberg. He appeared in the movie Entourage as himself, wearing a hat advertising the bottled water he’s invested in, and a t-shirt advertising his own line of body building supplements which he launched in conjunction with his body building movie, Pain and Gain. Meanwhile his other movie, Daddy’s Home, had a whole subplot about Indian motorcycle, for which he is a paid spokesperson, and which sells a “Mark Wahlberg line.”
And the Lifetime Achievement Award went to Pepsi for a veritable orgy of product placement. Last year it appeared in the likes of Tomorrowland, San Andreas, Ant-Man, and Jurassic World. It’s been in Twilight, Moneyball, 127 Hours, Fight Club, Gone in 60 Seconds, Tron, Salt, The Spice Girls Movie, Steve Jobs, Basic Instinct, Election, American Gangster, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Snakes on a Plane, The Blindside, Twister, World War Z. In Home Alone, it garnered a “Fuller, go easy on the Pepsi.” In Big, Tom Hanks’ man-child installed a Pepsi vending machine in his apartment. Pepsi vending machines have taken beatings in several Terminator movies. It’s also been beyond some meta-product placement, like the Doritos (owned by PepsiCo) breaking of the 4th wall in Wayne’s World, and the same basic gag being done by George Clooney in Return of the Killer Tomatoes. But are either of these half as memorable as Joe Manganiello’s stripper routine in Magic Mike’s XXL gas station scene? Didn’t think so. Touché, Pepsi. I raise my glass to you.
and also speaks human. That’s it. That’s the whole she-bang. Sorry I ruined it for you, but you’ve seen it before, and you’ve definitely seen it done better. The bar is set so low that any random episode of Paw Patrol will be more entertaining for your kids and less annoying for you. Yeah, I said it.
record all of the voices on Oscar night or something? Like, which “celebrity” is not only not invited to the Academy Awards, but not to any of the post-Oscar parties either, and doesn’t even have friends or cable TV to be watching them from home, and doesn’t have a job to go to Monday morning that they’re getting to bed early for? And so they called Balki from Perfect Strangers and he was busy. And they called Tori Spelling and she said no. Screech from Saved By The Bell thought the script was lame. Carrot Top thought it might compromise his artistic integrity. And on and on through a rolodex of reality-TV “personalities” until they finally scraped the bottom of the barrel, and guess who was there, desperate for a pay cheque?
I was unprepared for how bland and pointless Norm of the North would be. How can you release this alongside Pixar fare and think you deserve to be there? It’s like hanging one of my kindergarten macaroni Christmas ornaments at the Louvre and not being embarrassed. The only thing I can console myself with is that it did set a record for worst opening for an animated feature and so maybe, just maybe, Lionsgate learned a lesson in humility.
Lenny is a young man in his 20s who, not unlike his peers, is struggling to find himself. He’d like to find a girlfriend, preferably a very independent one, but he feels strongly that they’re all out of his league. There’s anguish here. Lenny will break your goddamned heart. Lenny is a smart guy in his way, and he’s aware. He’s aware of how much his differences have set him apart and all he wants is to be “normal.”
woman with her own disabilities. Though not a classic love story, you can see how much love and care there is between them. His wife knows how to get him talking, and how to recognize his affection. It’s incredibly endearing.
it’s embarrassing, but you start to think that they’ve got it right, because in recognizing their weaknesses, they’re actually working harder at overcoming them than a lot of the rest of us. Their communication is open and honest, even if it’s a bit of a trial. Everyone should be so lucky.
These two have so much hustle that there’s hardly a corner in all of dusty Los Angeles that they haven’t conquered, so when we called up Queen Bey herself to crown them with all the glory implicated in this event, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. To be fair, Rihanna and Katy Perry also accepted but those girls are so confused they couldn’t stop crowning themselves. So, Jay & Mark, in the name of Beyoncé, with the power invested by her entire Beyhive, I now pronounce you Most Industrious Assholes.
while Mark’s claim to fame was The League. Then they both appeared on the show they wrote and directed themselves, Togetherness. But that’s just what they do in their spare time. They’re also writing or producing or directing or micro-financing movies pretty much round the clock. Movies are either their passion, or their death wish.
workaholic, do what we love to do, and not die of a heart attack, destroy myself and my family, and keep my friends?’” – a commendable insight from Mark.
The Duplass brothers have been at heart of the Mumblecore movement for a long time. Mumblecore movies are a subgenre of indies that are known by their incredibly small budgets, their “natural” (read: amateur) acting, with an emphasis on dialogue over plot, lots of which may be improvised.
Beginners
company isn’t just about churning out Duplass stuff. They’re also bringing up lots of their friends along with them. They’ve got enough pull to make pretty much whatever they please, but they’re sticking close to their humble beginnings. The brothers are famous for bottom lines of less than a million dollars, and they always come in under budget. With their success and auteur status they’ve recently been asked to helm a real popcorn movie (shh – a superhero one!) and of course they turned it down, unwilling to make the kind of compromises
that would entail. “We’re not making that level of money [of directing a blockbuster franchise],” Jay says. “But we don’t need that level of money because we lived like starving artists for 15 frickin’ years. It’s like, we don’t need things. We just like to make things.”
Jay and Mark aren’t just running their own little empire, they’re changing the industry as a whole. “There’s no excuse not to make movies on the weekend with your friends” says Mark, and you know he really, truly means it.
are films that literally everyone loves. Sure, Once featured unprofessional actors and didn’t have much going in the way of plot but the music and characters struck such a chord mostly because of the unpretentious sincerity that everyone involved seemed to bring to the project.
Carney does his best to get back to basics, returning to Ireland with mostly unknown actors, in Sing Street. Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) has just started at a new school and, though he hasn’t made any friends yet, instantly falls for an older girl (Lucy Boynton) who aspires to be a model. Based in part on Carney’s own memories of the mid-80s, Cosmo decides to start a band inspired by The Cure, Duran Duran and Hall & Oates. For Cosmo, this project is mostly an excuse for him to film music videos starring his crush at first but the opportunity to write and play his own music soon becomes about much more. Music, he’ll soon learn, can be the perfect outlet to express his feelings about the tension between his parents, their financial troubles, and the restrictions at his strict Catholic school.
insightful and considerably funnier script. (I laughed myself into a coughing fit twice and I don’t even have a cold)..It is much better acted and more imaginative. The dream sequence of Cosmo’s ideal video for Drive It Like You Stole It is my favourite scene by far but there are so many perfect moments in Sing Street.
man, which is exactly what Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult) is. It’s the height of Britpop, and business is booming. If you find the next Oasis, or hell, the next Spice Girls, you’re made. But one misstep can also mean career suicide. It’s a super competitive industry, and both the screenwriter (John Niven) and the director (Owen Harris) have decided to bonk you over the head with this fact. And when, after the first 10 minutes or so, you’ve been completely bludgeoned with this theme, they yank open your jaw and force-feed it to you for 90 minutes more until you’re veritably choking on it.
entirety, so nothing sticks out. The bitterness is unending. Kill Your Friends aims to be the blackest of comedies, but when everyone is horrible all the time it really dulls your senses. It’s a grueling film to slog through without a single redeeming character so you can’t emotionally invest. Stelfox is pushed to further and further extremes but you won’t care an iota because nobody deserves to get out of this with their dignity intact.
To their credit, they spared zero expense on the soundtrack: Blur, Prodigy, Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers, Oasis. It reminds you what a good time it was to be alive in the late 90s. It also makes you angry that they’ve failed to live up to these bands. Almost certainly there’s an interesting tale here to tell. Kill Your Friends has no idea what it is though, and hopes you’ll be impressed with blood and cursing instead, which is almost the same as story, right?
fault. It’s received some fairly positive reviews so I had hope that it wasn’t as bad as my gut was telling me. But now I know the truth: either the movie-going public are idiots, or they talk up a bad movie in order to trick others into paying to see it too, thus assuaging their guilt and annoyance at having sat through it themselves.
animals is that they’re still cartoons. They’re very accurate, very expensive cartoons, but it’s just some fancy animation that makes it harder for me to anthropomorphize but doesn’t stop them from breaking out into song. The tiger is so menacing looking you can practically smell the rotting meat caught between his yellowed 3-inch teeth, yet he has the velvety smooth voice of Idris Elba. Bill Murray was a nice choice for the more playful Baloo, but let’s remember that Baloo is still a bear. A sloth bear, sure, but a bear’s a bear. Sloth bears are usually known to be docile for a bear, but they’ll still attack humans who encroach upon their living space, and Mowgli doesn’t just encroach, he fucking rides him! And 
then there’s King Louie, the big-ass scary mother fucking ape. Modeled after Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz, King Louie is a gigantopithecus, an ancestor of the orangutan, who in real life would have been about 10 feet tall and over 1000lbs. He’s hostile AF but he’s oddly voiced by Christopher Walken. Now, I love Walken almost as much as his mother does, but it was a weird and jarring choice. King Louie is scary, but Walken’s voice is far from it. He’s got the voice of a stand-up comedian or a jazz band leader, it’s one of the most recognizable voices out there, and it didn’t belong to this ape. And then he breaks out into a show tune, which is NOT something Colonel Kurtz would be caught dead doing, so the tone of the movie just falls apart like the chain falling off of a bicycle, and the whole thing just stinks. Stinks! And not just because it’s a temple full of monkeys.
a black panther makes most adults want to scream “Run you little idiot!” In fact, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop was brought in to make puppets for Sethi to act against, but those were completely replaced with CGI versions later. And as for the lush Indian landscape, it’s 100% phony too. The whole thing was filmed on a back lot in smoggy Los Angeles with a blue screen and some Styrofoam painted to look like jungle.
give me talking animals, that’s fine, but they’d better also have careers and pants and fart jokes. If an animal looks real and normally eats people, I don’t want to see him dancing around with a man-cub. I have zero tolerance for this movie and as far as I’m concerned, King Louie can kiss my ass.
It’s not exactly ground-breaking material but here’s the gimmick that’ll put butts in theatres: it’s Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong playing Perry. And is it pretty effing cool to see him play the guy he might have been had his own post-punk outfit not taken off when it did? Yes, yes it is.
moment that he was watching Billie Joe Armstrong. I, on the other hand, thought it was a scootch worse than that. Unnatural. Self-conscious. Very “you can tell I’m acting because my hand is over here on my hip, which means I’m going through some internal conflict I’m not subtle enough to convey any other way.” And yet I’m not going to condemn him because the movie really is a vehicle for him. He’s what makes it cool and relevant, makes the movie rise above the other mid-life-crisis\path-not-taken meditations. Plus, Kirk pads the cast with some better talent: Judy Greer as the old flame, Selma Blair as the current wife, Chris Messina as the scowling brother, Fred Armisen as an ex-bandmate.
The regret without resentment shows maturity I’m surprised to see in a character like Perry. Billie Joe never quite transcends the role, but there is an honest vulnerability there that’s a little charming. And Billie Joe is not just a casting liability, he’s an asset to the soundtrack because he’s written some original music for it, and the movie is never more confidant than when Armstrong is performing. In this he excels. The songs he wrote are great and I imagine they’ll be invading your radio waves sometime soon, lending the movie some major credibility.
an energy that defies the fact that Armstrong is in fact a middle-aged father of two. They played a couple of Green Day tunes as well, Scattered and then American Idiot, which morphed into Bad Reputation. Oh, did I not mention that Joan Jett was in the house? Yeah, she has a small cameo in the film but she got up on stage and showed the boys what a scene-stealing badass she still is. Her voice hasn’t aged a single minute and the woman’s still sporting leather pants. Armstrong closed the night with Ordinary World, the film’s acoustic ballad, and I couldn’t help but wonder at the twinkly goodness of my life. In the movie of my life, there is no path not taken.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 