Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓

Going to school for the very first time can be hell for kids, and, after leaving home, itself, the hardest part is definitely fitting it.

So, the sight of these three munchkins, above, power-sliding to Parliament’s “Tear the Roof off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk)” tells me that, even without mom, they’re gonna be all right.

Director Charles Stone III’s original 2000 “Wassup!” commercial for Anheuser-Busch may be one of the best-known TV ads ever made. It’s easily the most parodied. Not only did it inspire take-offs, and some of the internet’s first viral videos, twisting the bit’s tagline around everything from Transformers to a Jewish brit milah, but Anheuser-Busch even followed up with their own riffs, like this yuppie-themed one.

That was right before Bush trashed America, though, and in “Wassup 2008,” above, Stone and his boys, having suffered the last eight years’ untrammeled evil, return jobless, absent health insurance, mired in Iraq, grasping at vanishing 401Ks, and helplessly battling what looks like Hurricane Katrina’s big sister—until, at the piece’s end, they get a glimpse of the dawning Obama Age.

It’s probably the best satire of the original ad yet. I don’t know what’s cooler: The way Stone densely packs each escalating moment of the new work with biting commentary, or that, effectively, he’s doing this on Budweiser heiress Cindy McCain’s dime.

What I love about Sprint’s Instinct “Romance” commercial, above, is its slick mashup quality, nakedly blendering dumb chickflick dialogue with a shameless cell phone pitch.

“Rachel, you know what your problem is,” the protagonist’s “biracial” BBFF urges over lunch (and faint, Ben Folds-ish piano chords). “You want everything: You want a husband, you want unlimited text, unlimited data, and unlimited calls.” Rachel gives an It’s-true-but-I’m-tired-of-you-telling-me-my-faults look in the other direction.

Then the climax: “Maybe you’re afraid to be in love!” the Best Black Friend summarizes, moments before Rachel’s breakthrough. “I think I’m falling in love…” she concedes, giving a girly headshake, “…with a phone!” Wow. What delicious crap.

What you see, above—an Italian 4-fogli, or four-sheet, for the 1973 film, Coffy—is, for its subject, size, and graphical power, to me, the single most desirable ephemeral object in all of Black film, and possibly connected to any movie.

Why?

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Pretty much anything Disney does in animation these days is annoying. But the trailer, above, for Bolt, out Nov. 26, is pretty good. It’s about a television superhero dog who escapes the set of his show for the real world, but doesn’t realize he’s actually an actor with no special powers. As one writer noted, think The Truman Show meets Ol’ Yeller. Plus, try and take your eyes off the skittish and impressionable hamster.

I think director Christopher D’Elia’s spec commercial for Bud Light is pretty funny, at least as far as the brand’s actually-sorta-troubling, guys-using-beer-to-get-over-on-women schtick goes. Plus, the music cues are golden.

But as American commercial advertising, its racial politics are in a fantasyland, and getting an actor who looks like Obama Girl isn’t gonna change that. You mest not be frum ‘roun’ these parts, eh, Chrissy? If you want a job in Hollywood, stick to racism.

It’s a very strange detail, but ever since Bernie Mac died, I’ve been unable to watch reruns of his syndicated show.

I distinctly remember sitting in front of the TV, the very first night after he’d died last month, as The Bernie Mac Show came on. I tried to watch it, you know, in honor of him and all, but found myself succumbing to this dreadful sense that what I was doing was kind of morbid and vulgar. It wasn’t a grief thing, as much as it was a sense that what I was doing was false.

I hope this feeling goes away by November 7 when his final work, Soul Men—that’s the one-sheet, above—with Samuel L. Jackson and Isaac Hayes, hits theaters. (As we all know too well, Hayes died the day after Mac of an apparent stroke.) Or, maybe the sight of both Mac and Hayes will make me completely unwilling to suspend my ongoing disbelief.

It’s weird to be writing twice in the space of a few hours about great voice talents, but, man, the giant has left the building. Don LaFontaine, whose low, gritty, rock-hard “In a world, where…” anchored so many of the over 5,000 trailers he voiced during his 33-year career—like this one for Tyler Perry’s upcoming The Family That Preys—passed away on Monday at the age of 68.

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I get that the script is supposed to be a parody of the silly things twentysomethings say when they’re trying spread their DNA around. Still, I don’t know which statement in this Twix commercial is dumber:

1. “Frankly, I just feel like some politicians are completely out of touch with 99% of society.”

2. “Yeah…and it’s, like, the mainstream media’s fault.”

Or…retch…

3. “Blogging? I LOVE blogging!”

I just know that these two are getting laid. And that they completely deserve each other.

Looks like those feisty Hilton women aren’t just taking up space: They’re actually taking on John McCain’s use of daughter Paris’s image in a controversial campaign ad, “Celeb,” that attacks Barack Obama.

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