Spend your way to a better life, Part 1.7 million

Here's another Spend Money you Don't Have and Achieve Happiness and Popularity ad.  Yeah, I know- I pretty much described every commercial ever made, but this one is even less subtle than most....

One night, Cute Girl told her boyfriend that he's boring.  That wasn't quite enough, however.  Apparently, boyfriend is either A) Deaf or B) has demonstrated an unwillingness to absorb negative things about himself, so Cute Girl feels compelled to repeat the charge several times. "You're boring.  Boring. Boring."

At which point, Boyfriend really needs to reply "so, this dinner is Dutch Treat, right?"

Instead, Boyfriend decides to change himself for the better by-- using his credit card more.  To take cooking classes.  And to go to Alicia Keyes concerts.  And never mind that whether he's tasting some sauce or making eye contact with Alicia Keyes,  he's still just standing there.   Because he's put himself into debt, he's no longer Boring.  Mission accomplished.  Where's Cute Girl?

Here's my problem- in the opening scene of this ad, Boyfriend has taken Cute Girl to a nice restaurant.  Seems like he's already proven himself willing to spend some money.  How exactly does getting a particular credit card encourage him to suddenly start doing Not Boring things like taking cooking classes and attending concerts?*

I just don't get it- if Cute Girl thought that Boyfriend was "boring," why didn't she suggest that he do something with his money other than take her to nice restaurants?   Hey Cute Girl- how about suggesting fun activities- like cooking classes and concerts?  You know, stuff you could do that involves something other than sitting on opposite sides of a table, eating overpriced entrees, and rating your boyfriend on some arbitrary excitement meter?

Let's be generous, and concede that she's tried this- she's tried to drag him on hiking trips, the theater, sporting events, and other stuff she considers fun and Not Boring*, but he's resisted each time.  So she's put in her time and now is cutting Mr. Boring loose.  Did Boyfriend simply not "get" that she thought he was boring until she finally came out and said so?  Because he sure responds as if this is a real revelation to him.  He's instantly inspired to turn around his life and do all this stuff that Cute Girl probably would have loved to do with him,  if  he's only managed Clue One before she dropped her You're Boring bomb.

So let's jump ahead and imagine that in a year or two, Cute Girl bumps into ex-Boring Boyfriend on the street, and they agree to have an impromptu coffee . Over the span of thirty minutes, ex-Boring Boyfriend tells Cute Girl about all these great concerts he's gone to, how he's become a gourmet chef, and how he is a volunteer docent at the art museum in his spare time.  Cute Girl asks "where the hell was this side of you when we were dating?"  Ex-Boring Boyfriend replies "apparently safely hidden, waiting for a much nicer, much less cruel girl to come around."  I hope he doesn't mention the new credit card, because that's something she probably would have been happy to suggest, if only she'd thought of it first.

*Coincidentally, these are activities I find fun and Not Boring.  Cute Girl should give me a call.  Because in my experience, Cruel is usually trumped by Cute.  For a while, anyway.

600 frames of annoying, courtesy of Budweiser this time

I get that a lot of work probably goes into making commercials like this.  I get that they require a lot of camerawork and choreography and maybe there's even a certain level of skill and art involved.  Or maybe there's a very simple CGI program being used and I'm just sounding really stupid right now.

But man, what a waste.  Because all commercials like this- commercials which show the same person or persons wearing a dozen different sets of clothes, appearing in front a dozen different backgrounds, doing the same thing over and over AND OVER (whether it's texting or walking around with idiot friends or drinking beer) just gives me a freaking headache.  And makes me hate the people who are in them, almost as much as I hate the people who subjected me to this crap roughly 400 times while I watched the Atlanta Braves get royally hosed by the refs (infield fly rule? Are you fucking KIDDING ME?) and their own sloppy fielding in the National League Wild Card game.

License to Sell

James Bond fans, of whom I am one, have long suffered with the ubiquitous product placement that has gradually consumed more and more of the films over the years. I thought that it peaked during the Brosnan age (with "subtle" nods at Virgin Airlines, Hertz Rent A Car, Sharper Image, Norelco, etc. etc. ETC.) until I watched people stare at their cellphones for two hours in between playing cards in "Casino Royale." I get that these films cost a lot of money, and if Barbara Broccoli can get back some of that cash by inserting a commercial here and there, I supposed I have to understand.

 Still... James Bond drinks vodka martinis- shaken, not stirred. Martinis were good enough for Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce "Waiter with a Gun" Brosnan. Sure, this was parlayed into product placement opportunities in the later films, but that was acceptable because Bond drank vodka martinis ANYWAY- might as well let the audience know what brand of vodka he preferred. Didn't change the character, just cheapened him, slightly. But if Skyfall (I thought Quantum of Solace was a bad title- still, both were better than Tomorrow Never Dies or Die Another Day) is going to show us Bond drinking a beer- well, sorry, but that's just going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of THIS Bond fan. Hey Barbara, why don't you just have 007 reach into a bucket of KFC or use Kayak.com to book his next exotic travel adventure or scan recent texts on a Sony Ericson phone to learn more about it's previous owner (oh wait, he already did that, several times, in Casino Royale?)

 Then again, who am I to question Barbara "I Inherited this Empire from my Dad, and I've been working with my brother to destroy it since the mid-90s" Brocolli? After all, she's the one who insisted on replacing Dalton, a classically trained Shakespearean actor with a refreshingly dark take on Fleming's iconic character, with a talent-deficient mannequin, simply because that mannequin was more popular with American audiences. And I'm not even going to get into the stunt casting which marked the whole Brosnan period (no Bond fans really want to be reminded that Denise Richards was cast as a nuclear scientist in one film, and both Madonna and Halle Berry had prominent roles in another. You'd have thought Madonna's theme song would have been torture enough...) BTW, anyone else think that Craig is so pale in this ad that it's very hard to see where his hair ends and his face begins? I mean, that's just weird.

Share Everything- whether they want it or not

I know this is supposed to be a cute little slice of life, demonstrating how wonderfully awesome the Connectivity of whatever stupid electronic device which happens to be on the screen is.  See how relatives who can't be grandson's tuba concert can now "enjoy" it along with the parents?

Now, of course, we can take the snark in several directions at this point.  Mom and Dad let Grandma and Grampa know that just because they happen to conveniently live on another continent* doesn't mean they get to skip out on watching grandkiddo launch an epidemic of ear bleeding in an evening of exquisite torture.  Sorry, guys- you WANTED grandchildren, well, here's your grandchild.  You BOUGHT him that fucking tuba, well, here it is, being used.  Enjoy.

Or we could wonder at the kid who has been so acclimated to being surrounded by glowing screens instead of actual people that he sees absolutely nothing at all creepy about seeing his grampa and grandma's heads sitting in his parents laps, grinning like idiots as they "appreciate" his god-awful murdering of some perfectly good piece of music.  I can't help wondering if he wouldn't be perfectly happy with absent grandparents, followed by a "Sorry we couldn't make it" card, containing money.  I'm sure the grandparents would have considered it a bargain.

Instead, I'll just project ahead to a future commercial for the same product- one which shows  no actual human beings in the audience at all.  Just an auditorium full of laptops, sitting on the chairs, glowing away and featuring the faces of people who had Better Things to Do (like watch paint dry or, far more likely, check out a movie on their Kindle Fire IV.)  And the kids on the stage smiling appreciatively at the floating heads on the glowing screens, as if this is all perfectly sane and normal.

Seriously, though....is it just me, or does anyone else find this "reasonable substitute for actually being there" more than a little creepy and weird?

*On subsequent viewings (or maybe the viewing of a longer version) I see that the kid peeks through the curtains and is disappointed to see that Grandparents (or parents, how would I know) are not in their assigned seats.  Then he is relieved to see their glowing faces on the screens.  So they were SUPPOSED to be there and "couldn't" make it- but they DID find time to sit in front of their computers, or at least glance at their tablets from time to time while the kid plays his heart out on stage.  Kid is just fine with this.  Whatever.

Oh yeah- you can still use it to read, if you are into that kind of thing

Three years ago, I read a Boston Globe article praising the Kindle as the device which just might lead to a Renaissance of Reading. For an entire generation of children, it made reading fun again- being able to carry around a personal library in the palm of your hand made you cool and the object of envy- which meant it made READING cool, too. Kids were downloading the Harry Potter series and Goosebumps and whatever it is kids read these days, and a glimmer of light broke through the clouds. Briefly.

So much for the Renaissance. First, the Kindle introduced a touch screen. No big deal- it's what the kids like these days. Then the color screen was introduced, and for me, this was the first warning bell. Why do books need color? Good books create the color in the mind of the reader. I don't need to go through this step by awful step, do I? Let's skip to what is currently the basement, because that's where Kindle has taken us with it's beautiful little idea.

Look what the kids are doing with their Kindles now- they are playing brainless, pointless race car games. They are watching cartoons. They are downloading movies. In short- it's not a book anymore. It's a fucking television. I thought the idea was to get kids AWAY from this mindless junk. I mean, we've already got cell phones and laptops and tablets for this crap. As it turns out, Amazon didn't have as much faith in the intelligence of the public as we might have been lead to believe, three years ago. Turns out, downloading books was just the hook to reign in the Luddites who were thinking that no technology was immune from debasement. "Hey look, here's the Kindle!" Amazon shouted from the mountaintop. "It encourages literacy! You'll love it! And your kids will love it- which means they'll love reading, and they'll grow up to have functioning, active, inquisitive brains, unlike those kids who play video games and watch tv! Get a Kindle- do it for your kids!"

Now, my Second Generation Kindle, with it's buttons and virtual ink on grey background and its icky books sure looks retrograde compared to the pretty colors and images and awesome sound of the Kindle Fire (or the Kindle Fire HG- I think that's what the latest one is. Can you use it to update your Facebook page, call and text friends, or get directions to the concert? Do I really want to know?) If you listen very closely, I think the word "reading" is actually mentioned in this commercial, but it's hardly central to the advertising campaign for the new Kindle. Amazon is done selling good-tasting veggies (and teaching kids that veggies CAN taste good.) Here's a big bag of colorful candy, children. Never mind exercising your brain- here's another way to keep yourself glued to trash.

Yep, the Boys on the Board of Amazon decided somewhere down the road that while it was nice being praised as part of the solution for a while, the real money is in being part of the problem.

Criticizing this garbage? It's a snap!

Ok, let me see if I get this straight- The owner of this phone has decided that the best place to do her banking, and the best time to do it, is in the middle of her living room, while her demon spawn jumps up and down screaming their ungodly, obviously Satan-infused lungs out, the adorable little tikes. She rubs her finger around a screen for a while, taking a picture of a check, taking a picture of her children (does she, in some unguarded moments, secretly wish she could deposit them, too?), sending the picture of the check along to the bank, getting a confirmation that it's been deposited, Mission Accomplished.

 Then, she....ummm....hands the phone to Thing One who, having finally won Mom's attention, proceeds to....ummm...pick up the phone and play with it. So...all this time, Mommy's Little Miracle was actually just clamoring for his turn to play with the phone? Even if this is the case- is it really a good idea to let a kid play with a phone which we were just shown can be used to do rather sensitive stuff like banking? I can just see this kid playfully pushing a few buttons and transferring Mommy's 401(k) to that nice guy who is trying to get out of Nigeria with his suitcase full of gold coins. While we're at it, can someone explain to me why this thing is shot in some odd, ugly negative theme? Never mind- I mean, it's not as if any of the rest of this makes any sense.

Samsung's rather lame effort at self-parody. I think.

Ok, this is pretty funny. Samsung is really tearing those iPhone 5 losers a new one here, aren't they? I mean, listen to how they talk- they are babbling, glassy-eyed zombies who know they are online to buy something, know that it's a new cell phone, but are only vaguely aware (through rumors and hearsay) of the reasons why it's slightly better than the practically-new phone they already own. Haha what a bunch of losers- I bet half of them are drowning in student debt, and here they are anxiously awaiting the moment they can get their hands on this year's Shiny Status Symbol You Hold In Your Hand.

 Except, wait- oops, turns out that while Samsung is poking fun at Apple Devotees, they have NO problem with their own tech-addled clientele. The people Not On Line Because They Already Have Samsungs are having a grand old time explaining to the Apple Drones that hey, here's the phone, it doesn't have a picture of an piece of fruit on it but it's got all this stuff you claim you want from the phone you are waiting on line for. This makes the Samsung owners somehow superior to the current and future Apple owners (you know all these people on line have iPhones already, right?) how, exactly? Oh, right, because they aren't on line.

 Here's what this commercial is missing- a third group of people, who stop the We Are So Much Better Than You Pathetic Dweebs Samsung owners in their pompous blather to show them their wallets, which are fuller because they didn't respond "how high?" when Samsung called out "Jump, new product here!" Maybe that third group could also tell the Cell Phones Are Our Friends crowd how they have these great conversations with each other, how they took their kids to the park the other day and actually watched them play (and played with them) instead of obsessing with some stupid electronic device. Maybe they could talk about how liberated they feel whenever they leave the house, because they know they are out of touch, totally untraceable and unreachable, truly free to be alone or with the people they are with, and not handcuffed to the phony Connectivity provided by "This is the Future of Awesome" buzzing, beeping and glowing things. I imagine that this would create a moment of communality between the Apple and Samsung tribes against the weird, unassimilated Luddites who dare suggest that there may be Life Beyond Phones. I'd also imagine that this would result in a lot of jumping up and down and chest-thumping and hooting in rage and confusion, except that I doubt that these phone dweebs could manage anything that so closely resembled exercise. My guess is that they would all just whip out their phones, take photos, and post them on Facebook under the title "check out these weirdos they don't get how SuperAwesome my Best Friend is!"