"State of Apathy" would be a better title

My original plan for this post was to go on another rant about how sexist television commercials are, using this State Farm Ad as Exhibit 450,000 or so.  After all, the female character here is portrayed as a really, really stupid naive little twit.  Not to mention that she doesn't seem the least concerned that there's this steaming wreck of a car sitting right there in front of her; she just bleats "hey, what's up" as if it's not even there.  Personally, I would have gone with "Oh My God, what happened are you OK?"  But that's just me, and if you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know I'm kind of odd that way.

But one thought lead to another, and I found myself concentrating more on the accident victim's reaction.  Ok, so it's pretty clear that he wasn't actually in the vehicle when it was totaled.  I get the idea that it's a hit and run deal.  And it must have happened very recently.  Don't you think that the guy's response is just a little too nonchalant here?  He acts like he views the destruction of his car as nothing more than a slight annoyance, if not a great excuse to try out this awesome new State Farm App he's got.  "Oh, I'm just using this cool App to diagram this horrific accident which rendered my car a worthless, smoking piece of metal, yawn."

Looking at it this way, the female character's "Oh that's nice hey I've got a date with a guy I met on the internet he's a French model" makes a lot more sense.  She's talking to an emotionally vacant guy, and she responds by being emotionally vacant herself.  There's hardly a reason for her to be more upset about the wreck than the car's owner, right?

If the guy had shown even the slightest hint that he had actually been involved in, witnessed, or was in any way the victim of an accident (seriously, even walking outside and seeing your car with a new dent in the bumper justifies more than what this guy is giving me) I could go the Sexist Image of the Clueless, Thoughtless, Self-Absorbed Woman route.  But I just can't past the guy's weird non-reaction.  Like I said, I'm odd that way.

It's another awful Droid Commercial. 'Nuff Said.

This pretentious thirty-one seconds of dull, throbbing pain is brought to us by Droid Razor (oh, I guess it's actually "Razr.")  The ad is called "Projections."  ( Like I said, pretentious.)

We are "treated" to several images of people checking out their palms to do things like learn how to cut a fish (chop off head.  Check.  Good thing the guy had that projection, he might have cut off the tail and eaten the head, right?)   One person is just watching a mind-numbing, pointless game on her palm.

In the conclusion to this monstrous pile of dung disguised as an ad for a cell phone, we see a guy looking at blueprints for a bicycle.  Why?  Well, I guess we can assume that it's because he's a Very Important Businessman whose sacred Small Business depends on the success of this new bicycle prototype, or something. Who gives a damn?  In a few moments he's done being among The Most Productive and one of the Makers (as opposed to us Takers) and proceeds to relax with some movie about a battleship.  It's probably Battleship, but again, who gives a damn?

And like every other person in every other cell phone commercial for a product which allows you to watch streaming video, there's not a set of headphones, ear buds, or anything of the like in sight.  Which means that ONCE AGAIN, the owners of this crap are invited to "share" their viewing experience with EVERYONE ELSE IN THE FUCKING ROOM.  Which is perfect for ads like this- because what is being sold isn't really a cell phone.  What's on sale here is total self-absorption and addiction, two character traits of people who generally aren't all that concerned about the people around them.

So buy a Droid Razr- it's like having all the answers, all the games, all the Connectivity and all the movies you could ever want right there in the palm of your hand.  So you can stare at it and listen to it, all the while using your other hand to give the finger to the rest of us.  Thanks a lot.

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.