Turn your Flight into a party with the Bud Light Otter

Anheuser-Busch is asking Paramount to obscure the logos of Budweiser beer in Robert Zemeckis’s Flight, saying they didn’t participate in the production and don’t want their product associated with Denzel Washington’s portrayal of an alcoholic pilot. Yikes, we can’t have booze being associated with alcoholism! It’s all part of Bud’s latest ad campaign: “Bud Light: It’s not for pilots.”

Anheuser-Busch said Monday that it has asked Paramount Pictures Corp. to obscure or remove the Budweiser logo from the film, which at one point shows Washington’s character drinking the beer while behind the wheel.

Budweiser is hardly the only alcoholic beverage shown in “Flight,” which earned $25 million in its debut weekend. Washington’s character frequently drinks vodka throughout the film, with several different brands represented. William Grant & Sons, which distributes Stolichnaya in the United States, also said it didn’t license its brand for inclusion in the film and wouldn’t have given permission if asked.

I saw Flight, and I actually didn’t even remember the part where he drank a Bud. I remembered the part at the beginning where he drinks Miller (High Life, if I’m not mistaken). If anyone should be pissed, it’s the scotch brands, over the way they show scotch inside a hotel mini-fridge. Everyone knows you don’t refrigerate scotch, I mean come on.

“We would never condone the misuse of our products, and have a long history of promoting responsible drinking and preventing drunk driving,” AHB Vice President Rob McCarthy wrote. “We have asked the studio to obscure the Budweiser trademark in current digital copies of the movie and on all subsequent adaptations of the film, including DVD, On Demand, streaming and additional prints not yet distributed to theaters.”

At what point did the idea of product placement become so pervasive that you’re not allowed to show products that exist in the world without asking the manufacturer’s permission first, for fear that people will assume it’s a sponsor? It’s insane. At this rate, if you can’t get a sponsor, your characters are going to have to wander around in white t-shirts with “T-SHIRT” ironed on the front.

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Come on in, Denzel! Dry out!

If a critic’s first responsibility is to help the reader enjoy a particular work – and I’m not sure I agree, but I’ve heard that – with Flight that’s an easy one: stay for the first 20 minutes and then leave. You’ll get an awesome nude scene, Denzel ACTING, and a harrowing plane landing, and you’ll leave forever wondering what could have been. I promise, it’ll be better in your mind, for the same reason your teachers always used to tell you to read a book instead of watching TV. “Go on a FLIGHT, on the wings of your own IMAGINATION!”

If you do happen to stay, though, you’ll be treated to an extended infomercial for AA, an important after-school special about the dangers of alcoholism, a very special episode of the Denzel Show.

Flight is your basic example of a good premise in search of a movie. We open on Denzel, morning, in his hotel room full of empty Miller bottles, where he’s been up all night banging a preposterously proportioned, ludicrously hot flight attendant who has just woken up and is walking around stark naked, as hot babes are wont to do (as I know from my extensive research). Nadine Velazquez plays the flight attendant, and it would be impossible to overstate how fantastic her breasts are. They just sort of haunt the background for a while like chubby apparitions, all perky and ready to greet the day, while Denzel smokes a cig and argues with his ex-wife over the cell phone. He’s got family problems, you see, the poor guy. He takes a bump of coke to sober up and they hit the airplane.

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Since finishing Castaway in 2000, Robert Zemeckis has been on a mission to make motion-capture animation happen.  People hated it when he first finished Polar Express in 2004, and they’re only casually dismissive of it now, so I guess that’s progress.  Just last week he was still defending the process while promoting Mars Needs Moms, which he produced.

“The thing that’s always been at the core of the performance capture artform is the performance of the actor. The emotional warmth and the performance is what that performer has done, exactly like if a musician sits at a keyboard and plays, but then a processor takes those keystrokes and turns them into an entire orchestra.”

I’d say it’s more like auto-tune, which has so far given us a few funny parodies and thousands of Rebecca Blacks.

And in Mars Needs Moms, [using motion-capture] means Seth Green can play a nine-year-old, an insolent kid who gets what he arrogantly asked for when Martians kidnap his mom (Joan Cusack) to suck the “mom-ness” out of her and implant it in an army of “nannybots” to raise the Martian children. The diminutive Green has the physicality to pull off a child’s movements, but his beard would otherwise be an impediment.

Yes, or he could just voice a character that someone else drew, allowing him to play a monkey, a rocketship, or a yak fetus, all without having to shave his beard or even change clothes (thank God we finally have the technologies to make the job of a big Hollywood actor a little more comfortable, btw).  Put it this way: have you ever heard anyone complain about what a terrible actress Bambi or the Little Mermaid was?  I thought not.  In fact, we’ve long had non-motion capture cartoons lifelike enough to satisfy even the most discriminating of sex-pillow enthusiasts.  There’s just not a lot of upside to digitizing an actor’s entire face. Draw it or don’t.  Avatar, okay maybe, but let’s try not to shoe horn performance capture into every project like an Asian teen who just discovered emoticons.

Fast-forward to today, after Mars Needs Moms became the lowest-grossing opening ever for a broadly-released modern 3D-animated movie, when Disney chair Rich Ross strode into the boardroom atop his most muscular man servant and proudly knocked Zemeckis’ next mo-cap experiment into the sh*t pile with his pimp cane.

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Just when I thought Back to the Future month was finally over, Robert Zemeckis is back in the news.  Word is he’s in “early talks” to direct a live-action remake of Wizard of Oz using the original script (because who wasn’t clamoring for that?). Last we heard, Zemeckis was attached to

Warner Bros is in early talks with Robert Zemeckis to direct a live-action remake of the The Wizard of Oz and plans to use the original script from the 1939 classic. Warner Bros owns the screenplay because Ted Turner bought it along with the MGM library before Warner Bros bought Turner’s empire. This latest Oz twist comes as Disney is trying very hard to mount The Great And Powerful Oz [the Sam Raimi 3D prequel for which they want Robert Downey].

The original Wizard of Oz script had a total of 19 writers (seems not much has changed in Hollywood) with many of them uncredited, including Bert Lahr who played the film’s Cowardly Lion. This wouldn’t be the first hugely high-profile remake for Zemeckis; he’s in the middle of a Yellow Submarine animated redux for Disney, scheduled for a 2012 release. [Deadline]

Wait, so first he does three motion-capture animated pictures, which are basically to animation what tracing is to drawing, and now he’s doing a remake without re-writing the script?  If Brett Ratner ever chokes to death on a Totino’s pizza roll, Robert Zemeckis will be the laziest man in Hollywood.

(The Fading Photograph with original McFly Eric Stoltz — thanks for the tip, Videogum)

Yesterday, Back to the Future was in the news when for the first time, some of the footage of original Marty McFly Eric Stoltz was released.  Stoltz had been the original lead before Zemeckis had him replaced five weeks into shooting because he sucked so bad creative differences.  Another part of the story you probably didn’t know is that when they hired Michael J. Fox, they had to fire the actress who played McFly’s girlfriend — Melora Hardin, aka Jan from The Office — because she was too tall.  Hardin talks about it in in this interview (thanks for the tip, Joel):

We heard a rumor that you were originally cast to play Jennifer Parker on Back to the Future. Is that true?
Yeah, I was. It was a real small part in the first one and then a bigger role in the second one that Elisabeth Shue ended up playing. When I got it, it was a two picture deal, so it was going to be both films and Eric Stoltz was originally cast to play McFly, so I was going to play his girlfriend. And then they let Eric Stoltz go and I was too tall for Michael J. Fox. They called me in very regretfully and said that it wasn’t going to work out, which was sad. I was like 17 and, of course, shed some tears over that.

Now that it has become such an iconic movie, do you ever wonder what would it have been like to have been in it?
Sure. I guess it had the potential to kind of change everything for me, but I don’t know. It didn’t really do anything for the girl who played the small part and then was recast.

Especially since she’s “the girl who played the small part.”
(Laughs.) Exactly. So, I don’t know. I don’t think it would have been bad for me, that’s for sure. But who knows how good it would have been.

Hardin’s part went on to be played by Claudia Wells (5’4″ – only an inch and a half shorter than Hardin, according to IMDB), who was in turn replaced by Elisabeth Shue in the two sequels, when Wells had to quit after her mother was diagnosed with cancer.  But it was clear that God had had a plan for Hardin when she went on to star 2010′s Knucklehead, about a retarded MMA-fighting church orphan. (more Back to the Future comparison pics below)

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