Just like always, the Super Bowl yesterday was the only event of the year when people actually watch, let alone discuss, commercials. Almost all of them try to be funny these days, but it might surprise you to learn that a committee of professional salespeople trying not to offend anyone may not be the most effective way to create comedy. The only thing sure to be must-see TV are the GoDaddy commercials, because not even a thousand monkeys on a thousand tabs of acid with their brains set on shuffle could come up with as strange a combination of “hot-chick” spokespeople as Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser. Tim and Eric could huff ether-soaked rags for a week straight and not achieve that level of pure randomness.

Anyway, plenty of movies got in on the commercial action, including The Dictator, Act of Valor, The Avengers, GI Joe 2, John Carter, and Battleship. You can see all their spots here, and not on other sites, which I’ve never read, but I hear are for dong punchers.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people told me about this new Red Tails commercial, but I rarely watch commercials because I have a DVR and don’t live in a cave watching network TV over the air while I cook hunks of coon meat on a fire made of bear poop. Luckily, I was able to find it on YouTube like a human being. Mind you, this is a film George Lucas is producing about the Tuskeegee Airmen, a squadron of black fighter pilots during World War II, about whom a perfectly passable film was already made back in 1995. Judging by this commercial, it seems that the plan is to market it not only as a life-affirming period piece about racial progress (as in the original trailer below), but as an ultra-modern, action-packed thrill flight. At least, that’s my explanation for why it sounds like two Transformers buttf*cking now, what’s yours?

SHOOT HIM DOWN, MIKE! THAT'S THE GERMAN WHO MOLESTED YOU! /Wire joke

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of stuff written about Avatar’s budget this week.  The New York Times made the eyebrow-raising assertion that the budget was $500 million when you factor in marketing. Then David Poland said it wasn’t, and CHUD said it was again, and I decided that’s a lot of reading for something no one knows for sure that I don’t care that much about. Kind of like religion.

But then I found this new Avatar ad created especially for Nickelodeon.  It clearly tries to sell the film more as a family adventure (like, say, Fern Gully…) than the game-changing science fiction revolution which will change Coke to Pepsi, find your car keys, and make God look like a child pornographer that it is.  And that voice over… isn’t that Don LaFontaine?  He died in 2008, but that voice is either him or someone doing a very good impression of him.  I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but I think it’s pretty clear that Avatar is so good that it brought Don LaFontaine back to life.  James Cameron is truly a visionary.
Read the rest of this entry »

I hope they saved some jokes for the film, because there’s a crapload of new footage in these three new TV spots from Sacha Baron von Cohen’s Brüno movie.  I know a lot the commenters here are Brüno haters, but if the line (at the 0:14 mark) “Your king Osama look like a kind of dirty wizard, or a homeless Santa” didn’t at least make you smile, you’re probably a terrorist.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been three months since the trailer for Funny People came out, but these three new TV spots should refresh your memory.  It’s Judd Apatow’s third movie as a director, and Adam Sandler’s first movie since Punch Drunk Love that doesn’t look like the brainchild of an Eastern bloc immigrant who just learned English last week (“He ees hair dresser, but also Jew, spy, and sex macheen. Ees funny, no?”).  Anyway, I actually like the commercials more than the trailer, probably because they focus more on the Adam-Sandler-making-fun-of-himself angle than the guy-getting-cancer angle.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have high hopes for this, but in the end I’ll be happy if Sandler doesn’t talk in a funny voice the whole movie.
Read the rest of this entry »