As the houselights were dimming before the THUMBSUCKER and SERENITY screenings, I felt obliged to whisper a warning to my friends that the worst part of the show would be hitting them in just a minute - the pre-show commercial for Jaguar - "Gorgeous." While I don't WISH the experience on any of you, I do hope you end up seeing it, cuz that will mean that you were at the Brattle catching a movie! =)
At the first SERENITY screening on Sunday the commercial's finale prompted a burst of applause and some hooting. =)
The ad is a montage, a frickin long one, of soft-focus glamour-and-money-at-play scenarios mixed in with cool angle shots and close-ups of Jaguar automobiles, and over it all, a man's voice reading what seems to be an open-mic-at-a-coffeehouse-without-irony poem entitled "Gorgeous..."
As he enlightens you on how much Gorgeous doesn't suck...
"Gorgeous never has to apologize..."
"Gorgeous looks great in the morning..."
"Gorgeous trumps... Everything..." *
...in slow motion and something like sepia tones, you see a girl in a bikini running on a beach, a sunglassed smartly dressed woman looking at camera as she passes in her Jaguar convertible, a prettyboy being shoved backward off the edge of something (presumably into a pool, but perhaps into a dry well) by another bikini'd waif...
There's one longer scene within the montage that follows a stylish couple getting out of their Jag in front of their friend's mansion, mounting the stairs, greeted in the foyer by their country club buddies, ushered into the candle-lit dining hall, where they glad-hand, embrace, and cheek-kiss, and then unwind with some wine before dinner, discussing their investments, their new yachts, the quality and quantity of the many souls they've stolen or destroyed that week, before sitting down to dine on peasant. Not pheasant. Peasant.
"Gorgeous...gets in everywhere..." *
Like dirt, or cockroaches? Or like sand on Tatooine?
I've got no bone to pick w Jaguar, the company or their products, and I am definitely pleased to see a high-profile brand choosing to advertise at the Brattle. I just wish they'd had something a little less... "You are my base" to screen, y'know?
I wonder if Jag would have a problem if the Brattle took the same voiceover content, but got someone else to record it for them... William Shatner? Christopher Walken? Stephen Colbert? Eh, just wi$hful thinking. =)
Hrmm... maybe they could add some scratch-on-film or subtitling to the reel to enhance the experience? Cuz that dinner party thing really does look like a scene from one of the BLADE movies or DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, where long-lived evil has gone corporate and well-to-do and gets together every full moon or whatev to drink some blood, eat some employees, and play some Cranium.
I do wonder that I'm totally ignorant of the voiceover being of the work of a celebrated poet. Whatever the source, in combination with the imagery featured in the ad, it just doesn't seem like a best fit for most Brattle screenings, y'know? Although, I suppose there might be a decent case to be made for it being a pretty good palate cleanser.
Time to make the gray-vee...~
Keep on keepin on~
* I'm pretty sure I got the two asterisked lines of the voiceover correct, the other two are half-remembered half-cobbled together, but all in the same blue blooded vein.
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