Monday, September 05, 2005
I'd Like to Buy the World a Blunt Instrument
Saw Transporter 2 this afternoon. It was preposterous and obviously great fun for everyone involved, including me. Three stars.
The only truly distasteful part of the movie was the commercials that played before it; specifically, that stupid Coke commercial ("Everybody Chill," I think it's called) where a bunch of apparently unemployed and meticulously multi-ethnic twenty-somethings gather on a rooftop in a major metropolitan center and stare hopefully (as in, full of hope, with hope permeating their bodies) in the same direction, which I take to be southeast. They are facing the same way, I suppose, in order to avoid the hypnotic slack-jawed gaze of their leader, who's plucking and strumming a Gibson dobro in a way that would have made Robert Johnson demand his soul back, if he'd ever played that way, while half singing/half rapping the modern, updated version of "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke." The new version struggles mightily not to be as sappy and glassy-eyed as the original; it wants street cred, it's trying to be real, yo. It fails. "It's a simple thing/What the world wants today/Coca-Cola," the chorus of underachieving grungesters avers, while the dobro-strummer emits the whitest "Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' 'bout" you've ever heard.
It's a bad sign for your peace/love/understanding/merchandising song when it makes you want to take the dobro away from the singer and beat him to death with it.
And once he's dead, you'll turn to his astonished congregation and proclaim, "You are free now! I have freed you from the satanic influence of this merchandising svengali, this false rooftop messiah! Run! Run, now! Run home, and take showers!"
And what does Coke care for world peace and understanding? Well, I suppose it is easier to drink their products in a peaceful environment. I've never popped the tab on a Sprite while under machine-gun fire, but I can see how it would present its unique complications.
The really horrible thing is that, at some point tomorrow, I will probably drink a Coke. And Coke's marketing department will assume it's because of, rather than despite, their rooftop peace-cultists.
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The only truly distasteful part of the movie was the commercials that played before it; specifically, that stupid Coke commercial ("Everybody Chill," I think it's called) where a bunch of apparently unemployed and meticulously multi-ethnic twenty-somethings gather on a rooftop in a major metropolitan center and stare hopefully (as in, full of hope, with hope permeating their bodies) in the same direction, which I take to be southeast. They are facing the same way, I suppose, in order to avoid the hypnotic slack-jawed gaze of their leader, who's plucking and strumming a Gibson dobro in a way that would have made Robert Johnson demand his soul back, if he'd ever played that way, while half singing/half rapping the modern, updated version of "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke." The new version struggles mightily not to be as sappy and glassy-eyed as the original; it wants street cred, it's trying to be real, yo. It fails. "It's a simple thing/What the world wants today/Coca-Cola," the chorus of underachieving grungesters avers, while the dobro-strummer emits the whitest "Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' 'bout" you've ever heard.
It's a bad sign for your peace/love/understanding/merchandising song when it makes you want to take the dobro away from the singer and beat him to death with it.
And once he's dead, you'll turn to his astonished congregation and proclaim, "You are free now! I have freed you from the satanic influence of this merchandising svengali, this false rooftop messiah! Run! Run, now! Run home, and take showers!"
And what does Coke care for world peace and understanding? Well, I suppose it is easier to drink their products in a peaceful environment. I've never popped the tab on a Sprite while under machine-gun fire, but I can see how it would present its unique complications.
The really horrible thing is that, at some point tomorrow, I will probably drink a Coke. And Coke's marketing department will assume it's because of, rather than despite, their rooftop peace-cultists.
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