10 years of Flick Filosopher: what would Jesus buy?
Withdrawing from the Christmas shopping craze -- which my family did last year, to the general relief of all -- has made the holiday season so much more pleasant and relaxing. And it makes witnessing the orgy of consumerism that grips the month of December all the more pitiful to watch. From my review of Jingle All the Way:
Jingle All the Way doesn't quite send up the kind of mass insanity that grips parents at Christmastime so much as celebrate it. Jamie, at eight or whatever he is, is already the consummate consumer, rising in the morning from his TurboMan-sheeted bed (in which he was reading a TurboMan comic book) in his TurboMan-wallpapered room to munch TurboMan cereal while watching TurboMan on TV. A huge chunk of the film, rather appropriately, takes place at the Mall of America, a veritable cathedral to gimme. The postman Myron Larabee (Sinbad), whom Howard keeps butting heads with over TurboMan dolls, is made to look like an idiot for expressing anti-consumerist 'tude, as if fighting over toys the little brats are gonna get bored with in a month's time is not only normal behavior but something to be lauded. Is Jingle All the Way true to life? You bet. That's the most depressing thing about it.
• review of Jingle All the Way, posted 12.06.99
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comments
posted by Graham Deans Williamson (Tue Dec 19 06, 12:48PM)
Actually, I think the most depressing thing about it now is realising that if Jingle All The Way was made now, they wouldn't even bother making up a fictional toy - they'd just use a real toy and say the product placement was "ironic". I don't believe that movies necessarily do get worse and worse every year, but some things about them certainly do. Product placement is one of them.
posted by j4yx0r (Tue Dec 19 06, 6:11PM)
I don't necessarily agree that product placement in film is getting worse. In fact, I'd argue that this decade has somewhat improved on blatant shove-it-down-your-throat advertising in film. Have a look at Back to the Future II, ET, Cobra, The Goonies -- hell, Wizard was a feature length Nintendo commercial!
Product placement has and will always exist and there's really nothing wrong with that in and of itself. In my heart of hearts, I believe that a Baby Ruth candy bar is the ultimate diplomatic tool and I'm perfectly okay with that. What matters is whether or not the placement makes sense and is tastefully (no pun) used. We eat Reese's Pieces and drink Pepsi and there's nothing wrong with characters in a film doing the same. If we saw some kind of made-up brand on screen, it would likely be even more distracting. If the filmmakers are allowing a shot to linger too long on the Pepsi logo or the dialog starts to sound like a product testimonial, this is crappy filmmaking and the movie likely has more problems than its shameless pimping.
As for how this relates to Jingle All the Way, that film wouldn't and couldn't be made with a real product in mind. Satire for the masses works because most people can laugh at themselves... but only if they can feel sufficiently distanced from what they're laughing at. People need to be able to say, "At least I'm not that bad." They can do that when points are exaggerated to an extreme and TurboMan is a device for that exaggeration. If the film replaced TurboMan with Tickle-me-Elmo the it might hit a little too close to home with some people and filmmakers would not want to alienate their audience in that way.
~j