Just a brief note to say, if you’re still looking for strange gift ideas for sticky folks on your list, here’s some stuff from my friends and colleagues that might be off your usual radar, but which might nonetheless strike a chord! Check ’em out and see what they got.
It’s strange how sometimes commercials can expand on your experience of your favorite film franchises. I remember seeing a Star Wars-themed Energizer battery commercial in 1994 and freaking out. It had new footage of Darth Vader.
The recent DirecTV campaign (called “Fourth Wall”) that recreatespopularscenesfrommovies tried for the same reaction, but doesn’t get much farther than “Hey, look at that.” The message of the commercials — DirectTV is in HD? has a bunch of channels? is generally good? — isn’t relevant to the gimmick. Still, it was a neat idea.
Another “recreation” that comes to mind is this 2006 Gatorade commercial, which recreated famous sports moments gone wrong to convey the precision of Gatorade’s…lab-coated researchers with beakers and pipettes? To tell me that every gram of salt in a Gatorade is measured out by a person wearing safety goggles? It’s so vague that I remembered the concept of the commercial five years later, but not the advertiser. I thought it had been a Nike spot.
Well, this is kind of cheesy, but kind of cool too. Christopher Lloyd and the Back to the Future brand have been doing commercials for the Argentine electronics chain Garbarino. Here’s the first:
The best thing, with this second spot in particular, is how on-message the premise is. Doc Brown, an inventor, goes into the future and is wowed by all the amazing electronics he finds. I don’t know if Garbarino is any better or worse than any other electronics chain — I can see a campaign like this being done in America for a big chain like Best Buy or Radio Shack, and essentially lying about how amazing those stores are — but it’s cute. And we get to see my friend Doc on screen again! Hooray!
Perhaps you know Nicholas Gurewitch from his seminal comic strip The Perry Bible Fellowship, or perhaps you know him from the interview I conducted with him in The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack which you got without knowing about him because you are a me completist. Regardless, he is a singular talent and, in addition to his work in comics, has long nurtured a filmmaking impulse as well.
Trails of Tarnation is his surrealist Western. Shot on film and using handmade sets, Nick’s work has an incredible, tactile aesthetic that’s becoming uncommon in cinema, and it’s remarkable to behold. Here is Trails of Tarnation Episode 3, “Ants!”
With reference to my “True Stuff from Old Books”entries on humanity’s pervasive fear of the new and unfamiliar, Nealie from Michigan brought this video to my attention. It’s a clip from the Norwegian show “Øystein og jeg” in which a monk has to deal with the most newfangled invention of all: a book!
