Boards
The H&M Ad: When policy brutality is good?
I wrote this over at ISD but I want to share it with you people. I want to finde others with whom I can share my pain:
This commercial assaulted our eyes and our ears last night when we went to see Serenity (if you liked Buffy you'll love it, I reckon). It lasts for, well, ages. It feels like your life is being torn from you, agonising minute after agonising minute, for half an hour, though in fact it's probably a mere five minutes in length.
The premise is one of Romeo & Juliet, though in fact it's really West Side Story in the style of the fantastic Baz Luhrmann take they are using. The whole thing takes place in a long flashback just after 'Romeo' is gunned down in a gangland drive by after texting 'Juliet' to come out and meet him. Mary J. Bilge sings some piece of shit at the ball where they meet (everyone wearing H&M clothes presumably) and then her piece keeps going through a bunch of other flashbacks that show off as many pieces of clothes as possible, including lots of washboard stomachs and perfect dancing.
I am informed that Juliet is played by American Idol winner Tamayra Gray. And suddenly she takes up the singing, or rather over the top extended wailing, each word covering 320 separate semi-tones in true R'n'B Diva style. As she gnashes teeth and gets in a total emotional hell about how he'll always love her (posthumously, obviously, which isn't really all that hard, is it?) a large crowd of gangbangers and police gather round.
Finally, as your head threatens to explode like a sequence from Scanners, she picks up his phone (the one that's been lying on the ground the whole time in plain view) and holds it up, whereupon a cop shoots her in the face and the audience breathes a collective "Thank fuck". There's clearly a time and a place for the police to mistake an everyday object for a gun in their zeal to combat wrongdoers, and this was it.
So there you have it: gangland shootings given the gloss of a hollywood film in order to sell a new line of jeans in a shop that specialises in cheap, fun, tat. How wonderful.
If this piece of excrement ever appears before a film you're about to watch you can nip down to the toilets for a good dump, safe in the knowledge you are producing something far more worthwhile than H&M have done...
This commercial assaulted our eyes and our ears last night when we went to see Serenity (if you liked Buffy you'll love it, I reckon). It lasts for, well, ages. It feels like your life is being torn from you, agonising minute after agonising minute, for half an hour, though in fact it's probably a mere five minutes in length.
The premise is one of Romeo & Juliet, though in fact it's really West Side Story in the style of the fantastic Baz Luhrmann take they are using. The whole thing takes place in a long flashback just after 'Romeo' is gunned down in a gangland drive by after texting 'Juliet' to come out and meet him. Mary J. Bilge sings some piece of shit at the ball where they meet (everyone wearing H&M clothes presumably) and then her piece keeps going through a bunch of other flashbacks that show off as many pieces of clothes as possible, including lots of washboard stomachs and perfect dancing.
I am informed that Juliet is played by American Idol winner Tamayra Gray. And suddenly she takes up the singing, or rather over the top extended wailing, each word covering 320 separate semi-tones in true R'n'B Diva style. As she gnashes teeth and gets in a total emotional hell about how he'll always love her (posthumously, obviously, which isn't really all that hard, is it?) a large crowd of gangbangers and police gather round.
Finally, as your head threatens to explode like a sequence from Scanners, she picks up his phone (the one that's been lying on the ground the whole time in plain view) and holds it up, whereupon a cop shoots her in the face and the audience breathes a collective "Thank fuck". There's clearly a time and a place for the police to mistake an everyday object for a gun in their zeal to combat wrongdoers, and this was it.
So there you have it: gangland shootings given the gloss of a hollywood film in order to sell a new line of jeans in a shop that specialises in cheap, fun, tat. How wonderful.
If this piece of excrement ever appears before a film you're about to watch you can nip down to the toilets for a good dump, safe in the knowledge you are producing something far more worthwhile than H&M have done...