Robert Rodriguez and Blackberry, coffee cups, and some summer movietts

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I haven’t posted in awhile, I sort of got lost in Summer Chaos. The post below is one I started in May, so I do not remember how I was going to fit in coffee cups, however, it is still current – only because it isn’t really topical – and still fun (at least for me).

Yesterday, a Blackberry Ad showed up on a webpage I was looking at.

As an aside, I find it endlessly fascinating what shows up in the  for rent areas of a webpage I am looking at. Now that Canon has a new EOS 5D3, I want to see if I can get a EOS5D2 cheaper, so I go to Amazon – No! – but 5D2’s follow me around for a week. I click on a picture of a very young woman on the left side of The Telegraph F1 page and women in bikinis stalk me for weeks. End side.

Back at the Blackberry ad, I noticed that it was directed by Robert Rodriguez – who I have liked since I first saw El Mariachi in 1992 – and decided to watch it. It was too long IMHO and I moved on but it got me thinking about famous directors making ads. I knew that alot of directors started their careers by making ads, but it never occurred to me that they often went the other way. They do, however, and these mini-movies are a great way to sample different director’s styles.

After he made Blade Runner, Apple hired director Ridley Scott to help launch their new product – the Apple Macintosh – and it became one of the most famous ads, ever.

If you want, Quirkiness, hire Wes Anderson. Add Jason Schwartzman. Throw in a Wilson brother and an obscure indie track and you’ve got your next Wes Anderson movie.

Why anybody would hire famed cinematic nutjob Terry Gilliam to shoot an ad is another matter. The ad in question is typical Gilliam, a dystopian tourney aboard a disused tanker.

Lastly and one of the best, directed by Michael Mann, is Lucky Star. It is 150 seconds of fakery. Not unusual for a commercial, but this one purports to be something entirely different. Shot as a trailer, it stars Benicio Del Toro as a fellow for whom luck comes naturally. He quickly attracts the interest of the US government, which gives him ample opportunity to outrun them in his sexy new Mercedes SL500.

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