Last Autumn Mary HK Choi’s skank boots started bleeding into my beloved Football. Now they are showing up in my Olympics coverage. Here is figure skater Joannie Rochette speaking with Bob Costas in a paid of swashbuckling skank boots. LOOK OUT BOB SHE’S GOING TO BOARD YOU!
Here’s Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl in the upcoming film Killers (June 2010). That sure looks like a Mac, no?
Oh, THERE YOU ARE SILLY!
You know that scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button where Ben and the girl realize they are at that very second the same age so they take a moment and are all “we’re passing each other exactly right now.” *MEANINGFUL PAUSE*
Well, if you are a 30-something year old father not totally devoted to fitness but also not a slob, there is a moment when your child is about 13 months and you look at his/her body and then at yours and you realize…. *MEANINGFUL PAUSE*
National Public Radio (90.7 in Wisconsin; <3) carried a round-table discussion with scientists on promoting reliable science and technology news? One subject was how scientists could “spice up screenplays with science.”
The scientists recognized the idea of “product placement” as a powerful force. And some argued that there should eb an effort for “reality-based science” to be the “product”:
“Well, we actually recognize the power of Hollywood to inspire people, to inspire imaginations. When I was working as a journalist, I always would talk to scientists about what made them want to become a scientist. And invariably it would be a book they read, a movie they saw, or someone they met, but in general it was this entertainment industry.
It has the power to reach people with a very strong, inspiring message and it can get across very broad, general messages about, you know, the good or bad of science. And so this is a way of doing that by essentially finding a way to get entertainment people and scientists in a room together and talking.”
The panel discussed very specifically how it could work:
“It’s good when it’s done well. For many, many years I was on and still am - on advisory boards to Hollywood, and I keep trying to tell them that it’s not so much your job to tell the science story, but to tell the science process, because that’s not where people are going to get their science information, so you need an accurate thing.”
With some amusing anecdotes, speaking of The Day After Tomorrow:
“…big special effects. One of the things that our other speaker, Sid Perkowitz, brought up during our session was, okay, yeah, the science was ridiculous in terms of the time scales on which it happened, but it did have a measurable impact on people’s attitude towards climate change. People came out of there with a sense of immediacy and urgency that they did not get had they happen to see “Inconvenient Truth.”
Plus, it has scientists getting emotional about climate change deniers. Something you don’t always se. It is as enjoyable as it sounds:
“I completely agree and I got to put down the blogosphere. The blogosphere is one of the worst places to go for information, because, unlike Paul and others, most public people are not going to spend three hours a day doing this. We really need to reestablish the mainstream media in putting some specialists back in who can smell the north end of a southbound horse, because most general assignment reporters can’t and certainly their editors can’t.”
Listen to the whole wonderful thing.
In a look at 2010 Apple product placement, I noted that the first Toy Story 3 trailer passed on an Apple placement. But in the latest trailer it looks like Pixar has indeed placed a Mac. The logo is conveniently covered with stickies but one look at the upper left of the screen confirms it’s a Mac.
Nothing endorses a place like a bunch of famous people who could not even be bothered to go to the place and instead are standing in front of green screen images of said place.
Who would have thought Law Abiding Citizen would torture us with gruesome murders and Apple product placement. From iPods to Macs, Apple was everywhere. And the nonsensical premise that city district attorneys use Macbook Pros was about par with the rest of the film’s plot
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