Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!

18 Comments

• Oliver_C says:

  March 12, 2013 at 10:03 am

  “Refreshes the parts [of the screen] oth­er beers can­not reach”

• Tom says:

  March 12, 2013 at 10:10 am

  Product place­ment often feels kind of lazy to me. I get that Heineken just wants their brand asso­ci­ated with Bond and for it to appear in the film as often as pos­sible, but isn’t there a dif­fer­ence between doing that and actu­ally con­vin­cing people to buy and use your product? I mean, take the second and third shots above. That’s from the point in the movie where Bond is at his low­est. He’s a wreck, and he’s drink­ing Heineken. Not very con­vin­cing as advert­ising. Now, I don’t think any­one is going to watch those scenes and sud­denly decide NOT to drink Heineken because they want to avoid a sim­il­ar situ­ation, but it’s quite a long way from Connery driv­ing an Aston-Martin and look­ing cool while doing it. It’s that kind of aspir­a­tion­al use of a product that’s miss­ing in Skyfall and most mod­ern product place­ment, which is why it just seems like a waste of money on Heineken’s part.

• Victor Morton says:

  March 12, 2013 at 5:20 pm

  Yeah, but look at that body he has and see the chick he’s scor­ing with. Also, he’s … star­ing down … scor­pi­ons. James Bond rules! Gimme a Heineken!!

• Grant L says:

  March 12, 2013 at 5:21 pm

  How funny – brings togeth­er the bits of a great pan­el car­toon I saw back in the late 80s: “Dennis Hopper as James Bond – ‘Heineken! Fuck that shit! Martini! Shaken! Not! Stirred!!”

• Josh Z says:

  March 12, 2013 at 7:36 pm

  The Heineken in this has got noth­ing on the out-of-control Sony product place­ment in Casino Royale. In that movie, Bond watches Sony DVD-Roms on his Sony Blu-ray play­er while using his Sony Vaio laptop, mak­ing a call on his Sony Ericsson cell phone, and tak­ing pho­tos with a Sony digit­al cam­era. And I’m not exag­ger­at­ing any of that.

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  March 12, 2013 at 7:56 pm

  The product place­ment I can nev­er for­give is the Bulgari watch in MINORITY REPORT. Every time Cruise looks at it, I think “At what point in the future does Bulgari get out of the lux­ury goods mar­ket and start man­u­fac­tur­ing police-issue equip­ment? And why?” And then that story starts seem­ing way more inter­est­ing than the one I’m watching.

• Grant L says:

  March 12, 2013 at 9:27 pm

  Besides the Cheerios box in Superman the first movie I can remem­ber where the audi­ence aud­ibly com­men­ted on the blatant and pro­fuse place­ments was Moonraker.

• Lex says:

  March 13, 2013 at 6:38 am

  Denzel spends about 80% of FLIGHT lug­ging around a damp 12-pack of THE KING OF BEERS, and you best believe I went out and bought a 12-er of Budweiser like 15 minutes after it was over and got lit the fuck up. There’s no such thing as mak­ing drink­ing look bad.
  Didn’t Truffaut say that NO MOVIE COULD BE ANTI-WAR because it always looks so fuck­ing awe­some on film? Similarly, any allegedly ANTI-DRINKING MOVIE only ever serves to make me prouder to be a drunk. Shit, they gave WAINGRO a Bud long­neck in HEAT and I still think of that every time I buy it in six-pack bottle form.

• Tom says:

  March 13, 2013 at 8:52 am

  I’m also reminded of CAST AWAY, which should have been sub­titled “Brought to you by FedEx,” des­pite the fact that the whole plot hinges on the crash of a FedEx plane due to improp­erly handled haz­ard­ous material.

• Jeff McMahon says:

  March 13, 2013 at 1:36 pm

  Some people are more sus­cept­ible to a movie’s mar­ket­ing than oth­ers. It’s not neces­sar­ily about ‘selling’ to a mar­ket that would­n’t be buy­ing oth­er­wise, it’s get­ting people like Lex to just buy more.

• Not David Bordwell says:

  March 13, 2013 at 7:48 pm

  Okay, I always thought it was Sam Fuller who said that thing about war movies… and then I always imme­di­ately flash to Lee Marvin’s “Poussez, poussez” scene in THE BIG RED ONE.
  If it was­n’t Fuller, and Lex is right about Truffaut, I’d like to be straightened out on this. This should be the right place for that.

• Not David Bordwell says:

  March 13, 2013 at 7:51 pm

  Oh, and apro­pos the theme of the thread:
  The Heineken place­ment in SKYFALL can­not pos­sibly be MORE obnox­ious than the god­damned TV spots with Daniel Craig, or that whole cam­paign in general.

• I.B. says:

  March 13, 2013 at 8:55 pm

  @Lex: “Similarly, any allegedly ANTI-DRINKING MOVIE only ever serves to make me prouder to be a drunk.”
  Not (per se) an anti-drinking movie, but my ante-ante-ante-antepenultimate relapse into the allures of Eristoff would have been delayed for at least a couple of days had I not seen Freddie Quell/Joaquin Phoenix in THE MASTER. When most people seem to go “how can he drink tor­pedo fuel!” or “ew! Lysol!”, I go “well… you know, I’d like to have a taste of that”.
  I’ve nev­er fired a hand­gun, but no Bond movie is going to con­vince me to ditch a Glock for an old Walther.

• Tom Russell says:

  March 13, 2013 at 10:58 pm

  Not David, the quote is most fre­quently attrib­uted to Truffaut, though I’ve nev­er seen a dir­ect quote, just para­phrases by oth­ers (such as Ebert).

• tvc says:

  March 16, 2013 at 9:10 am

  There’s also the scene where Rory Kinnear (Tanner) drinks a Heineken, but you don’t actu­ally see the logo. It’s when he and Q lure Silva to Scotland.
  But ser­i­ously, this is noth­ing com­pared to Casino Royale or Moonraker. It’s nev­er dis­tract­ing. Imagine how much advert­is­ment they could’ve thrown at the Shanghai Silhouette fight scene.

• Petey says:

  March 16, 2013 at 11:09 am

  Speaking of Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!, where’s our Korine-fest review?
  We pay you good money for this blog, Glenn, and we demand value.

• george says:

  March 18, 2013 at 8:15 pm

  Where’s the “Spring Breakers” review? That’s what we want!

• BeaGomez says:

  March 21, 2013 at 2:23 pm

  This is pea­nuts com­pared to every Mac in every movie. You’d think that film­makers could devise a new brand.