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BMW ad's
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| dallastar |
they are all short films!
Ii especially like the one titled STAR it has Madonna in it - trully classic material here - one of them won an oscar for best short!
anyways enjoy - go to the BMv website and search for the ads!
www.bmw.com
:p
| quote: | ONLINE FILMS.
Directors For Hire
by Jesse Lichtenstein
Only at TNR Online | Post date 08.14.01
"The Hire" series, playing at www.bmwfilms.com
Advertainment is what they're calling it. Whatever the world loses when programming and product wed, it tends to gain a new word as compensation. (How would we describe our insomniac nights if there were no word for infomercial?) In case you've missed the TV ads, press releases, and scrutiny in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere, BMW has sponsored "an unprecedented Internet film series featuring an A-list roster of Hollywood heavyweights." The first short film made its debut in April at www.bmwfilms.com, and four others have followed. Each is under ten minutes long, each stars a character known as the Driver and a late-model BMW, and each features fancy wheelwork that showcases the cars' many qualities. Is this as hideous as it sounds?
Few cineastes would normally look up from their morning coffee at the announcement of a new BMW Internet marketing campaign. But BMW's boast is not idle, if not entirely accurate, either. This really is an A-list roster of Hollywood heavyweights: John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie. The two slight exceptions are even more encouraging: Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director of last year's Oscar-nominated Amores Perros, (an effort that likely has catapulted him onto the A-List), and Hong Kong original Wong Kar-Wai. For the most part, these are people who, when they get behind the camera, even to film their daughter's fifth birthday party, you want to see what they come up with.
Bavarian Motor Werks must know this--it paid for the names, and consequently our attention. That's good advertising, even if one may be permitted to question the demographic overlap between buyers of new BMWs and watchers of five-minute Internet films. (Maybe we will buy BMW key chains.) In any case, the BMW shorts raise the question of where this advertainment is taking us. And of course there's the question of the films themselves.
ne of the inspirations for this series was John Frankenheimer's 1998 film Ronin. It's easy to see why. Ronin, once you cut through the "samurai without a master" silliness of the title, is about people with guns driving cars very fast. Its two principal car chases are among the finest non-comedic examples in movie history (Frankenheimer plays it very straight: those poor Peugeot drivers who swerve to avoid Robert DeNiro are generally too busy hemorrhaging to wave their fists in laughable French indignation). Since Frankenheimer had no problem with product placement then (one of his characters specifically asks to drive an Audi S8) and since some of the movie's most convincing vocalizations belong to maxed-out engines and complaining tires, it comes as no surprise that he agreed to direct a short film starring a well known four-wheeled German.
In "Ambush," the Driver (played in all films by the ascendant British actor Clive Owen) is ferrying a mousy passenger along a highway when masked gunmen in a big blue van pull alongside and demand that he pull over. It seems the passenger has some valuable merchandise that the gunmen require. The passenger begs the Driver not to acquiesce, and so a breathless mini-Ronin chase ensues. Inevitably, the vehicles come across midnight roadwork and the odd Caterpillar left carelessly in the middle of the road. The BMW handles like a dream! Safely through, it skids to a halt on the roadside so the Driver can watch the hapless villains attempt to negotiate the obstacle course. They cannot, and perish in flames. The moral: A shiny new BMW handles better than a twenty-year-old blue van.
Ang Lee fares better with "Chosen." The Driver picks up a young Tibetan on an ill-lit pier--from his bearing and his robes we are to assume the boy is some sort of fugitive Lama--and takes him to a safehouse. Before he can go anywhere, though, the Driver must evade three cars full of gun-toting baddies. Frankenheimer treats the chase as a race; Lee treats his as a dance. The string section kicks in and the cars weave round each other in a brief, captivating pas de quatre. Too soon, this elegance ends in a blind alley, from which the Driver and his BMW must extract themselves by overpowering a hapless Mercedes-Benz. (No doubt Mercedes will exact its revenge in a future Francis Ford Coppola Internet-film trilogy.) The movie has a cute/clever ending, guessable but palatable. Ang Lee, the Hollywood Shape Shifter who seems equally at home in Regency England, 1970s New England, and dynastic China, can add automobile advertainment to his list of filmic fluencies. And quickly move on.
Anyone who saw last year's In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai's vivid, tantalizing, deeply frustrating film about inaction and checked desires, can be forgiven for hoping here for a burst of the stylized violence that carried Fallen Angels (1995), or for the humor of that film and Chungking Express (1994). No such luck. Wong is, to me, the least plausible of these five directors. If In the Mood for Love sits at one end of the film spectrum, car commercials sit pretty near the other. For "The Follow," Wong engages the services of Forest Whitaker, heavenly Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima, and Mickey Rourke, who looks like hell. The Driver has been hired to follow a movie star's beautiful wife, and not surprisingly he soon must choose between his employer and his quarry. There is little that visually marks "The Follow" as a Wong Kar-Wai film; emotionally, we can perhaps find a shared thread: the sympathetic, nearly motionless scene in an airport bar that recalls the near misses and quiet, unresolved amorous tensions of his feature films. Wong gets focussed performances from Owen and Whitaker, but they're all but buried by the Driver's final voiceover slogan: "There's always something waiting at the end of the road. If you're not willing to see what it is, you probably shouldn't be out there in the first place." (Translation: Have you considered a BMW?)
hould Madonna be allowed in front of a camera without a headset mic and a backing band? If, somewhere in the world, this debate rages on, Guy Ritchie's "Star" will have to be counted as hard evidence for the nays. Her role as a fuming, megalomaniacal pop diva on the way to a performance would seem to fall within her range. Alas, the veteran of the stage and more than ten feature films here is unable to convincingly portray a harridan for five minutes. Maybe this speaks well for Madonna's personality, but it somewhat cramps her director-husband's style. Perhaps because there is no danger, no gunplay, no risk of life or limb or falling in love, "Star" comes across as the lightweight of the five films. On the other hand, Ritchie's film may be the most honest about this whole project. It delivers the eager-to-please, up-tempo good humor of a commercial, and it employs the instantly recognizable stock characters of that form. The arrogant starlet gets her comeuppance, the Driver gets a well-deserved joyride, and the director gets a nod and a wink at car-chase cliches of comedies past.
The final film, recently released, is Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Powder Keg." Harvey Jacobs (played by Stellan Skarsgard) is a grizzled Times war photographer who has just captured a paramilitary massacre in a vague Latin American locale on film. When he's shot and wounded trying to leave the scene, the U.N. sends the Driver and a new BMW SUV to find Jacobs and get him across the border to safety. Men with guns are in pursuit and Jacobs is bleeding badly as the Beemer wends its way through the impoverished landscape. During the ride, Jacobs shares his cynicism and despair about his life's work with the Driver, who has lost most of the preternatural cool he exuded in previous episodes: he is desperate to save this dying man whom he clearly admires. "Powder Keg" is longer and more ambitious than the rest of "The Hire" films, but Iñarritu burdens its eight-minute frame with a little too much thematic weight: the ethics of documentary journalism, the myopia and hypocrisy of the First World's drug war on the Third, the life sacrifices required by a man's dedication to his art, the bond between mother and son, the gift of sight. And, of course, a healthy ration of bullet-riddled car chases. Nonetheless, the film is unquestionably the most visually accomplished of the five--shot in high contrast on 16mm, frenetically edited, with mesmerizing sequences of swirling vantage points. And it is impossible not to take some measure of delight in the images of the pristine, $40,000 sports utility vehicle cruising through scenes of political oppression and abject, mud-soaked poverty. These are not the juxtapositions we expect to find in advertisements for luxury goods.
o what's the sensible reaction to this? One could express outrage, mutter about selling out, hurl stones across the age-old, chimerical divide between art and sponsorship. But no one seems to be doing this. The fact is, even A-list directors have downtime between projects, and BMW offered these five a quickie, a budget, and a chance to work within a new set of constraints. How great is the difference anyway between a movie made for a studio that dictates casting decisions, product placement, and final cut, and a move made for a car company that requires a car and a Driver? For all we know, (and according to the producers' claims) the level of creative freedom granted the directors of "The Hire" was far above what they might expect from Hollywood.
If the prospect of Wong Kar-Wai making car company movies, or shaving cream company movies, or real estate company movies, seems less demoralizing than it ought to, perhaps it is because the entire debate about selling out seems terribly moot, pointless, and long-ago lost. And, frankly, anyone who has witnessed the Internet film boom of a year ago contract into a barely audible whimper--and who has taken stock of the general quality of Internet films today--is bound to wonder if this sort of money influx is a necessary, if invasive, life support. The BMW project brings a new and broader audience to a medium that is clearly struggling. It is hard to argue that this remedy--if that is what it proves to be--is worse than the disease. Money can't buy a purist's love, but it can buy attention, proven talent, and better-looking films--just as it can buy new BMWs, or BMW key chains.
But this is just the beginning for advertainment. The producers of "The Hire" have declared it an advertising success, and if other companies are willing to throw around the kind of money BMW did on this project--it's been hinted that the costs were on par with those of a high-end TV commercial ($400,000 per thirty seconds)--more big-name artists will come to the party. (Say, Lars von Trier, Jane Campion, and M. Night Shyamalan present the adventures of the Shaver and his trusty Gillette Mach 3.) Internet film, of course, is new enough that it is hard to insist on many distinctions as sacred. Perhaps when the Driver's star-powered advertainment progeny establish themselves as content on movie channels and in the multiplex--and the former is already imminent--the protests will begin. Perhaps.
JESSE LICHTENSTEIN writes frequently about Internet films for TNR Online.
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here bmw films :tongue2 :tongue2 :tongue2 :tongue2 |
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| DannyO |
| These have been around for ages, but yea there damn good, especially the Star one. |
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| Trance Nutter |
They have been around for ages, but that doesn't mean they're not good!
Star is great "ooooooooohhhhhhhhhh...........lets try again!". Beat the Devil is not bad too, funny. |
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