Cloud City's favorite malt beverage. UPDATED!

I said a few years back that I would start drinking Colt 45 if Billy Dee Williams started appearing in their ads again.

I am typing this while sipping on a can of the stuff because the folks over at Colt 45 apparently realized that Williams is the second greatest pitchman named Billy of all time* and that they really needed to capitalize on their product's connection to his bad self. Not only did they bring him back in ads last year, but they even had his handsome mug gracing the bottles for a few months last year to promote the new campaign. They are using a drawing of Mr. Williams which depicts him as he looked in the 80's, which is a smart move since Williams is currently 73 years old, and based on this photo of him from 2005, he has aged to look like an even older version of Carl Weathers.**

Here is a billboard with the new Billy Dee art on it:

That's a cool drawing, but it doesn't hold a candle to Billy Dee's 80's ads for Colt 45:



Those are some pretty lame punchlines when you think about them, but Williams has the smoothest delivery and sells the shit out of those punchlines so he not only makes them passable, he makes them awesome. Its like in the mediocre remake of Shaft when Samuel L Jackson tells a girl, "its my duty to please your booty." Which would be the worst line to ever happen in all of filmed entertainment if it was said by Nicolas Cage, but it Samuel L Jackson's hands it turns out, somehow, against all logic to actually sound hip.

When you have Billy Dee Williams pitching your product you don't really need much else. Just point the camera in his general direction, have a lady 'round his arm, have him hold up the can so the audience can read the label, and you are gonna sell a shitload of Colt 45. Colt 45 realized this when they first hired Williams as demonstrated in the TV spot and in this bar mirror from the same campaign***:

For some reason, later on Colt 45 decided to mess with this formula and made the following:



If I saw that exact video as an instillation at the New York Museum of Modern Art I would be much less confused by its content than trying to understand it in the context of a commercial.

The ad, especially the begining, is rediculously avant-garde, and is made even more ridiculous when you consider it is selling malt liquor. The ad that this most reminds me of  is the Michael Bay directed Dunlop Tires commercial I wrote about back in March.

What's weird is we have cans floating out of a fridge and random shots of horses as the video, and the music is ominous and percussion heavy, but the jiggle's lyrics are down right old fashioned. "With A powerful appeal! A taste that is unreal! Its  Colt 45!" sounds more like ad copy that belongs to the era of  slogans like "The pause that refreshes" than in an ad that is so Michael-Bay-Dunlop-Tire-ad-esque.

Williams apparently received criticism for being in ads for alcohol, and he responded to that criticism with a quote that is more bad-ass that Indiana Jones fighting Rowdy Roddy Piper, "I drink, you drink. Hell, if marijuana was legal, I'd appear in a commercial for that too."

Though we sadly have yet to see a Billy Dee ad for weed, he did recently do a fake ad that is easily the funniest thing I have ever seen happen on Jimmy Kimmel Live****:




Footnote(s):

*Rest In Peace Billy Mays.

**Speaking of Carl Weathers, why does he briefly appear at he beginning and end of every Bud Light ad now?  Really. I genuinely have no idea what he is doing there. You see, I don't have ESPN or Versus at my apartment so when I watch sports its at bars on mute. Therefore, I have just seen those ads where Carl Weathers is sitting looking at the camera holding a big book at the beginning and end, but I have never heard the ad's dialogue. Weathers isn't in the rest of the ad, so maybe that book was the story of the ad and he was opening and closing it for you like how Disney movies used to begin and end with a book with the title of the movie on it.

***I like typing the phrase "ad campaign" because it makes me think of British colonial troops lunching a desert campaign which consists of shooting people, but also writing clever slogan and painting them on billboards.

****Though to paraphrase Leatherheads, being the funniest thing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, is kinda like being the world's tallest midget.

At long last the promised Michael Bay ad. UPDATED!

Three posts after I announced I was going to, I've finally gotten around to discussing Michael Bay's one minute magnum opus to his two true loves: Tits and explosions. ("Tits and Explosions" probably would have made a good Frank Zappa song, it would have worked well as a companion piece to his song "Titties and Beer".)

I contend, much to the derision of everyone else I know who has ever seen a movie before, that Michael Bay is actually a good director in his only particular way. He obviously only directs action driven explosathons, and from the little I've seen of his film Pearl Harbor he does drama and history about as well as the folks over at Drunk History, but as long as he sticks with what he knows, I contend movies are better photographed than pretty much any other summer popcorn movie, and astoundingly engaging since they contain stuff like Sean Connery getting into a fight with a moving San Francisco Cable Car, and somehow causing it to roll down a hill sideways and crash into a Ferrari. But don't take my word for it, which this severally shortened version: (yes the clip i found of this 3 minute scene online was a 45 second edit of "the best of this scene", Michael Bay obviously over estimates America's attention spans.)



The clip above shows the difference between Michael Bay and mere mortal directors, most directors would have been satisfied with an AM General Humvee hitting a cable car and causing it to go out of control. Some directors would have ended the scene with the cable car exploding, but only Michael Bay would have the explosion cause the cable car to fly 30 feet into the air for no apparent reason, and then do a barrel roll and land on a Ferrari.

You really can't even fault him for being over the top because he does over the top so often and so well. Case in point: that the scene we just saw actually occurs in the first 15 minutes of The Rock, and everything only gets bigger and more explodey from there.

This whole idea of starting at the total extreme and then escalating nicely encapsulates what is so great about his Victoria's Secret ad that I am actually going to start discussing now. Lets watch it first so we are all on the same page:



This really is the prefect outlet for Michael Bay's directing style. People complain that he cuts to a new shot every 1/4 of a second? Lots of critics complain the shots in his movies are so short it seems like a commercial, but here you can't complain about that because it actually is a commercial. People point out that shots of cleavage gratuitously occupy all the non-explosion portions of his movies? Can't complain here, its an underwear ad, the only way it would not be full of boobs would be if it was directed by the guy who did the Dunlop Tire Ad I showed a few days ago. Then the ad would have just been shots of two midgets dressed as the Red Baron jousting each other whilst riding llamas, and then 2 seconds at the end saying, "Victoria's Secret: We Probably Sell Stuff." And I think we can all agree Michael Bay's approach is easier on the eyes and won't cause you to wake up in the middle of the night screaming.


Even with this being a commercial and with women in underwear being a given, Micheal Bay still managed to ratchet this up several hundred notches above where any other director would have taken it. There are women in underwear getting out of obscenely expensive classic cars in no fewer than three shots; a woman straddling a giant motorcycle, a women being pursued by a helicopter, women walking through a circus with people eating fire, breathing fire, and juggling fire, and hanging from trapezes (strangely enough NOT while on fire); girls throwing knifes at each other; girls looking mistrustfully at a World War II era plane; and a girl climbing up a spiral stair case which leads from nowhere to nowhere in the middle of the desert.

I haven't even brought up yet the Bayiest element of this whole thing, that random shot of the girls posing with a stupidly huge explosion behind them. This part: (in case your mind had been so blown by it that you have forgotten.)


The more stuff created by Michael Bay that I experience the more I think that Verizon commercial I posted before might really be what he is like in real life.

To provide some context I decided go back and look at a few of Michael Bay's old commercials from the early 1990's when he had only made commercials and music videos. Bay actually created the first ever ad for the "got milk?" campaign. Though a commerical more foreshadowing his illustrious explosion and skin filled career which was to come is a Levi's ad he did. Its about two strangers in an elevator together who mutually fantasize spending their whole lives together, but Bay decided what it really needed was the scariest half second shot of a preacher of all time. In this shot the reverend presiding over the couple's wedding in their dream jabs his arms toward the heavens with such seriousness that he seems to be indicating that this wedding will bring down hell fire on all of humanity. This immediately fades to white in the most frightening manner possible. here are two screens shots that do not adequately capture his scariness:





Then in the next shot, instead of candles, their wedding cake cake has the biggest sparklers ever created by god or man. What I'm trying to say here is now I really want Michael Bay to plan my wedding.
Bay: "I envision the church collapsing around you as a herd of wild horses stream through the chapel, the horses will be on fire, and their will be women in corsets riding them, and it will be good!"




(Oh and for those of you who checked out the Got Milk commercial directed by Bay. You might want to watch this pretty funny parody video I found when trying to find the youtube video of the original. Here is the parody. )

This tire ad will garrote your eyeballs

So I've been meaning to write a post about Michael Bay's recent Victoria's Secret commercial, because it really is the ultimate Michael Bay production. It combines his love of explosions and cleavage and shooting everything at sunset without having to worry about annoying things like plot or Shia Labeouf. But that can wait till later, because right now I have to share this other commercial with you, mostly because it's not fair that otherwise I'd be the only one having nightmares about it. I came across it through the fake Michael Bay twitter, which I read, even though as I've said to everyone ever how much I hate twitter. I hate twitter because I really don't care about mass messages from people about what they are up to at the moment, but the fake Michael Bay is not about what anyone is up to, it is one liners about what Michael Bay would be up to right now if he lived his whole life like that Verizon commercial he starred in.



I understand that it's a bit silly of me to condemn all of twitter except for one account, but if other accounts only updated once a week and consisted updates like this: "Take off the brakes and make it a fixed gear. I want this to be the kind of Ferrari that kids in Brooklyn would drive," I would probably change my opinion of twitter.

Now would probably be a good time to get around to the commercial I was going to discuss this entry. The fake Michael Bay linked a commercial accompanied only by the text, "People, listen to me. This is how you sell tires." That really did not prepare me for what was to follow. Although I don't think anything could have prepared me for what was to follow. Just watch (though be warned once you watch this commercial you will be henceforth numb to human emotion.)



Dunlop tires, the official tire of David Lynch's pearl farm, is I assume what they were going for here, since I just re-watched this twice to try to make some sense of it, and the only thing I noticed, other than the fact that I was screaming in horror the whole time I watched it, was that there are all those silver balls everywhere, and at one point the scary painted dudes are grasping along in a body of water. So I'm going to go with a "these are all employees at David Lynch's pearl farm" theory, and assume that's him in the black sports car coming to check up on his workers.

I'm really not sure how this seemed like a good way to sell tires at any step of the creative process. My Dad and I always make fun of those Pontiac commercials where it shows the car doing doughnuts through the desert the whole time, because the ads are basically admitting, "there is no reason to buy this car unless your daily commute involves a drive through unpaved portions of death valley." And this commercial takes that concept to new extremes. "Do you need tires that won't lose traction even when you run over millions of metal balls and several performers from Cirque Du Soleil? No? okay, well then buy any other brand of tires, Dunlop is useless in snow or rain but great for driving near fat guys painted gold."

It's one thing to create a brand image instead of focusing on the actual advantages of your product in an ad, it's another thing to have the brand image you create be one that instills discomfort and fear into the consumer.

(A brief side note I couldn't find a place for or think of a joke about: This ad was directed by the director of American History X. It came out in 1993.)

That cat-eyed women at the end is quite probably going to haunt my nightmares for the next several forevers. Here is a still shot of her for your viewing pleasure. I assume if you look at it for more than 30 seconds she sucks out your soul and uses it to make rubber. As I said at the beginning, this wasn't so much a post to be enjoyed as one designed to make sure other people experience the same trauma that I am.