My wife and I had another couple over for the Fourth of July. We asked if they wanted to watch a DVD, and Sleeper somehow became the movie du jour, which was fine with me. As Michael Graham once said, "I used to love Woody Allen, before he went southern, and started sleeping with his children".
Sleeper is shot in that 2001-influenced ultra-white, ultra-modern look that was the standard appearance of The Future in the movies until Blade Runner's dark future-noir style replaced it, even in non sci-fi films, such as the Batman movies and The Crow. I couldn't remember another film made after Blade Runner that pictured a clean, modern, antiseptic Mies van Rohe-meets-mainframe computers future.
That was until last night, when flipping channels through the stratosphere of DirecTV, I came across 1993's Demolition Man starring Sly Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock, well on her way to becoming Hollywood's "it" girl of the mid-1990s.
I watched about 15 minutes of the film, and then having taken all I could of its inane product placements, switched it off. (I sure hope Taco Bell paid the producers a lot of money, because they sure rammed the name down the audience's throats), The deliberately clunky dialogue, and the stiff as a board acting from everyone didn't help matters. (At least when Ahhhnaaald does these sorts of films, he lets you in on the joke: he can't act, but he's working really, really hard, so just kick back and go with it, OK? Stallone doesn't even display that kind of humor--at least not in this film, where he's leaden.) When Bullock tells Sly that she'd like to have sex with him, and then tosses him a helmet with antennas and other gadgets and geegaws, and straps a similar device on herself, it was obvious:
Article comments
1 - Temple A. Stark
Now if you'd put a link to Bladerunner I would have bought it from Blogcritics. That's a film.
Films are entertainment. Those that choose to have product placements out the *** - I mean ass - are likely to make money but not likely to have a shelf life longer than a ripe tomato.
2 - visualsimplicity
I know Taco Bell paid them for the product placement, but I always thought the movie sort of made the Taco Bell surviving the fast food chain wars into a joke. I thought it was funny.