In the director’s commentary accompanying his follow-up film to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Ang Lee discusses how he tried to apply his newfound choreography savvy to a car chase.
Time out. You didn’t realize Lee had already unveiled a follow-up to “Crouching Tiger”? Well, maybe you haven’t been watching television, where ads for his new film, “Chosen,” have been playing in heavy rotation.
Or maybe you just didn’t consider “Chosen” a true film — certainly not one worthy of a shot-by-shot director’s commentary — given that it’s a six-minute short that Lee made for a BMW Web site (bmwfilms.com).
“Chosen” actually is the second release in BMW’s series of five shorts, collectively called “The Hire,” which all feature piercing-eyed “Croupier” star Clive Owen as a driver whose clients invariably require him to navigate his spiffy BMW sports car (in the first few films, a 740i, if you must know) out of dicey situations.
John Frankenheimer, who demonstrated his cinematic car-chase skills in “Grand Prix” and “Ronin,” directed the first entry, “Ambush,” which consists primarily of, yes, a well-filmed car chase. “Chosen,” added to the Web site last week, finds the driver chauffeuring a Little Buddha (played by Lee’s son Mason, as the director informs us in his commentary) to the house of a shady Tibetan monk.
Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai applies the moody romantic feel of his features “In the Mood for Love” and “Chungking Express” to “The Follow” (debuting May 24), in which the driver is hired to tail Mickey Rourke’s fleeing girlfriend. Still to come are shorts from British director Guy Richie (“Snatch”), featuring his wife, Madonna, and Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (“Amores Perros”).
It’s an impressive group of filmmakers, assembled on behalf of the high-end car company by impressive filmmaker David Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Seven”), who serves as the project’s executive producer.
None of “The Hire” directors was available to discuss their roles as filmmakers for hire, though the appeal isn’t too mysterious: Each was paid lots of money (no one is saying how much) and given a big budget to create an original story — and to play around with and sometimes smash up fancy cars — on a high-profile project that would require a fraction as much work and time as a feature film. The timing might have been especially fortuitous given that none of these directors was working to complete a film before the possible actors strike date of June 30.
To BMW the benefit is that the company has devised an attention-getting promotion (hence this story) that links its upscale product with a forward-looking medium (the Internet) and a cinema connoisseur’s dream team of directors. (Figure Ford would have gone with Chris Columbus, Michael Bay, Penny Marshall, Renny Harlin and Ron Howard.)
“It betrays the growing desperation of advertisers as they struggle to break through the clutter in a world of nothing but clutter,” said Mark Crispin Miller, media studies professor at New York University. “So they have to resort to evermore startling and sensational devices just to attract people’s attention.”
But how are we to view these little movies? As tasty hors d’oeuvres to savor as we await the filmmakers’ next full meals? As lavish commercials made by name filmmakers moonlighting in the advertising world, as Spike Lee, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, Errol Morris, Tony and Ridley Scott and countless others have done before? As another fallen line of defense in advertising’s escalating invasion of entertainment?
The most probable answer: All of the above.
The first three films (the other two were unavailable for preview because they’re not finished, a BMW representative said) are enjoyable as exercises somewhat akin to a Second City improvisation where someone in the audience shouts out “Flaming potato!” and the actors must work it into a scene. Here, the directors try to operate in their identifiable styles while showcasing a slick car.
(The films are viewable as streaming video, which presents a somewhat pixelated image across a horizontal sliver of the screen, or as a download, which offers a larger, clearer, though still a bit choppy picture and allows the viewer to click onto two-minute “sub stories” that “Boiler Room” director Ben Younger has filmed for each movie. Because the movie files are large, downloading can take many minutes or hours depending on your Internet connection.)
BMW under `maximum stress’
Frankenheimer highlights the Beemer’s ability to finesse high-speed maneuvers and hairpin turns. “I wanted BMW to be able to show their car at maximum stress,” the director says in his commentary.
Lee sets his would-be lyrical car chases to a combination of baroque and Tibetan music and provides a moment that the BMW brass must love: The driver, trapped in an alley, shifts into reverse and smashes the bad guys’ Mercedes. Wong plays up the car’s sensual qualities, cutting to shots of gear-shifting and steering as if they’re elements of a love scene.
“Even though these little movies don’t seem to pitch the products explicitly, they’re still essentially commercials in that their function is to glamorize the product,” Miller said. “However talented the filmmaker may be, he or she cannot finally overcome the crucial difference between cinema and advertising, because cinema at its best is an art form while advertising is a form of propaganda.”
In a sense, these films represent product placement in reverse. The Pierce Brosnan James Bond traded in his Aston Martin for a BMW, and in return the German company spent millions to promote those movies. Now BMW has created its own version of Bond movies (and made a convincing case that Owen should be Brosnan’s successor).
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, complained about the evils of product placement in his book “Marketing Madness,” but he’s not too concerned with this latest development.
“It’s their Web site,” Jacobson said. “If people are aware that they’re watching a commercial that’s sponsored by BMW, I don’t get exercised by that.”
Danger ahead
But Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra, the national media watch group Fair’s magazine, sees a danger in advertisers’ increasing input into content. Companies, he said, are reacting to the failure of Web advertising to prove effective and the sense that TV advertising is at risk because of developments such as TiVo, which allows viewers to skip the commercials entirely.
“Advertisers are concerned that they’re going to get shut out, so the next step is to build advertising into the [movies and] TV programs,” Naureckas said, noting the continued rise of product placement as well as shows in development that spotlight McDonalds and other brands.
“I wouldn’t say that the BMW films rate very high on the outrage meter, but I think it’s a sign of disturbing things to come,” he said. “I think people should be very wary of accepting commercials as entertainment because we could end up with a culture that has nothing for entertainment but commercials.”
Lee, at least, showed that big corporations aren’t the only ones who can play the product-placement game. At the end of “Chosen,” the driver affixes a kids’ bandage to his bloodied ear, the final shot being a closeup of the bandage decorated with a cartoon rendering of the Incredible Hulk.
Lee’s next movie: “The Incredible Hulk.”
