Art or advert?

When products placed in films are incongruous to the plot, the film is no longer art or entertainment but has become a two hour advert. In the US they may be content to watch the shopping channel info-mercials, but in the UK we have so far been spared. The upcoming feature Fierce Creatures, the sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, parodies product placement but also amply exploits it. The story goes that an American entrepreneur is trying to set up a zoo, and in order to raise the money, the animals are seen to endorse thousands of products, resulting in a thousand blatant product placements: like a monkey drinking a can of Fosters. This tongue-in-cheek method of using product placement in a mainstream movie is refreshing, and yet undoubtedly netted the film production company a huge revenue.
Hey, look, it's another Apple! But sheesh! Don't they have any chairs around here? (This style of data input is now illegal under the Health and Safety at Work 1996 [Flying amendment]).
Perhaps more subtle, and more effective, is the use of designer clothes in films, spurning not only sales of said designer, but also heavily influencing current fashions. Classic examples are The Untouchables team head to toe in Armani. Armani like Apple has been star struck, and since The Untouchables the company has had starring roles in many films including our own Mission: Impossible: check Ms Beart throughout the film.

The fact remains that if you choose to go to the cinema to see large, studio commercial productions, you are choosing to partake in a whole commercial experience, and should therefore be prepared for a total commercial overdose, from the adverts before the film, to the Jurassic Park logo on your can of coke, to Tom Cruise and his PowerBook. The film producers may find that in the near future, if things continue on the path Apple has paved, people will turnover or switch off as they do with commercial TV channels. After all nobody chooses to watch the ads.