Pulp Bond
Played hookey today. Well, not entirely - I took the latter part of the day off to go see the new Bond film, “Casino Royale”.

Unless I miss my guess Broccoli and company have managed to reinvent the entire Bond canon. Daniel Craig has always impressed me as a talented, nuanced actor (The Mother, Layer Cake, Munich), and believe it or not he plays Bond as a real person complete with faults, warts and intelligence and more than a little passion.

Loved the movie - tons of fun.

But that’s not why I’m mentioning it here. True, I started in this business as a film critic many years ago, but I’ll save that for another day.

No. I want to mention something that lasted less than twenty-four frames in this movie, a quick second. Something I wonder if anyone else has noticed yet. There were a few articles written about it six months or so ago referring to a ‘cameo’ or sorts, but the info was quite oblique.

It was one of those sleight-of-hand movie ‘cookies’ that happens off to the side of the frame while the main action is taking place. It’s usually one of those little gems you don’t catch until you watch the DVD where you can slow it down, freeze it and smile knowingly at the ‘inside’ joke placed so perfectly, but surreptitiously for your pleasure. One of many, no doubt.

I’m talking about the best piece of product placement I’ve ever witnessed in a film. Absolutely perfect.

Early on there’s a chase scene through Miami International Airport… okay, no ’spoiler warning’ necessary here - I’m not giving anything away other than the ‘cookie’.

The only recognizable airline in the entire film is Virgin Atlantic. A brand new Airbus A340-600 complete with livery well framed for the cameras plays a major role in a pivotal scene on the tarmac. Fair enough. Virgin Atlantic is seen and everyone remembers the airline. There’s also a scene later with a Sony Cybershot digital camera, and a watch manufacturer:

Vesper Lynd: “Nice watch - Rolex?”
Bond: “Omega.”

You don’t even see the watch - beautiful!

But what blew me away and made me laugh at the audacity of it, was the presence of a person — a human being — being used as recognizable product placement.

During the airport scene as Bond is chasing down one of the many villains in the film, we see, Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airways, being frisked and scanned with a wand at security. The whole thing lasts less than a second.

It takes big cojones to trust your audience enough to use the cult of personality in the process of ‘pushing tin’.

What’s next… Colonel Sanders waiting for a bus in the upcoming ‘Simpsons’ movie?!