Plus surprises!

Commercial cinema is becoming just that, a commercial-ninety minutes of seamless advertising, corralling all artistry within the comfy confines of the saleable. In years past, the propmaster, like Wile E. Coyote, had a pantry filled with generic products, Acme beer, Acme cereal, or Acme explosives. Then the propmaster was replaced by the product peddler, who envisioned great exposure for his wares. Film producers, in turn, saw the benefits in big bucks, bucking the integrity of the films themselves. Product Placement (P.P.) infiltrated the Dream Factory with an array of lovely goods and foodstuffs-sneaky salutations to the merchandised environment. Now P.P.s surface in forms more numerous than flavors at a Baskin-Robbins: insinuated into dialogue, thrown front and center like loss leaders, even engulfing entire features until they become little more than cross-promotions for toy manufacturers. That most forward-thinking of films, Minority Report, heightened the practice with its talking Armani billboards and customer-friendly Gap, raking in a cool twenty-five million in the process. Value-Added Cinema offers up some of our favorite Product Placements: Rolex, Budweiser, Ray–Ban, FedEx, BMW-the stuff dreams are made of.