Brand Hype, my website all about product placement, is now just a few weeks away from being ready for launch. The database works well enough, and we’re now looking for folks who might be interested in helping us test it out. (Here’s Joaquin Phoenix as fireman Jack Morrison in Ladder 49 (2004). It’s his daughter’s fifth birthday party, and she’s completely hidden by the “Barbie car” she asked for. She got a Barbie doll, too.)

Within the next two months I hope to have the product placement website up in some basic but usable format. Stuart’s database programming is coming on, and it should, we hope, provide a decent enough system for entering data on product placements in movies both new and old. Here’s Julianne Moore communing with an Apple Powerbook in The Forgotten (2004).

For me, the new Sandler/Barrymore movie 50 First Dates was never going to be anything more than a casual renter: the kind of film you skip until it comes out on video (and even then only worth the money if there’s nothing better on the ‘new releases’ shelf). The main question yesterday was whether the movie itself would amount to anything more than a clothes-line on which to pin the handful of funny gags from the trailer.

As it turned out, the story was flimsy, the acting patchy, but the overall effect vaguely pleasing in an absent-minded sort of way. Except to say that I found it disquieting to be presented, once more, with a Sandler vehicle that is so feverishly demarcated in terms of gender and sexuality. Fine that the central characters are unequivocally straight and conventionally attractive (i.e. young, slim, white, able-bodied). But why does the supporting cast have to be so negatively contrived? Is the status of heterosexual screen romance so fragile an institution that it needs to be shored up at every turn by the repeated derision of older women, fat women, gay men, aboriginal people, transgendered people?

And silly me for not figuring out in advance that the two most derided characters – the gay-coded bodybuilder and the campy Teuton of indeterminate gender (how funny!) – would end up as a couple. So, despite Drew’s crippling memory loss, Adam establishes (and re-establishes on a daily basis) the Nuclear Family via a daily dose of video diaries, while the rest of the cast recedes into irrelevance, and the two queers effectively cancel themselves out.

As Drew says on the official website for 50 First Dates, “Adam’s films are like a beautiful medicine”. Indeed.

The dizzying speed with which images are decontextualized and then radically recontextualized is well illustrated when considering the recent movie The Rundown (US, 2003). Set in Brazil (but shot in L.A. and Hawai’i), it features Christopher Walken as a ruthless mine owner pitted against a bounty hunter, played by The Rock.

The mine itself is, as many people have noted, based on a series of stunning photographs taken in the 1980s by ‘concerned photographer’ Sebastião Salgado of some of the tens of thousands of ‘garimpeiros’ working at the Serra Pelada goldmine (Pará state, Brazil). The political context – the horrendous exploitation and human suffering that Salgado surely wished to convey – becomes, in The Rundown, merely a highly aestheticized feat of contemporary special effects. This is conveyed clearly enough in the two commentary tracks on the DVD. The producers merely refer to it as “Salgado’s mine”; the chummy chitchat between Peter Berg, the director, and The Rock, is more revealing:

Berg: We stole our photographs from… we didn’t steal actually, but we looked at some photographs by a photographer named Salgado, who went and photographed the Brazilian mines, so if anybody’s interested in looking at some really cool pictures of real Brazilian mines go check out Salgado’s photographs.

Rock: Yeah, and people who are basically being enslaved by..these guys…and there’s guys with guns…

Berg: Sure. There’s some great footage that exists, in National Geographic films, and then all the photos.

More stills from “Salgado’s mine” can be found here.