• So Many Super Bowl Ads To Watch Before The Super Bowl
    Gaaa! Super Bowl week! Must watch online-only preview alterna-tease unrated extended surrogate outtake versions of Super Bowl ads! Must! Watch! No time to dilly-dally with column lede about personal idiocy that vaguely relates to subject of column! No! Time!
  • 'Nissan Briefcase' Starts Strong And Ends Flat
    And yet in the greatest upset since Super Bowl XLII, last Sunday at approximately 5:42 p.m. ET, an advertisement pierced my coma and piqued my interest. This is how it went down: one minute, I was all guhhhhh football football salty treats fizzy beer football guhhh guhhhhhh. Then, without warning, a car was going vroom vroom and an attractive member of the female species was driving it and a dude in the backseat was clutching a briefcase as if it contained his weight in unscuffed Krugerrands. Then the screen blinked with a URL, which I took as a sign that …
  • "Ten Resolutions with 7Up Ten" Is Mean-Spirited And Terrible
    You'll forgive me, then, if I can't say with 100 percent certainty that one, I am awake and two, that I didn't hallucinate the subject of today's Video Critique discourse, "Ten Resolutions with 7Up Ten." A major-league brand snarkily dismissing activities in which a sizable percentage of its target audience is engaging, at a time during which they're engaging in them most fervently... that sounds like the kind of pitch a marketing exec would come up with during a rabies fever dream, doesn't it?
  • P&G's "Pick Them Back Up" May Not Be Ambitious Or Clever But It's Full Of Charm
    Caddyshack II. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. The Whole Ten Yards. These sequels are a treasured part of our cultural canon not merely because they answered the burning questions left unanswered by their predecessors, but because they contributed indelible joys of their own. Where would we be without the relentless whimsy of Son of The Mask, or the spit-specked intrigue of Basic Instinct 2? A world that never knew the neo-Swayzean grizzle of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is a world not worth knowing, friend.
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