{"id":3960,"date":"2009-08-20T23:01:42","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T04:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=3960"},"modified":"2009-08-28T18:37:56","modified_gmt":"2009-08-28T23:37:56","slug":"the-marc-pease-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=3960","title":{"rendered":"The Marc Pease Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"420-marc_20pease_20experience_20wkend.embedded.prod_affiliate.56\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The best examples of movies that use product placement as plot points are Tsui Hark\u2019s Double Team<\/em><\/span><\/a> which amongst other things, has our heroes hide behind a Coke machine, protecting them from certain death and Alexander Payne\u2019s Election<\/em>, where Matthew Broderick, because he is staring at a can of Pepsi, is able to deduce that he should encourage a potential school president candidate to run for the office. It seems wasteful to have products front and center in a movie, only to pretend they were casually placed in the frame, as opposed to acknowledging their existence. This tactic took some time to perfect, as exemplified by a film like George P. Cosmatos\u2019 Cobra<\/em>, where Sylvester Stallone spends an inordinate amount of time drinking Coors in the middle of an action scene, and not even noticing that he lives but a few feet from a giant, flashing Pepsi sign (wouldn\u2019t its existence make it hard to sleep?).<\/p>\n

Todd Louiso\u2019s The Marc Pease Experience<\/em>, one of the last few films left in the Paramount Vantage vault before it shut down, takes the Cobra<\/em> approach to product placement. The movie\u2019s theoretical villain, a phony letch of a high school musical teacher named Jon Gribble, played by Ben Stiller (in a slight departure from his normal two roles, which is either the ridiculous, arrogant, and bizarrely accented idiot or the sap with much contrived slapstick bodily function jokes to befall him), has whole sequences where he slowly drinks a can of Diet Coke or eats a Twizzler as he spits out perfunctory dialogue. Nothing he says seems all that important, just that we understand how tasty the snack is to him (and therefore us). Normally, this sort of quibbling would be pointless nit-picking, movies have to get funded somehow, right? But there\u2019s literally nothing else going on in The Marc Pease Experience<\/em> to pay attention to. You keep waiting for Gribble\u2019s obsession with junk food to pay off (he\u2019s got a drawer full of candy bars and cases of Diet Coke all over his office), but it doesn\u2019t. And you\u2019d think that because he\u2019s the supposed villain, we wouldn\u2019t think his behavior was something to emulate, but The Marc Pease Experience<\/em> has absolutely no attitude toward its characters, stuck in the nebulous void between pity and mockery, but never hitting either button.<\/p>\n

\"marcpease082009_81169c\"<\/a>This feeling of nothingness could be the result of studio tinkering (The Marc Pease Experience<\/em> is being released on all of 10 screens, clearly a contractual obligation, and with no advertising of any kind to back it up), the movie is short, choppy, and unfocused, only serving as a way for titular star Jason Schwartzman to further his real-life music career. There\u2019s no connective tissue between any scenes, Pease is a failed acapella singer and high-school scapegoat (Gribble was his teacher who patronizingly encouraged him 8 years previous), now a limo driver, trying to gather money together to get some time in a recording studio to make a demo. His girlfriend, Meg, a high school senior (nothing is made of how creepy their relationship is), doesn\u2019t know what she wants to do in life and either thinks Marc is annoying or supportive, it\u2019s never clear how she feels about him. Their plots have very little to do with each other, which is how the film\u2019s editor(s) seems to have wanted it. The focus of the movie is actually on a schlocky high school performance of The Wiz<\/em>. Not that we get much of the behind-the-scenes drama, no, we just watch the students act out their parts on stage. It plays like a low-rent concert film (the kid playing The Wizard appears to have been cast for his visual resemblance to Nipsey Russell), the drama of Pease and Gribble battling over Meg\u2019s future or whether or not Gribble will help Pease with the demo is less than secondary. It\u2019s even below the peculiar hairstyle choices made for Stiller and Schwartzman, wherein they wear silly wigs for the entire movie.<\/p>\n

\"AnnaKendrickMarcPease\"<\/a>The hair issue highlights another distraction; it is never clear what time period we\u2019re in. Is Stiller\u2019s feathered look supposed to be funny or in style? Is Schwartzman\u2019s ponytail supposed to highlight his overall cluelessness and inability to move on with his life, or is it just the movie\u2019s feeble idea of a joke? The currently mangled state of The Marc Pease Experience<\/em> is puzzling because there\u2019s no way to even tell what Louiso was after, all evidence of human hands have been removed.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t Louiso\u2019s or the movie\u2019s fault that the studio financing it was shut down or that a writer\u2019s strike interfered with production. But the incarnation of The Marc Pease Experience<\/em> that the public is [barely] being allowed to view is, instead of being an ad for Coke or Twizzler, rather an ad for cell phones that light up in the dark. So you can check the time to see how much longer you\u2019ll have to be sitting in an empty theater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best examples of movies that use product placement as plot points are Tsui Hark\u2019s Double Team which amongst other things, has our heroes hide behind a Coke machine, protecting them from certain death and Alexander Payne\u2019s Election, where Matthew Broderick, because he is staring at a can of Pepsi, is able to deduce that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[5188,2565,5140,4945,327,5135,5139,5129,5130,5134,5132,5124,2454,5126,5002,2459,5127,3011,1337,1190,2668,5138,2564,1383,778,4597,2237,3354,1826,535,5119,1345,1186,36,4600,5121,1415,5137,3458,1851,140,2455,5125,3756,5189,5123,1429,1035,5136,5133,3627,5120,192,5122,5131,5118,207,5141,5128,1189],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}