For those contemplating a trip to the multiplex, my review of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is here (short version: it's remarkable), and my thoughts on American Gangster (very good, but somewhat familiar) will be up sometime in the next few days. If you want to read about Bee Movie, however, I fear you'll have to look somewhere else, as I haven't seen it. Why not? New York Magazine's indispensable Vulture explains:
So this morning we foolishly attempted to read the Daily News online and were hit instead with a huge banner ad for Bee Movie. We've been counting, and that banner ad was the 1,000,000th marketing message for the movie we've seen in the last few months. (Balloons fell from the ceiling, and we were given a free jar of honey.) ... It's hard to say which of the movie's marketing techniques has been the most effective: The trailers? The TV spots? The billboards? The magazine ads? The newspaper ads? The appearances on talk shows, including an hour on Oprah during which the host wore a bee headband the entire time? The front-page "Arts & Leisure" profile of Jerry Seinfeld? The event at Cannes where Seinfeld dressed as a bee? The Brach's candy corn "made with real honey"? The McDonald's Happy Meals? The bee-painted Volkswagen Beetles at the L.A. premiere? The music video with 100 kids dressed as bees? The short mini-mockumentaries on NBC? The Hewlett-Packard ads that manage to contain not one but two mentions of Bee Movie? His guest-starring role on 30 Rock, during which, at one point, he actually looked right at the camera and plugged the movie?
I imagine Tom Shales has been in heaven.
--Christopher Orr