Celebrity Products - A Step too Far?

One of the first blog pieces I ever wrote was a review in which I praised the successful relationship between Gary Linekar and Walkers Crisps. In my opinion this is one of the best examples of a celebrity endorsement.

The reason it's successful is due to the way the brand and the celebrity work in perfect harmony.

There is however one celebrity (oddly enough, another sportsperson) who has gone a step further in bonding a brand with a personality.

Tennis superstar Maria Sharapova may soon become ‘Sugarpova’ for this year’s US Open. Owned by Sharapova herself, the sweets company Sugarpova claims their sweets reflect the tennis player's "fun, fashionable, sweet side", this is further reflected in their advertising.

Personally, I haven’t tried the sweets myself, so I can’t comment on the quality but the brand does appear to have a really sharp style to it. The website looks great, the packaging is stylish and the PR photos of Sharapova herself integrate perfectly with the brand.

However Sharapova is now trying to get her name temporarily changed to Sugarpova in time for the US Open so as to maximise public awareness of the brand. The question I would ask though, is this a step too far?

It’s not the first time a sportsperson has changed their name to promote a brand – Jimmy White became Jimmy Brown for a short while to promote HP Sauce – but it does seem somewhat bizarre and just maybe a tad over the top.

And yet I do think to some degree that in Maria Sharapova’s situation it's more than acceptable, because from the content on the website its obvious that the brand is very personal to her, also some of the profits raised will be donated to her charity.

On the other hand what’s the next step? Personally I want to see Wayne Rooney, Robin van Persie and Ryan Giggs playing for Man U, not Thomas Cook up front, Mister Potato in the center and Chevrolet dashing down the wing.

edit - this was written before Maria Sharapova pulled out of the US Open.

Zero Dark Thirty and the Depiction of Soldiers and War in Modern Cinema

Do all war movies have an anti-war theme?

It’s almost expected for a war movie to have an anti-war agenda – morally correct. It doesn’t matter if it’s patriotic or includes a great hero in a central role; they all show how war invariably leads to death and destruction. However in recent years there appears to be a select group of films (and TV series) that show a less candid approach to the subject of war and those taking part in it.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty follows Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative who’s handed the job of hunting down Osama Bin Laden. As the film unravels Maya becomes increasingly more determined and obsessed with capturing (and killing) Bin Laden, and even after her superiors try to focus her on more pressing matters she stays fixated on finding him.

Although based on the real life manhunt of Bin Laden, unsurprisingly the film it has been the subject of many discussions. 

Some believe it’s pure propaganda and that Bin Laden actually died of a kidney failure in 2001. Alternatively, former Navy S.E.A.L Matt Bissonnette’s description (in his book No Easy Days: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden) of a female CIA agent who was recruited straight out of college and was the ‘go to analyst’ in terms of Bin Laden intelligence, matches Chastain’s character.

  

However what really interested me was Mark Boal’s (screenwriter) and Kathryn Bigelow’s depiction of the Navy S.E.A.L. team and the CIA Operatives. Similar to their previous film The Hurt Locker, the soldiers appear to have a very ‘matter of fact’ attitude towards war and killing – bordering on relaxed. Jason Clarke’s character Dan, who has the job of interrogating suspected terrorists, is dismissive about the personal affects of torture, devoid of what we might call humanity. The only sign of emotion his character shows is when his monkeys are killed.       

This attitude towards killing and war seems not just real but professional, and doesn’t seem to fit with many of the themes of the classic war films. Their lack of any emotional regard to their protagonists was almost absolute to the point where some characters even seemed to get enjoyment out of killing people.

This kind of attitude is repeated in Generation Kill. 

Not only is there a racist and homophobic discourse, but the characters also talk candidly about wanting to start shooting people and blowing things up. This is not to say there isn’t any emotional response what so ever by any of the characters, in fact in one episode the lead character Sgt. Brad ‘Iceman’ Colbert emotionally breaks down, even though he’s notorious for being ‘cool’ under pressure.

So has there been a ‘seed’ change in the way soldiers (especially US soldiers) are depicted in combat situations?

In the classic WW1 film All Quiet on The Western Front there are some similarities in terms of how soldiers are represented. The idea that soldiers waiting to fight live a mundane lifestyle is similar to Jarhead and Generation Kill. However in All Quiet… there's an attempt by the director to humanize the opposing soldiers whereas in Jarhead and Generation Kill there's a less sympathetic approach. 

Again in Saving Private Ryan there was an attempt to show a connection between the US and German soldiers. After raiding a bunker the American soldiers let one surviving German soldier go free, rather than killing him – this seems to contrast with most factual descriptions of WW2 battles.

In American cinema today there seems little attempt to make any connections between belligerents. 

Part 2 coming soon