Last week I shared some disturbing McDonalds ads that I found in Argentina in addition to a clip of a faux Marilyn Monroe also endorsing the Golden Arches. Compared to some dead celebrity-employed marketing, though, that’s relatively innocent. A black and white photo with a badly inserted color cheeseburger? Even Marlon Brando would have been fine with that unbelievable campaign. As for the Marilyn commercial, I’ve seen some people comment on YouTube that they didn’t know she did a McDonalds ad. But aside from inadvertently confusing some idiots, having an impersonator hawk products isn’t too unethical.
This 2005 Volkswagon ad is a little more questionable, as it superimposes the face of Gene Kelly (d. 1996) on the bodies of breakdancers outfitted to look like his character in Singin’ in the Rain. I’d say it’s despicable or blasphemous but I have to admit to having enjoyed it when I first saw it. And the remix of the movie’s titular tune is also appreciable. Also, its painstaking recreation of the iconic scene is to be respected, especially because it doesn’t simply pull some archive footage or photograph of a dead actor and randomly plop it into an advertisement, like the John Wayne Coors spot.
That’s not actually Marilyn Monroe in the McDonalds commercial above. It’s Susan Griffiths, a Marilyn impersonator who you may have seen on the cover of this month’s GQ magazine. I’m not sure how old the ad is, but I wanted to use it as the Clip of the Day in order to share some other McDonalds print ads that I discovered while on vacation in Buenos Aires last week (no, I wasn’t dumb enough to bother eating at McDonalds with all the great Argentine beef elsewhere; I was using the restroom). I don’t know how old these ads are either, but they seem pretty despicable regardless. Check out some pics of Bogie, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Nat King Cole hawking cheeseburgers after the jump.
We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.
Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Gunsand played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.
Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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We’re less than a week away from the release of 
