In 2014, Richard Linklater released Boyhood, an arthouse drama that he filmed over the course of 12 years, which let audiences spend almost three hours watching Ellar Coltrane grow up (and also allowed some of us to realize that we still have complicated feelings for Ethan Hawke). Two years later, a pair of Brazilian directors who are collectively known as Salsa seem to have been inspired by Linklater’s flick when they worked on a coming-of-age TV commercial called “Timeline.”
The ad opens during an at-home water birth and, for the next minute, we see a montage of that baby boy experiencing birthday sparklers and shadow puppets and tentative walks on the sand. He gets older, watches a woman as she gets dressed, steals an age-appropriate kiss in a perfectly lit pond, gets angsty and shaves his head. He grows a patchy beard, boxes his things and moves away from home, and then, as the music swells and the spot moves towards its climax, he...uh…. goes into a Subway for lunch. “Every day, life asks you the same question,” the voiceover says. “What are you going to try today?” Well, we’re going to try really hard not to throw our computers down a sewer grate, Subway.
Although “Timeline” was produced for Subway Brazil in the summer of 2016, its cinematic weirdness—and the bonkers “SURPRISE! IT’S SUBWAY!” twist ending—was brought to everyone’s attention this week through the internet churn. “Got another capitalism greatest hit,” Ryan Simmons, a video director for SB Nation, tweeted on Thursday. “I will give you one hundred thousand dollars if you can guess the brand by the end.”
Not that Simmons was actually going to Venmo a hundred grand to a stranger in his mentions, but nobody could have guessed that this was all building toward a six-inch sandwich order. (Some people responded with their own guesses, which ranged from Shell and the U.S. Army, to assorted car companies, a life insurance firm, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
Simmons later posted his own FAQ about the commercial, starting with “Is this real?” and, yes, it certainly is. The ad was created by a production company called Stink and was directed by those two Salsa guys. (“Timeline” is listed—and viewable—on their website, along with equally cinematic, equally baffling commercials for Chevrolet and Brazilian soccer club Flamengo.) Subway has also since confirmed the ad’s existence, just in case you thought Stink and Salsa sounded suspect.
“This video was created with our team in Brazil in 2016. We’re excited for the storytelling and creativity that takes place around the world, from this story in Brazil to dedicated Franchisees in the United States and our culinary innovation taking place around the world,” a Subway spokesperson told Vanity Fair. “Stay tuned to SubCulture and Subway.com for more stories.”
“Timeline” was posted to YouTube three years ago, and the responses were much more lowkey over there than they were on Twitter. “Oh my God, what a shame,” one person commented. “I saw it on TV and thought it was some Jonhson's Baby [sic] commercial, but in the end it was just a commercial about a sandwich.” But someone named Mathias N. summed it up perfectly. “What an ad, huh?” he wrote. “Bitch, that freaked me out.”
Same, same, same.
from VICE https://ift.tt/2FGhixN
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment