Who needs TV when you got all your favourite ads at the movies

Rating: 1/10 (2 January 2007)

OK. I get to the cinema at 2.40pm. Only a short wait till the movie starts at 2.45, or so I think. For the next 20 minutes I'm treated to a rich assortment of trailers for films I would never want to see. This has whetted my appetite for the 15 minutes of advertisements that follow. It doesn't get much better than this.
Finally, the lights in the theatre dim and the movie starts. Thank God, no more bleeding ads! Then James Bond whips out his fancy new Sony Ericsson mobile to talk to his mate. The terrorist has an old ugly looking Nokia. Bond hacks into the secret services database using a spiffy looking Sony Vaio notebook. He manages to nick the mobile phone of one the baddies, another Sony Ericsson shown in loving closeup. The girl at the casino asks Bond what drink he'd like - not a vodka martini but some concoction with gin in it. And not just any old crap like Plymouth or Bombay Sapphire, but Gordons. And what watch does 007 says he wears - definitely not Rolex, but Omega. Seamless. For the next Bond film, I think Casio should throw a couple of wads of cash at the producers so that calculator watches become cool again.
What's going on! Why are we allowing this sort of blatant advertising to be regularly shoved in our faces in a movie we've paid good money to see! 007 is a licence to print money as well as a licence to kill. Any half decent Bond film will make an obscene amount of money in ticket sales, DVD releases, PS2 games etc without needing to resort to such over the top product placement. It is pure greed on the part of the studios that motivates them to do this and pure apathy on the part of the audience that lets them get away with it. Get mad people! Or else you might soon be enjoying commercial breaks in the middle of your next movie at the cinema.