Herbie, Fully Loaded With Crap You Should Buy
The NYT breaks down Disney's recent, completely non-cynical revival of its Love Bug franchise, Herbie: Fully Loaded, into its constituent parts: product placement and shitergy. The movie's chock-full of Nascar-real advertiser bombardment and shameless ESPN (owned by Disney, naturally) tie-in buggery that encroaches into virtually every scene:
The only time Ms. Lohan/Peyton touches food or drink is when she pulls a prominently displayed bottle of Tropicana orange juice from a kitchen refrigerator. In a scene 20 minutes later, Maggie enters the kitchen growling at another character, "If you touched that orange juice, I'll kill you." Tropicana, a division of PepsiCo, is the official soft drink of the Nascar racing team headed by Jeff Gordon, who plays himself in the film.
Even in the crassest of commercial enterprises, sometimes there are moments of Truth. (Tropicana orange juice makes excellent screwdrivers.) Had Lindsay Lohan touched solid food, even in the name of additional product placement dollars, the entire project would have imploded under the weight of implausibility, leaving nothing but fifteen seconds of lingering shots of Goodyear tires.
