Pop Goes The Island.

A post in two parts.

THE ISLAND IS FOR SALE.

This product placement is not at all distracting.

Went to see the Michael Bay sci-fi/explosion movie The Island last night with Matt and Laurie. First, I enjoy the fact that the interactive table from the Media Lab's Tangible Media Group has found uses other than attracting money and visitors. You know, the one which has a projector above it, and that lets you manipulate windows by moving an object (in this case, a pyramid) across it. It's a more believable UI in 2019 than the Tom Cruise's gesticulations in Minority Report. Heck, the thing probably actually worked as shown in the movie. But that's about all The Island had on Minority Report, except of course for Scarlett Johansson.

My beef with The Island is not that it's a big dumb summer movie. It's a big dumb summer movie with such insidious product placement that it brought you out of the fold of the story. Now, Minority Report was as guilty as any movie about this (Lexus, Banana Republic), but it did so in a half tongue-in-cheek way; the fact that the advertising changed to identify John Anderton and make him more trackable was a plot device. Here, they just slapped giant labels on things. Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johansson duck into an "information directory," conspiciously a huge banner ad for MSN Search. People drink Aquafina everywhere. Ewan and Scarlett face off in a virtual XBox fighting competition. Scarlett discovers what a kiss is via a Calvin Klein commercial. Maybe I wouldn't have been as offended if I weren't a tap-water-drinking, Google-using, PlayStation-playing charlatan. But last time I checked, I already spent 11 bucks to suspend reality. The last thing I want is to be sucked out of that fantasy world by a reminder to drink Bud.

BREAKTHROUGHS IN OFFICE BIRTHDAY PARTIES

Office birthday parties. You dread them, I dread them. We sit around and sing half-heartedly, someone asks if anyone is doing anything interesting over the weekend, someone asks the lucky employee's age, and we eat cake in fits and starts of silence.

Until today.

The gimmick around here is that the birthday boy (or girl, but most likely boy) doesn't know when he/she is going to get the cake. So, about five minutes before the event, that person's boss or friend brings everyone to the conference room (which the celebrant clearly sees), before escorting the lucky individual to the hungry crowd.

Today, we ran into a problem. We had assembled in the conference room, eyeing the cake like tigers over fresh prey, but the birthday boy had not arrived. Ten minutes had passed since the scheduled start to the party, and he was AWOL. People shot the shit a little, joked about blowing out the candles, tried calling him, until the situation came to a tipping point. "Screw this, let's just eat the cake," yelled Joe, when...

BAM! Sam burst from inside the equipment cabinet in the conference room. "Fooled you!" Sam had been cooped up in a ball inside the cabinet for 20 minutes. "Screw this, let's eat the cake" was the codeword to come out.

Classic.

This trick has been played out once in our group. But if you endure the same office birthday monotony that we do, spice things up a bit by hiding. Beats trick candles.