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make it suntory time
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For a funny case of life imitating art, look no further than Texas bad ass Tommy Lee Jones and his ads for the Japanese coffee drink Suntory.
When I saw Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, I had no idea that the product Bill Murray's character was shilling actually existed. Well it does, and this time it's not Murray's "Bob Harris," but a flesh-and-blood middle-aged American movie star.
American A-listers have been cashing in on their fame in Japanese TV spots for years while managing to to protect their public image from being associated with the crass world of advertising. But that was before YouTube made the world a whole lot smaller. (Recently, the stigma of appearing in commercials has softened -- here's a Michel Gondry-directed Pepsi ad starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody.)
The punchline here is that it's Jones, who has cultivated a reputation -- by his own design or not -- as a tough, no-bullshit artist who shuns the spotlight and only devotes his time to "the work". We imagine his paycheck for the spots was well into the seven figures and, while we don't accuse him of selling out, it's pretty funny to see the tough-as-nails thesp speaking Japanese with a robot antenna on his head. That spot is embedded below -- the rest can be found here.
