A young man sits on a living room couch. Alongside it is a giant hourglass full of Skittles. He lifts the hourglass top, which is already ajar, grabs some Skittles and munches away.
His buddy, presumably a roommate, then enters the scene.
“I know it man,” he says to his seated pal.
“You know what?” says the Skittles chomping guy innocently.
“I told you not to eat the Skittles from my hourglass. Look at me, man. You’re speeding up time.”
He then removes his baseball cap, revealing a balding head.
“How many did you eat?”
The culprit responds, “Like two. Three.”
The sands of time are moving much faster than the rate of two or three lost Skittles, however. We now see the balding man has aged further, his face wrinkled beyond any Botox repair. He then feels fatigued and sits down, looking even more elderly by the moment. “I told you,” he mutters, only to say nothing further as he dozes off in the chair.
An end tag implores, “Warp the Rainbow. Taste the Rainbow,” accompanied by the Skittles logo.
This offbeat :30 was directed by Randy Krallman of bicoastal/international Smuggler for TBWAChiatDay, New York.
The TBWAChiatDay creative contingent included creative director Rob Baird, associate creative director/art director Kris Wixom, associate creative director/copywriter Alisa Wixom, exec producer Media Arts Matt Bijarchi, head of broadcast production Ozzie Spenningsby and senior producer Winslow Dennis.
Allison Kunzman exec produced for Smuggler with Cory Berg serving as producer. The DP was Bryan Nueman.
Editor was Lawrence Young of bicoastal Cosmo Street.
Post/effects house was Framestore, New York, with Raul Ortego as lead VFX/Inferno artist and James Razzall as exec producer.
Review: Director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” Starring Robert Pattinson
So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it'll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson's in Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an "Expendable," and by this we don't mean he's a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone's tired band of mercenaries ("Expend17ables"?). No, even worse! He's literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be "reprinted" once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong's hotly anticipated follow-up to "Parasite." There's creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn't know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he's adapting here is called "Mickey7" — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he's part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He's surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: "Haven't you died yet?"
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan... Read More