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Wayne's World ... product placement gets cheesy. Photograph: PR
Exposition used to be the screenwriter's dirty secret, hidden at all costs with cast complicity; nonchalantly mouthed mid-scene while watering the plants. Things got easier when product placement came along to distract everyone with the pleasures of the spot-the-venal-movie-studio game. The scribes had to work that bit harder to cloak the gratuitous flog-fest in some negligee of dramatic pretext, just to make the game that bit more fun. Nothing wrong with that.
What I really hate, though, is when companies decide they don't want to play any more, and refuse image rights to films that happen to feature their wares as part of the fabric of daily life; as if a parallel cinematic universe exists, identical but for the total absence of internationally recognised brand names. That's just changing the rules when you feel like it.
1) Sunlight Soap isn't a name that has withstood the years like Coca-Cola and GM, but it seems to be the first recorded instance of in-film advertising - trundling into view (0mins 17sec) in 1896 on a wheelbarrow in Girel's Défilé du 8e Battalion.
2) Of course, William A Wellman had very good reason for that closeup of the Hershey bar (1min 46sec) when Gary Cooper throws it on to the bed in Wings - one of the earliest instances of American product placement. (It's a very heroic-looking chocolate bar.)
3) Cast Away reminds me of the multiple Malkovich scene in Spike Jonze's film. It's a kind of psychotic universe where every atom is FedEx-stamped (on the flat screen and the jumbo jet in this scene alone).
4) The future is a clever arena for the discerning corporation to invest in - implying, as Gap does in Minority Report (where Spielberg spins the product spots cleverly, too, with the personalised ads), that you've got some cultural longevity.
5) "That's just the nature of the beast." "Maybe I'm wrong on this one, but for me the beast doesn't include selling out." Pizza Hut, Doritos, Reebok, Nupren and Pepsi get in on the irony rush in Wayne's World. But does self-awareness make it OK?
We reached critical mass on last week's song to the throng. These were our crowd-pleasers:
1) My inner atavist has always quite fancied a bit of looting; failing that, I think I would make a good superstitious villager/townsfolk. Assemble your own baying mittel-Europe pitchfork medley from Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Love At First Bite.
2) "There's so many of you. Just be cool there at the front, don't push around." A fretting Mick Jagger, hypnotic satanic riffs, a churning audience, Hells Angels on the frontline: a recipe for disaster at Altamont in Gimme Shelter.
3) That sunbeam ain't big enough for the 30 of us in Vittorio de Sica's Miracolo a Milano, from 1951.
4) Lairy riff-raff pacified by the magic of the moving image: I like the idea of remaking both films, but swapping the audiences in Cinema Paradiso and Gremlins.
5) And this week's winner is … AJBee and the recalcitrant rhythms of his sequence from Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 adaptation of The Tin Drum. Conceptual credit goes to Günter Grass, of course, but it's a great, immediate, unpretentious illustration of crowd-individual dynamics, as well as a shining political statement. Hidden underneath the wooden podium, the young Oscar's discordant bashing tips the music of the fascist marching band off-balance, a ripple of rebellion coaxing taboo improvisational serendipity at weak points everywhere: his easily swayed fellow drummers; soldiers tripping over their own feet; parping clarinetists; an outbreak of the whirling Blue Danube; until it finally rains on the Nazi's parade. AJBee, don't forget to email catherine.shoard@guardian.co.uk to claim your prize.
Thanks to TheDudeAbides, greatpoochini, pompeyplayup, saintlucius, steenbeck and MrWormold for the rest of this week's picks
