You know how when you’re watching a movie, and there are three guys sitting around drinking beer, and all the beer bottles are positioned so you can clearly read the label? That’s called product placement, which Wikipedia defines thus:
This is one means by which movies get funded. For example, in the last two or three James Bond movies starring Pierce Brosnan came out Bond was driving a BMW. The producers signed a deal with BMW to provide the vehicle in exchange for monetary or other consideration. When the last movie, Casino Royale, came out the producers signed a deal with Ford. When Bond first goes to Bermuda he rents a small Ford which he drives to the hotel. Once there he ends up winning the bad guy’s Aston Martin in a poker game. Later on we see Bond driving his pimped-out Aston Martin, the one with the defibrillator in it. At the time Ford owned Aston Martin, thus the majority of vehicles in the movie are by Ford. (Apparently the new owners of Aston Martin have agreed to abide by the terms of the contract entered into by Ford, so Bond will be driving an Aston Martin for the next few films.)
In 2006 there was an action film starring Jason Statham called Crank. I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Here’s a plot summary.
Chev Chelios is about to begin his morning with an unexpected wake-up call. Groggy, practically unable to move and with a heart that’s barely beating, Chev answers his cell phone and hears the voice of thug Ricky Verona, who reveals Chev has been poisoned in his sleep and has only an hour to live.
As it turns out, Chev is a hit man who freelances for a major West Coast crime syndicate. And a run of the mill job the night before that was supposed to be like any other hit went unexpectedly awry: Chev let his target go in an effort to quit the professional killing business and start a new life with his girlfriend Eve.
Now, Chev must keep moving - literally - to stay alive. The only way to prolong the poison from stopping his heart is to keep his adrenaline flowing. As the clock ticks, Chelios cuts a swath through the streets of Los Angeles, wreaking havoc on those who dare stand in his way. He must rescue Eve from danger, stay two steps ahead of his nemeses as they try to eliminate him, and search for an antidote to save his own life.
Crank takes place over the course of one frenzied day in Los Angeles, where Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), a hit man who is trying to give up the business in order to lead a more normal existence with his oblivious girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), wakes up to find that his nemesis Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) has poisoned him with a drug that will kill him if he slows down for even a minute. To outwit Verona and his men, and finish off a job that involves the termination of a Chinese crime lord named Don Kim (Keone Young), Chev must rely on his physical strength, the help of his friend Kaylo (Efren Ramirez) and the medical counsel of Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam) to keep moving-and stay alive.
As you can imagine this film was full of product placement—Red Bull, Mountain Dew, anything with caffeine in it. So, why do I bring up this otherwise pointless piece of movie business trivia? Because I just read a story about the apparent plot for Crank 2. Now, this is coming from a fanboy site so take it for what it’s worth, but if this is true it’s going to be amazing.
I know you guys were huge Crank fans so I got the lowdown on how Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) survives into the sequel and what exactly they put into him.
After an 8-bit video game intro sequence, Crank: High Voltage, begins with Chev slamming down into the ground. Since his heart was already super accelerated on adrenaline…he miraculously and implausibly survived.
Asian gangsters in a black van arrive on the scene and scrape Chelios off the ground. They toss him inside the van and take off before the authorities and emergency personnel arrive.
Three months later, in an operating room, Chev awakens MID SURGERY strapped down on an operating table. He can’t move or speak. His chest is split open! Chinese doctors remove his heart while the bad guy Johnny Vang watches. The doctor’s ooooh and aaaahh at the site of “The Chelios Heart.” It gets placed in a red igloo cooler. A nurse brings over a futuristic looking artificial heart made from clear flex plastic, black rubber and metal. Chelios passes out again for another three weeks.
Chev reawakens at a Chinese massage parlor in Long Beach and makes his escape in the movies first action sequence. He then gets the lowdown on his heart from DOC MILES (Dwight Yoakam).
Chev has been outfitted with an ABIOCOR TOTAL ARTIFICIAL HEART. It has an internal battery that will pick up once the battery belt dies. It’s like a reserve tank but only good for one hour.
The Abiocor is designed to keep you alive only for a couple of days while waiting for a transplant. It is not built for strenuous activity.
The internal battery charges wirelessly through the transcutaneous energy transfer system – two coils, one internal and one external that transmit power via magnetic force across the skin without piercing the surface. The internal coil receives the power and sends it to the controller device. Basically Chev has to keep his body electrically charged to keep his ticker running. Whereas in the first movie he needed adrenaline to stay alive, in Crank: High voltage he needs jolts of electricity to stay alive.
As many of you know, my father was one of the guinea pigs for the first generation of the Abiocor THR. He was patient 12 out of the initial 14. He lived for almost three months on it. It was only recently that the manufacturers, Abiomed, were able to get FDA approval to keep implanting the heart under a compassionate use exception. (Note that not only did they have to hire a lobbyist to petition the government to get this, they had to get the families of the original 14 men involved. I was videotaped for a presentation, and I wrote a three page letter to some bigwig at the FDA.) The company is now rolling out the Abiocor II, the second generation design based on the data learned from the first round of testing.
This is HUGE news. It’s a sad fact of life that diseases which afflict celebrities get more awareness than those which do not. (It wasn’t until Rock Hudson died that anyone really started giving a damn about AIDS.) If Crank 2 does indeed feature the Abiocor this will do amazing things towards raising public awareness of the potential of artificial hearts. Obviously the writers and producers are going to have to take a number of liberties with what this heart can actually do, but that’s not the point. You could have 1,000 newspaper articles about the Abiocor II and nobody would give a damn, but if it gets written into a hit action film it will enter the public consciousness, and this will benefit us all.
It should be noted that it is the massive profit potential for an artificial heart which prompts venture capitalists to fund this sort of experimental science. It’s the desire for profit on the part of the producers of the film which will make the public aware of the technology. And it was the fucking US government which almost sunk the whole thing by refusing to allow the company to continue to implant the devices under compassionate use.
Once again capitalism saves the world, despite the best efforts of Michael Moore and his “compassionate” government. And, I have no doubt, that when this heart becomes a reality, Michael Moore will be the first one to decry the “greed” of the people who just spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing it, and will turn to government (who almost killed the project) to “protect the public” from these “evil corporations.”
Here’s my challenge, Mike. You’re a fat bastard, you’re undoubtedly setting yourself up for heart disease. If the time comes when you find yourself in need of an Abiocor, I want you to decline it. After all, you wouldn’t want to get in bed with a corporation driven by a profit motive, would you?
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