A Film With Heart
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:
Product placement is a type of advertising, in which promotional advertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. When featuring a product is not part of an economic exchange, it is called a product plug. Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books. It became more common starting in the 1980s, but can be traced back to at least 1949. Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand’s logo in shot, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product in shot. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.
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?
Comments
Answer me this. From a stistical standpoint, how do you determine someone dies SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE they don’t have health insurance?
What I mean by that is quite simple. Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate a point.
Suppose there’s a guy who smokes four packs a day, gets no exercise, and eats bacon at every meal. he dropped out of high school, works as a fork lift operator. He goes into hospital with a heart problem and, because of his lack of insurance, is denied care.
Are you going to sit there and tell me the reason this guy died is because he didn’t have health insurance? Because, by Michael Moore’s statistical counting (or whoever the group was whose numbers he used) that’s the answer.
Interesting you should bring up Advil. A product created by a greedy, evil, for-profit corporation.
Are you going to sit there and tell me the reason this guy died is because he didn’t have health insurance? Because, by Michael Moore’s statistical counting (or whoever the group was whose numbers he used) that’s the answer.
No, I totally agree with you. Thats why Im saying the 18,000 number is probably the highest possible number he could come up with, using the loosest parameters possible. Depending on his age, that guy is probably dying real soon, treatment or not.
But the argument Ive heard on here over and over is that your system is superior to ours (in Canada) because we have long wait times. And in the US, if you need care and cant pay for it, it wont be denied, you just may end up going bankrupt. So Im trying to figure out how that number could be anything other than 0. I guess a good hypothetical would be a perfectly healthy person gets treatable cancer, but is denied care.
Interesting you should bring up Advil. A product created by a greedy, evil, for-profit corporation.
Thats exactly why I brough it up. I dont think you have to wait for MM to need an Abiocor to ‘get him’. By your standards, if he has taken an advil, you are already there. I just dont think he is being as black and white as that. Saying that ALL corporations are evil. In fact, I think in the movie The Corporation, he actually said corporations can be a good thing (going from memory here). I just dont think he agrees that corporations are the answer to everything. Maybe Im drinking the kool-aid here, but it does seem like HMOs do have a bit of an evil streak to them.
But the argument Ive heard on here over and over is that your system is superior to ours (in Canada) because we have long wait times.
Who’s claiming superiority of a system? To me the issue at hand has always been that we’re not willing to trade the problems with our system for the problems in yours, just so we can be further under the thumb of government.
Who’s claiming superiority of a system? To me the issue at hand has always been that we’re not willing to trade the problems with our system for the problems in yours
I havent been around in a while, but thats definitely not the argument Ive heard in the past. That is a fair argument. Thanks Buzzion. You are right, both have problems, and its a matter of opinion (probably largely based on what you have grown up with) which you prefer.
just so we can be further under the thumb of government.
Thats not the reason why a lot of us prefer it. When they showed in Sicko some of the republican politicians speaking about the problems with socialized health care, things like, having to speak to some bureaucrat before being able to get into see a doctor, wow. I mean, I dont know if thats the kind of system the dems were planning in the US, but its really nothing like that here. Members of my family have spent considerable amounts of time in the hospital, and there was never any interaction with the govt.
With my families situation, everything may have gone exactly the same if we were living down there. My dad had an excellent job with full benefits when my mom had an anuerism in her brain rupture. So Im sure everything would have been fine with her. The only thing Im not sure about is that her nuerosurgeon ordered MRIs for my entire family (my moms brother also died of a brain anuerysm). Dont know if those would have been covered by most plans down there or not. They ended up finding an anuerysm in my younger sisters brain, and scheduled brain surgery right away. They said she could have gone the rest of her life without it rupturing (although it had caused headaches for a year or so), or it could have ruptured at anytime. It was something like, every year, the chances of it rupturing went up by 2% (something along those lines). Again, I wonder if there would have been an issue with getting something like that covered. I realize, from what Ive read on here, all of these procedures would have been done down there regardless, but I wonder if it would have bankrupted our family (brain surgery cant be cheap).
The issue is more the honesty of the system. I was in England/Ireland in Dec/January, and one of the news stories when they were reviewing last year was someone who, because of the wait to get to a doctor, didn’t have the neccessary tests for a treatable cancer until when the cancer had progressed too far to treat. Issues like that are not brought up honestly as a consideration for nationalised health care in debate here.
Up4Debate, You did have interaction with the government, every time someone in your family got paid. Health care isn’t cheap, and someone has to pay for it. In a system like Canada, isn’t it taxes that pay for it? Here in Maine, we already pay high taxes, and don’t get much in return.
Let’s say that someone finally decided to lead us down the Socialized Medicine Superhighway. The U.S. has ten times the population Canda has, so we’d have to build a pretty huge bureacracy to handle something like that, which would mean more taxes, more buildings, more unelected officials making decisions that we should be making for ourselves.
If you like your medical system up there, that’s great. I don’t think we have any business telling other countries what they should be doing. I just don’t think that your system would work down here.
glad we could all be mature an not resort to namecalling…
oh wait.
Is it really neccesary to call somebody a fat bastard? That’s a pretty immature way to get your point across.
That’s a pretty immature way to get your point across.
Indeed. Perhaps you have something substantial to add to the conversation, yourself...? Perhaps a refutation of Moore’s “free” healthcare, or a repudiation of Lee’s point that for-profit medicine helps us all?
Up4Debate, You did have interaction with the government, every time someone in your family got paid.
What I was referring to there was the scene in Sicko where a republican politician suggests one of the problems with socialized medicine is you may have to talk to ‘some bureacrat’ before being allowed to see a doctor. Thats not how it is up here.
Is it really neccesary to call somebody a fat bastard? That’s a pretty immature way to get your point across.
So true, after all, Michael “Stupid White Men” Moore would never do such a thing.
But Up4Debate, your money was handled by a bureaucrat. Socialized medicine can’t exist without forms, files, lists, Standard Operating Procedures, commissions, boards of review, managers, caseworkers, IT specialists, directors, analysts, and a few medical people. Just because you don’t have direct contact with them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
But Up4Debate, your money was handled by a bureaucrat. Socialized medicine can’t exist without forms, files, lists, Standard Operating Procedures, commissions, boards of review, managers, caseworkers, IT specialists, directors, analysts, and a few medical people. Just because you don’t have direct contact with them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
I am not under the impression that these people do not exist. All I was saying was that, contrary to what the one politician in the movie suggested might happen, up here, if I have to see my family doctor, or go to the ermergency room, I personally do not have to talk one on one with some bureaucrat for approval.
Your system of health care probably couldnt exist without all of those things as well, and then add in the insurance company. But other than medical staff, Im sure you never have to speak to any of the above either.
A lot of the bloated system is government-created. Again, just because you didn’t have to speak to a desk-jockey doesn’t mean there was no interaction. Someone approved your family’s claim, and then money that was taken from people in the form of taxes was used to pay that claim.
Let’s say that instead of approving the claim, the desk-jockey denied it. Would you appeal to the doctors, or to someone in a big government office?
Let’s say that instead of approving the claim, the desk-jockey denied it. Would you appeal to the doctors, or to someone in a big government office?
You mean in our system in Canada? I can’t say I have ever heard of such a thing happening, so I wouldnt really know. You are normally told up front if something is not covered (cosmetic surgery for example).
The only time I have ever been told something wasnt covered was when I had to have dental xrays done. But that was in dealing with a private insurance company, not the government.
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First of all, Crank was pretty bad. Snatch was such a good movie, and Jason Statham was so good in it, I want to give him a chance everytime he comes out with a new movie. Oh well.
Anyway.
I think youre going a little overboard here. No? If you really think you’re not, I think just challenging him to never take an Advil would get the same results. Or challenging you to never never use a govt service.
I actually just watched Sicko for the first time last night. I can see where the exagerations are (Id bet anyway). Still, pretty scary. It says 18,000 people a year in the US die because they dont have insurance. Im sure that number is exagerated. But from everything Ive learned on here about your system, that number should be 0, no? If nobody is ever refused treatment for anything, regardless of their ability to pay, how could it be anything other than 0?