Aside from the bag of Burger King Kids Meals toys I got at the Superman Returns junket (disappointing, to say the least), it’s been ages since I’ve gotten promo items from a movie studio. Forget the dozen or so films they haven’t screened for us so far this year. No matter the proliferation of fan boys’ blurbs on the ads. What really makes me afraid that critics are history is when they don’t even try to cloud our minds with childish crap.So I was pleased and, as usual, suspicious when I received a UPS Express envelope from Fox’s marketing department last week. Inside, I found a pair of stills for an upcoming movie entitled John Tucker Must Die, and a white, lacy woman’s thong. I’m no expert in such matters, but the latter seemed to me a quality item (it had small embroidered blue and yellow flowers).
Common sense would say: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Just appreciate it. But I know better. These things are a form of communication, a message from Them, the studios, to Us, the lowly working press.
For clues, I examined the thong. Attached to it was a tag with an illustration of a young woman wearing a T-shirt on which was printed DON’T GET MAD. GET EVEN. She had a tattoo of the film’s name on her lower back and was wearing a pair of white cotton underpants. She was not wearing the thong in question.
I then checked out the stills. Shirtless schoolboys, thongs evident above their shorts (“whale tail,” I believe it’s called), are lined up on a basketball court. The caption: JOHN TUCKER (JESSE METCALFE), CAPTAIN OF THE HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL TEAM, CONVINCES HIS PLAYERS THAT WEARING A THONG WILL HELP SHARPEN THEIR GAME IN JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE.
For that, he must die? Why? If I donned the thong, would it “sharpen my game”? Would I die? Clearly, they are trying to lure us, the critics, into putting it on. For our few female colleagues, it would perhaps not be inappropriate. But for the men? Not that a lot of us would need our arms twisted to try it, but I fear it may be some form of entrapment, luring critics into a taboo act with promises of a “sharper game,” or daring us with threats of death, and then revealing some of us as the fat-assed idiots we really are.
I’m troubled. But I’m still glad I got it.
