Brad Pitt has a new movie out this month, The Heart of the Beast, about an emotionally damaged man who forms a life-saving bond with a dog. If that sounds familiar, maybe it is because you have seen The Call of the Wild. Or maybe it is because you have seen A Dog’s Way Home.
Or maybe it is because you have seen Dog. Or, look, you get the idea. But perhaps Brad Pitt knows that getting people to see something as unimaginative as The Heart of the Beast is an uphill struggle, because that would explain why he has just made an advert that looks and feels much more like the Brad Pitt dog movie that deserves to be made.
In short, it is an advert where Brad Pitt gets loudly disparaged by a number of dogs for an extended period of time. As reported by Variety, the commercial is for the De’Longhi Magnifica Duo, an all-singing, all-dancing coffee machine that retails in the UK for about £700. But really the product is beside the point.
The main point is that the advert, running to almost two minutes, sees Brad Pitt stumble around cluelessly while a small army of real dogs – all of whom have names, some of whom are dressed in human clothes – shout insults at him. As he wanders into his living room, some of the dogs (in subtitle) tell him that he woke up too late. They tell him to make a hot coffee and, even though he has started to make a cold one, he drops his head and sullenly obliges.
Then another dog says that he can’t have any coffee at all until his attitude improves. The dogs berate him for his slovenliness and his stupidity and, when he finally snaps and tells them to go and fetch a stick, they make him fetch a stick for them instead. It is slightly reminiscent of that bizarre Chinese commercial for Chinese vitamins from a few years back, when Tom Hiddleston cooks you breakfast before looking straight into your eyes and promising that he’s going to have sex with you.
The difference is that, while you could tell that Hiddleston desperately hoped that nobody would see his ad, Pitt’s has been made for an American market. He wants you to see this. Of course, it helps that the weirdness is deliberate.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
