Toy company executives might want to give filmmaker Eric Moyer a call. Moyer, the writer-director of 2005’s A Halfway House Christmas (featuring narration by Bobcat Goldthwait), has crafted the best possible ad for those hot-pink Barbie cars, the plastic, kid-sized, battery-powered vehicles that terrorize the nation’s sidewalks during the warm weather months. Using Matthew McConaughey’s much-mocked ads for the Lincoln as a template, Moyer has filmed a brilliant little commercial parody featuring his own daughter, Michelle, as the spokeswoman.
Drawing upon the spirit of McConaughey that dwells within all drivers, great and small, the precocious child waxes philosophical about her choice of vehicle. “I’ve been driving a Barbie car since long before anybody paid me to drive one,” she says with true McConaughey-esque conviction. “I didn’t do it to be cool. I didn’t do it to make a statement. I just liked it,” she continues. The director augments this monologue with contemplative, slow-motion shots of the Barbie Power Wheels Jeep drifting lazily through the frame, in no particular hurry to arrive anywhere. Or maybe that’s as fast as those things can go.
The ad is an eerie, shot-for-shot evocation of a real-life Lincoln ad called “I Just Liked It.” In this indelible, 30-second spot, a dreamy-eyed McConaughey, wearing a suit fit for a fancy funeral, drives along a winding desert road in his Lincoln SUV while pondering the imponderables of vehicle ownership. His monologue is nearly identical to that delivered in the parody, but the Oscar-winning actor says his lines as if he were Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. Moyer’s parody undercuts the overbearing pretension of the original commercial. By swapping a Barbie Jeep for an SUV and replacing McConaughey with a little girl, Moyer both literally and figuratively cuts this ad campaign down to size.
[via Laughing Squid]