When a movie character needs to find something online he or she usually surfs on over to Google.com.
Who doesn’t?
Not Capt. Colter Stevens, the hero of the upcoming science fiction film “Source Code.”
When it’s time for the good Captain to do a little Web research, he punches Bing.com into a smart phone. Needless to say the camera lingers on the Bing.com home page for quite some time before the search begins.
“Source Code” from “Moon” director Duncan Jones hits theaters nationwide April 1. “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” Morgan Spurlock’s documentary on film product placement, opens in select cities April 22.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Every time I hear or read the word “Bing” my first thought is Groundhog’s Day.
>>Who doesn’t?>>
Two thumbs pointing back at this guy. Been avoiding Google and using Bing since the fine lefties at Google routinely starting acting like landmark and important anniversaries like 9/11 and Veterans’ Day don’t happen. All while seemingly every other search engine pay their respective respects, and Google celebrates such important events like the invention of the Rubik’s cube or John Lennon’s birthday. Gotta love freedom of choice.
Gory – I think of Chandler Bing
Eric – How do you like Bing?
Quite happy with it. Really like their different theme days and all the cool factoids and pics which accompany them. Aside from those shinier bells and whistles, Search engine definitely rivals Google, too.
I use Bing 90% of the time, then if I am looking for different/broader info, I will Google.
I always think of Chandler Bing, too!
Hey, Apple mastered this art of cluttering the silver screen with its products over and over and over again. It’s been done so often I got sick of it years ago. I bet if Apple would’ve run a search engine, every single movie character would use this one single search engine. Over and over and over again.
I’ve wondered if maybe all advertising could be by product-placement, but for a lot of products it probably wouldn’t get enough repetitions without being far too intrusive. But Bing’s wasting its money, with me at least. Their ads sorta imply you’re too stupid to narrow your own searches (I actually consider narrowing my searches to be something of a sport). Though I agree that Google basically thinks they get to Orwellian memory-hole any sites they don’t like, I find that too many of their other services, like how their calculator also does unit-conversions, are too useful to pass up.
As for Source Code, though, I only like time travel when it involves phone booths or Deloreans (seriously, Back to the Future and Bill and Ted are some of the most severely underrated films of all time), but this seems like it might not involve actual time travel as much as some sort of replaying the past. Then again, I’m the sort of person who says things like, “If an object changes its orientation in the fourth dimension it turns inside-out” and “Any matter traveling backward in time becomes antimatter, according to the Feynman-Stuckelberg interpretation of quantum physics (yes, really).” A nerd, basically.
I’m not 100% on this, but I think that Bing is the default that the phone’s browser opens to. Still, it is on purpose. I like to think of it as a little comment from Duncan Jones comparing Stevens’s situation and our own.
That shameless product placement was extremely annoying. Now the whole movie smells like microsoft.
Couldn’t you at least try to make it subtle? For example, “bung!” or “qing!” would relax it, and at the same time hint that the whole story is taking place in a parallel universe. But I guess you think that it’s too intellectual for an average hollywood junk consumer?
I doubt there’s a company on this planet that would pay for product placement that doesn’t actually feature their product.