The sight of a conspicuously planted product in a contemporary film is always jarring. It always says “the people who made this movie are on the take.” And yet brand names are inevitable in any contemporary setting. Products in a film should appear in the same way most products appear in real life, which is never in a way that pops out of the constant corporate stream-blur. My eyes glaze over when I see big-brand ads on a street or a billboard, and it shouldn’t be otherwise on a movie screen.

The attitude of the camera should always be, “Yeah, okay, a medium-sized Starbucks coffee is being sipped by the star of the film, but so what? Pay it no mind and listen to the dialogue.” It should be, at most, a tiny bit more than subliminal. Because once the appearance of a product registers, even for a second or two, the spell of the film is faintly disturbed because someone, you sense right away, has cut a deal.

I’m thinking about this because of what Brett Ratner said two days ago at an Advertising Age gathering about putting products into movies. The philosophy behind his company, Brett Ratner Brands, is to use “creativity and connectivity” and keep branding organic. Rather than trying to shoehorn a product into a scene, Ratner said the process needs to work the other way around, etc. But would Ratner even have a company like this or be talking to advertisers if he was really an advocate for keeping things sly and glancing and unobtrusive?

When did conspicuous product placement start appearing in films? I haven’t done the research but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was proven to have mainly begun in the ’80s, when TV executives began to migrate into producing features and running studios. Or in the ’90s, when the mentality of bottom-line corporate-think began to manifest more and more in films. I know that it was fairly unusual to spot a noticable brand of anything in movies of the ’70s.

I’ve always enjoyed the way Quentin Tarantino has created his own fictional brands for his films — Red Apple cigarettes, Big Kahuna burgers. But that’s another story and a whole different coin.

“The American dream is not totally dead, but it’s dying pretty fast. We’re not in good shape. On bad mornings I wake up and think that we’re turning into a Latin American country. But on good mornings I think, well, this is America. We’ve always in the past managed to turn ourselves around, and there is an FDR just around the corner if we could only find him. I was kind of hoping Obama might be FDR, but maybe not.” — N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman speaking on last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

And Maher says in a 9.25 Huffington Post-ing: “I don’t care about the president’s birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to ‘Yes we can.’ Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they’ve gotten is a dog.”

There was a rumble a while back about Weinstein Co. theatrical chief Tom Ortenberg leaving the company, but it was flatly denied so I let it go. Yesterday his resignation (for “personal reasons”) was officially announced, on top of news that the company had cut loose another 35 employees on Wednesday. Ortenberg, a good guy, will be announcing a new business endeavor in two or three weeks, I’m told. Here’s a Wall Street Journal assessment of upcoming Weinstein Co. releases. Bottom line: Nine‘s gotta do it or else.

Released 13 years ago to considerable acclaim and home-run financial success, Jerry Maguire remains Cameron Crowe‘s finest film. It’s easily one of the most soulful and emotionally affecting movies about a troubled, emotionally-repressed, elite-business-class, fraying-at-the-edges white guy ever made. The writing is robust, sharp and knowing, the secondary characters are tangy and angular, and there’s still no question that it contains Tom Cruise‘s career-best performance.

But something in me slightly winced when N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott included two of the film’s three classic lines — “You had me at hello” and “You complete me” — in this Critics Pick video piece. (Thankfully he didn’t include “show me the money.”) Because as spirited and resonant as these lines seemed in ’96, they’ve been repeated to death since, and it’s pretty much impossible now to “let them in.”

Which is a way of saying that whenever a movie catches on too well with mall culture, something is gradually lost. Jerry Maguire will always sit on my DVD/Blu-ray shelf, but seeing it fresh at the Jimmy Stewart theatre on the Sony Studios lot a few weeks before it opened in early December ’96 was, for me, one of those truly special encounters that can never be re-lived or re-savored. It was what it was back then, but it became too popular and too sentimentally branded in a People magazine sense, and now it’s something else, which is to say an overplayed vinyl record. You can go home again by re-watching Jerry Maguire from time to time, but not really.

Which reminds me — whatever happened to Crowe’s Hawaiian “volcano romance” movie that Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon were going to costar in, but which was withdrawn for a rewrite/re-think?

Here we go again…The Road, I Am Legend, Terminator 4, etc. A loner survivor, charred remnants of an extinct civilization, marauding gangs of zombie goons. Beware any plot synopsis that involves “protect[ing] a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind.” As well as purple narration that uses lines like “something-odd years ago, the war tore a hole in the sky.” The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington and directed by the Hughes brothers, opens on 1.10.10.

On 9.21 a Blu-ray disc of Rudolph Mate‘s The Black Shield of Falworth (’54), the medieval costumer in which Tony Curtis allegedly said “yondah lies the castle of my fodda,” came out on Amazon.uk. Except the line isn’t in the film. The belief that Curtis spoke it “clearly derives from American snobbery about Curtis’s [New York] origins,” says the BSOF Wikipedia page. “And yet Curtis did say a similar line in Son of Ali Baba (’52) that reads, ‘This is the palace of my father, and yonder lies the Valley of the Sun.'”

I didn’t even see Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low at Toronto, but it was clear early on that it had an impassioned critic fan base and that Robert Duvall‘s lead performance was being seen as award-worthy. But Sony Pictures Classics, which acquired it, will not be releasing Get Low this year and is planning a mid-2010 release.

So what’s happened to Michael Hoffman‘s The Last Station distribution-wise since it drew enthusiastic notices (particularly for Christopher Plummer‘s allegedly Best Actor-worthy performance as Leo Tolstoy) at the Telluride Film Festival nearly a month ago? I’ll tell you what’s happened — nothing. No deal, I mean, because the rights sellers are asking too much. Actually way too much, according to one source.

The other night I asked a hypothetical question of an acquisitions veteran who knew the score. If, in your estimation, the realistic market value of The Last Station is five dollars, what are sellers asking for? Fifteen, I was told. Included in the high price is an ironclad pledge to launch a Best Actor campaign for Plummer as well as Helen Mirren for Best Actress and somebody else (James McAvoy or Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting?).

An additional complication is that while The Last Station may sell tickets to the over-40 crowd, it’s a very linear and straightforward film, which is another way of saying it hasn’t been regarded by most critics who’ve seen it as being all that wise or hip. So there’s that as well.

The only slightly “off” element surrounding last night’s A Serious Man premiere was that it was happening under the auspices of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival. This suggests that Man traffics in a form of rollicking Milton Berle schtick when in fact it’s one of the greatest and darkest “no-laugh funny” movies of all time. It’s undeniably brilliant and masterful but almost all the humor is of the LQTM (“laughing quietly to myself”) variety. Which is actually the kind of humor I prefer.

I spoke to Michael Stuhlbarg, who truly needs to be in a Best Actor running for his performance as the relentlessly earnest and reasonable Larry Gopnik, and to Amy Landecker, who stands out in the film as Gopnik’s next-door neighbor — a kind of Jewishy Marlene Dietrich with a thing for pot and nude sunbathing.

Jonathan Mostow‘s Surrogates is the likely weekend champ among the new wide releases, according to today’s tracking. Surrogates has a First Choice Open & Release rating of 18 vs. an 11 for Fame and a 7 for Pandorum. The best films, as is often or usually the case, are among the limited or regional releases — Scott Hicks‘ The Boys Are Back (with a 70% Rotten Tomatoes rating), The Other Man, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and Stanley Tucci‘s Blind Date. I won’t even see Brief Interviews With Hideous Men until this evening.

Please forgive the sluggish postings. I’m looking around for the right place to move to and most of you presumably know what an all-consuming, tangled-up process this can be.