Mickey Rourke's Old Japanese Commercials

Mickey Rourke is riding high. Thanks to The Wrestler, he's got as good a shot as anyone to win the highest honor in his profession, he just picked up the BAFTA earlier tonight, and with the newfound (or rediscovered) respect for his talent has come a parade of job offers, including Iron Man 2, The Expendables, the remake of 13, and the just-announced St. Vincent with director Walter Hill.

But I wonder if Daihatsu will give him some work again. The automaker was one of several advertisers (along with the celeb-friendly Suntory) to hire Rourke for a series of Japanese commercials back in the day. Of course, hundreds of actors have wound up pitching products on Japanese TV; the money is just that good. Still, you can't help but think these advertisers didn't get their money's worth out of Mickey. He's kind of phoning in these commercials. He certainly wouldn't win a BAFTA, that's for sure.

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Brad Pitt, Japan's Answer to the Verizon Guy

It's hardly a secret that big time American movie stars sometimes supplement their already enormous salaries by taking a day's pay filming commercials in Japan. There's an extremely funny scene in Lost in Translation that plays off of that fact.

Brad Pitt has been making commercials in the Land of the Rising Sun for over a decade, shilling for jeans companies, Honda, Rolex, a bank, and a tasty beverage. Now he's got a new phone commercial, which was directed by Wes Anderson. I can understand overpaying Pitt to show up in your commercial, but Anderson literally just pans the camera twice, once to obscure an edit, and then there are some cuts at the end to get a product close up. And yet, it's exactly what you'd think a Wes Anderson commercial would look like, so he killed it with simplicity, I guess. Here's the commercial, posted on Friday at Defamer:

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The NBA: Where 'Zohan' Happens

You Don't Mess With the Zohan doesn't look like much in trailers and the concept is not entirely appealing either: A former Isreali Mossad agent (Adam Sandler) changes careers and chases his dream: He becomes a hairstylist in New York. And then I saw this brilliant new TV commercial running during the NBA playoffs. It mocks the league's current splitscreen campaign that features two players from opposing teams talking about what the playoffs mean in exactly the same terms.

And in this spoof, that's Baron Davis of your Golden State Warriors on the right.

Zohan takes a little off the top on June 6th.