Sylvester Stallone made a branded luxury snake/sword/skull “Chaos” pen. Somehow that fact is less embarrassing than the pen’s trailer.
You should really watch the pen’s trailer.
After you clicked “play”, your life changed. You now throb with desire for a Chaos pen. You must possess it. You wield money before you, like a lantern splitting the darkness, seeking a path to a life of Chaotic scribbling. But I am sorry, My Dear Hotdogger. It is no longer possible to buy this pen. They sold out all four versions of Sylvester Stallone CHAOS WRITING INSTRUMENTS.
I love knowledge. I also resent the imposition of knowledge of luxury products. Luxury product information hijacks a functional brain. My head’s whirring Noggin Gears process any input. This often serves me well. My thoughts stop me from falling through open manholes, or watching films lacking Pierce Brosnan.
However, my brain also processes the most obscene fruits of capitalism’s tree. If you show me the pricing for Chaos Writing Instruments, I will optimize it. I’ll leap from never conceiving that these items existed, to thinking “silver is mid.” After all, one golden Chaos Pen is worth a dozen silver Chaos Pens. That is true, because of math. But I should not feel like Sylvester Stallone sells the silver pens in friggin’ egg cartons, or soda twelve-pack cardboard, or some other shame packaging for the hoi polloi. The beautiful precious metal silver is valuable. Luxury Brain sneers at it like it’s a grade school crafts project by Not Your Kid. I was happier, yesterday, without that mindset. Yesterday I felt like a new baseball hat is a splurge. For real: I was wracked with angst about the expensiveness of a minor league baseball hat, even though my approach to making TikToks makes it a business expense. But that was the Old Me. The plebeian Pre-Chaos Pen Me. Now I question anyone using a silver (yuck) Chaos Pen. You bought the silver pen, [spoken in a kleptocrat voice where this phrase has the opposite meaning] in this economy?
Anyway that’s the products in the trailer. Er, most of them. There’s also (spoiler) a wristwatch. Here is how the trailer for Mostly Pens begins:
IDEAS. Ideas are what these pens are all about. Your current pens are trash because whoever made them forgot to think about big ideas during pen-ufacturing. Have you noticed when you pick up your current pen, and write something, the thing you wrote is not a BIG IDEA? That’s because the pen came from a factory assembly line with zero nozzles to squirt-insert concepts in its shaft part. A shaft of squirty ideas, narrated by the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Because the pen is “designed by Sylvester Stallone.” The trailer says so, in the most normie font possible, beside an illegible haunted hayride special effect title of the word “Chaos”, probably.
I wanted to make GIFs of the funniest transitions, smoke-fades, and whirligigs of this trailer. That was impossible. I’d have to make hundreds of overlapping GIFs of every second. Just watch it, please. It’s a journey. You will often think the video peaked. Then you’ll look at the YouTube progress bar. Then you’ll steel yourself for the next four-fifths. This trailer is wall-to-wall MOMENTS. It flies us through gloomy sagebrush under a full moon to behold a desert skeleton, and THEN it starts getting wild.
I never thought I’d miss the calm, measured stability of a crystal skulls book by two Floridians who broke off their situationship between UFO sightings. Those former lovebirds took their time. They titrated out their skulls tantra-style. Sylvester Stallone’s pen partners reject this philosophy. They barrel forward into their chief design motifs of snakes, skulls, skull-swords, snake-swords, whatever combinations are left over, and lizards.
I math’d the timecodes. That image comes 40.7% of the way through this trailer. The giant burning snake/sword/skele-pen is, in a dramatic sense, an early step of Act Two. On with the show:
Thank you, close-ups of the previous close-up. I wasn’t sure how many reptile motifs and bone molds we’re dealing with here. Also is that skull being blessed by the exact reptilian paw of The Geico Gecko? Still: this is powerful filmmaking. They allow the WRITING INSTRUMENT to SPEAK FOR ITSELF. It’s that old maxim of “show don’t tell.”
Sure. Let’s also tell. Show AND tell! Maybe bring this to grade school “show and tell”, if your plutocrat divorced dad has you that week. At the very least, show it to me. Despite how many times I’ve watched this trailer, I’ve barely seen the actual pen. Instead of filming or photographing the pen, they poured a vast yet insufficient budget into CGI-ing it. It’s as if McDonald’s stopped advertising pictures of their food, and started making cutscenes of it. Why not show me the pen in real life? The next minute-plus of trailer is closer and closer shots of a computer animated replica pen. The polygons are inescapable.
Sincere question: is purple fire a thing? Can you burn specific chemical elements to generate it? I refuse to look it up. MONTEGRAPPA faked some purple fire with Italian Adobe software, and I refuse to let that prompt me to research my question’s answer. I’m busy. I’m busy trying to figure out whether the actual ballpoint pen is this basic-looking on its writing end.
Banks have more interesting pen tips. I’m flabbergasted. This pen costs thousands of British quid, and THAT’S what’s under the cap? Awful. And fantastic. I love that, for everyone but the pen’s owner. Every one of these pens causes an exquisite unboxing letdown, because this pen has a cap. Imagine a customer receiving their CHAOS PEN. Marveling at its CHAOS DESIGN. But then, they open the CHAOS CAP, to discover a COMMONPLACE, CUSTOMARY, CAPITAL ONE CAFÉ-ASSED BALLPOINT. Many congratulations, Chaos Pen Owner. Each time you uncap this pen, its surface area turns forty percent more ORDERLY.
In the trailer’s next shot, they reveal this little skull on the cap clip. The skull has wings. I think. That’s what they’re going for. But it looks like the skull of Bozo The Clown, in a universe where skull protuberances dictated his hairstyle. Which bozo designed this pen anywa–
Oh right. That informative shot leads to rapid shots of Pen Parts, plus purple fire, and soundtrack escalation. It’s a lot. It’s too much. And I found the next shot informative, because my mind spilled all its information several “insert → text → ugly” software commands ago.
This hints at one challenge for the trailer. The challenge: the product is a pen. People have pens. Selling someone a luxury pen is like selling someone an extra clothing pocket. I walked out of the house with enough pockets on my person. Or I have a bag. Either way that’s bad news for your sales pitch. Once you’ve got that hill to climb, you might as well draw a weapon and rob me. Robbery is a crime. But it’s more likely to get my money than selling me a luxury pocket, with a pitch about The Power Of The Car Keys Not Falling On The Ground.
After that we “transition → fireball → low res” to the pen version of a Microsoft Solitaire victory screen. They unfurl as many Writing Instruments as possible. It looks like the gun-knife peacock thing on the poster for the first Expendables movie. That parallel suggests creative involvement from Sylvester Stallone. That’s the biggest surprise of this trailer. Don’t get me wrong: Sly’s recycling an idea. He copy-pasted it for the Italian pen guys long after that movie came out. When this trailer dropped, Stallone was two films into an Expendables franchise. He was and is a star. He made a big movie every year of the 2010s. So I doubt he delayed pre-production on Creed 1 or Exp3ndabl3s or A 5th Friggin Rambo Movie to hop on a transatlantic Skype brainstorm about pens. He let the pen guys fly solo from here. They solo’d a next beat of “the pen visits Ancient Rome.”
There is more than an entire minute of trailer to go. They fill twenty seconds of it by repeating all the “pen visits Ancient Rome” shots, in reverse order. This is a terrible choice, because sometime around the Ancient Rome part, the animator found the “3D → rotate → too fast” command in their dropdowns. This sequence is nauseating, and THEN it pulls a directional switcheroo mid-carnival ride.
That’s the next beat after the Roman Vomit Comet. The pens get disintegrated by Lasers But Boring. Then, the trailer recycles those lasers as they recycle some text.
Those text splashes are two separate messages. The trailer follows a text splash of “And Now…” with a text splash of “And Now…”. You cannot be this discombobulated in front of an audience. Those are the exact words and pacing of a magician who swears the trick didn’t get stuck like that when he practiced it one of the times.
Abracadabra.
Abraca-more skulls. Feel the CHAOS of the INTERIOR BONUS SKULL, impressing a skull on your sleeve! Or that wrist brace you wear sometimes!
Did you know they don’t make good watches in Italy? I sure didn’t! But these guys drove north a few hours to a better country to get their watch gears, because…CHAOS. IDEAS! RECYCLING THE RECYCLED EXPENDABLES IDEA FROM BEFORE!!
Honestly? Good for Sylvester Stallone. He got this opportunity by being a movie star. He became a movie star by outworking full-time writers, and making at least one movie my dad loved. Sly is himself a dad. A dad to countless faildaughters, according to the Paramount Plus ads they make me watch because I didn’t buy Deep Space Nine on physical media. Sly isn’t just working for his own enrichment. He’s supporting Sylvestra and Sylveena and Stallette. Cashing in on Skullwatches and Snakepens is better than the other ways he could fund his family. So I sincerely want what’s best for Sly. I’ve also never checked if he’s cancellable and I’ll ride that blessed ignorance for a while. And here’s another thing I mean sincerely: Sylvester Stallone is too talented to associate with this pen company. He’s a legitimate filmmaker with basic competence. But I dug a tiny bit deeper into his partners, and watched the next listed video on their YouTube account. Turns out they’re the least competent luxury brand on all of social media.
If you’re a luxury brand, media is your entire job. Media in all its forms, from going viral online to generating “Devil Wears Prada”-type fashion spreads. My Dear Hotdogger, MONTEGRAPPA is so far below the level of every fashion thing you’ve ever seen. MONTEGRAPPA’s trailer for MONTEGRAPPA is lower quality than the last hundred YouTube videos you’ve watched. I linked the video before and I’ll link it again but don’t watch it. Or maybe watch it with the sound off? About 80% of the shots do not have sound that lines up with the picture. It’s that busted. The guy’s mouth doesn’t move in time with his own voice. I also learned something watching this, because I’ve never seen a video where 80% of the sound isn’t synced. I’ve only watched videos where 0% or 100% is offline. It turns out an 80% misalignment feels far worse than 100%. If this video was always messed up, I could pretend this is a spaghetti Western with that funky dubbing that’s kind of its own aesthetic. But in this case, you can’t play that game. Just when my brain recalibrated for the problem, and implemented my headcanon, I got jolted out of it by a rare shot they fixed.
According to this video, Montegrappa makes their pens in a beautiful villa. The CEO tells us this as they cut to… a suburban medical building plus loading dock.
Then the CEO says they’ve made pens in this location for more than a century. I am a bit of a historian myself. So I tried to remember if anything significant happened between this video’s upload date (2013) and the previous hundred-plus years. I believe the years that start with “19” feature a few significant Italian political choices. Before I could google to check, the CEO shared an interesting take. He says they assembled their pens through Italy’s difficult times. Even the times when, direct quote, “Italians heroically defended their country during two world wars.” The next shot is footage of guys fighting – “heroically” – in World War Two. This pen sales video is capital-F Fascist.
Next, the CEI (Chief Executive Il Duce) says Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos swung through Montegrappa’s region during World War One. Therefore, “legend says” those novelists were the first users of Montegrappa pens. Then the CEI’s words, and eventually his mouth, welcome you to a shot of a worse showroom than your tri-county Nissan dealer.
Behold the showroom’s “Icons” pens. These pens celebrate Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, and other men whose estates signed on the dotted line.
Guess what style of music soundtracks that Bruce Lee pen, and no other part of the video. You guessed right! And one Montegrappa celebrity partner stands above the rest. Mostly because they stood up a UPS Store banner of his face in the lobby.
The video gets more disappointing from here. It disappoints with its celebrity tie-ins AND its geopolitical preferences. Did you know Montegrappa sells a branded pen for the Paulo Coelho novel The Alchemist? I’ll bet that fits that novel’s message! Next up: a Montegrappa pen played an exciting role in world history.
That’s right: they PROMOTE their role in Boris Yeltsin signing legal documents that put Vladimir Putin in charge. Are you going to ponder that for even a split second? No! You will not! This video whisks you to a next shot of the CEI. They also leave in a first part of the shot where he’s waiting for his cue before he starts walking toward the camera. Also, his mouth is multiple entire seconds ahead of his voice. So as the CEI tries to look cool in the pen workshop, his voice and the captions laud this century’s worst authoritarian.
Then there’s one more shot, featuring Signore CEI’s office…
…which might not be nicer than your bosses’ office, at your job. If your boss has one desk toy AND a Formula 1 poster in a generic frame, he’s as glamorous as this Italian executive who ran out of Sylvester Stallone pens.
Does the CEI thrill you with passion style and sophistication that make up the soul of Italy? Are you transported to a higher realm of Italian luxury? Yes? You are? Excellent. Now give this man forty thousand American dollars, in exchange for getting that money back minus transaction fees, because Rocky Pens With Bozo Clips are out of stock forever. Nothing says “luxury” more than that…and I’d like to see PoxCo TRY to prove me wrong.
Special thanks to Cyberzone for the hot dog tip.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, designer of Nitrate, the only pen that’s just a hot dog. It writes with genuine hot dog water for as long as the dog stays wet. $12,000 USD.