Cannes commercials are back!

It was the Apple commercial that touched our collective hearts and put St. Albert on the map, sort of. The 90-second spot titled Misunderstood featured an extended family coming together for a Christmas celebration.

One teen, however, seems less involved in the reunion and more wrapped up in his cellphone. Come Christmas morning, however, everyone is gathered around the tree as the boy plays the video that he made for them while they thought he was just being antisocial. It shows the family in the very moments of their reunion: kids playing in the snow, kisses and hugs, and everything else.

If your eyes are still dry at the end of it, well, then perhaps you just don't have a soul. Or maybe you're immune to the heartstring-plucking ploys of the advertising agency TBWA/Media Arts Lab. They toyed with your emotions so well that the ad won a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial last summer, and then it was honoured as a Silver Lion at the Cannes Lions Awards for creativity in advertising.

Watch it here

It was reportedly partly filmed in this fair burg during a particularly splendorous winter. All of the Cannes winners are now playing at the Metro Cinema as part of the screening compilation known across the metropolitan area as The World's Best Commercials.

They really are the world's best commercials. After all, they don't just give out Cannes Lions Awards to anybody.

The annual awards demonstrate the myriad ways that people and companies try to sell us things. Frankly, it's impressive to watch, sometimes fun and sometimes just really depressing how much money, time and talent is spent on the ridiculousness of beer commercials.

Honestly, I can't stand commercials because of how manipulative they can be and are, but there's a lot to admire about the artfulness of the storytelling, or the mind-boggling creativity, or the incredible sense of humour that can be expressed through this very unusual and unique medium.

The importance of always having milk in your own fridge, especially when you live next to a cat lady.

The commercials in this screening are a microcosm of all of the world's commercials: they run the gamut. You'll enjoy the pranksterism of a team of advertisers fooling people at an airport to think that they couldn't leave the bathroom, all to promote an anti-diarrheal drug. There's a series of car commercials that do a pretty decent job of convincing you that you get what you pay for, so it's best not to get the discount shark cage.

There's the simple ad that shows how roosters can demonstrate stability in a luxury vehicle, as they perform a dance of sorts to a hit disco track. And there's that Apple ad that does a convincing job of proving that cellphones can be good too, if even for one shining moment despite how they pull your teens far away from you, the family, and the present world the rest of the time.

The ads go from serious to comedic, absurd to hyper-real, and pensive to patently idiotic, and they're all worth a watch, if only once. The ones I can't stand, however, are the ones that seem to prey on normal, unsuspecting people, like that aforementioned bathroom in the airport.

There's even an ad that recognizes this trend and spins it to its next logical steps. “The most powerful emotion we have isn't love. It's fear,” the ad states at the beginning, before it shows a couple being awoken out of bed by intruders. The commercial is actually for an ad agency, and I sure hope that it's a spoof. I can't really tell though but it does make me a bit troubled for the future. Thank goodness that I don't own a television.