NBA Finals: 5 things to know before Game 5

2. Anthony Davis deserves better than Pixels

(Yes, this is a tangent. But it’s important.)

Look, there’s nothing wrong with athletes (or celebrities) getting their cross-promotion on. Sure, there are limits — an athlete pitching for a weapons contractor would be a bummer, I’d say — but for the most part calls of “sell-out” just seem childish. There’s nothing ideal or fun about athletes and corporate pitching — well, except for low-budget ads for local businesses — but it’s more money in the pockets of people who put their long-term health on the line each and every time they play, and that’s good.

All that said, the Anthony Davis Pixels ad breaks my heart.

Anthony Davis is a basketball marvel, someone who commands your attention at every moment. He’s a treasure, a phenom. And Pixels? Pixels looks like an abomination. It looks ill-planned and joyless and aggressively shoddy. I won’t be surprised if the post-credits scene is Adam Sandler setting money on fire while ridiculing the audience for having paid to see such a neon-slathered corpse of creativity.

I’m not even going to say that Pixels, as a concept, is outright horrible. Video games are in, the ’80s are always in, and the idea of sending pop-culture artifacts into space is at least based in enough reality to make for a flimsy, passable premise. But from the trailers, everything looks more wrong-headed than a Lynn Merritt PR move (that’s a callback to a classic, y’all). Hey, look, it’s the creator of Pac-Man being chased by his creation! That’s hi-larious, because it is. It appears to be making the same mistake that the garbage-fire that was Premium Rush made: attempting to appeal to a subculture by simply referencing its visible, obvious parts — in the case of Premium Rush, bikes — instead of delving into the actual people involved in the subculture.

Because a Pixels-esque movie could work. If you threw in cameos from Walter Day, Billy Mitchell, and Robert Mruczek, you could get the audience eating right out of your hand. But instead of trying to understand the people who love classic arcade games, Pixels just seems to want to say, “Hey, I bet we can name some games that you remember.” It’s a gesture void of both effort and human connection, and it saddens me that Davis wasn’t given a better vehicle to cross-promote with.

(Michelle Monaghan also deserves better, but that’s a whole nother story.)

Next: 1. Nobody knows anything. Trust nothing