Meet the Lucky Ones

Meet the Lucky Ones has to be the most beautiful car commercial ever made. This series of 50 30-second films follows four generations of an American family (plus a neighbor, a laundromat gigolo, a Danish exchange student and a doomed frog) in a sweet portrayal of semi-functional suburban living. Protagonists like Estelle, the family matriarch who shoots grouse and practices karate chops to complete her “100 things to do before I die” list, keep the films firmly rooted in the indie-cinema trend of driving a story by the quirks of its characters. Amazingly, product placement is kept to a bare minimum; the brand name is never uttered throughout. The project has scored Mercury a record amount of Web-site hits, but the real victory is the use of advertising dollars to fund something that qualifies as art.