What do you do when you’re stuck on a plane with nothing to read? You ask somebody else for a magazine. When that magazine is “People” and your name is Max Lanman ’10, something comes of that.

The front page article on “Brangelina” amused Lanman so much that he was compelled to write a song, and after that, direct a music video.

“Brangelina” is Lanman’s R’n B tribute to celebrity culture and the trend of which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been at the forefont: adopting kids. The chorus is catchy as hell, and after hearing it once, you’ll be humming it for days.

The song is an extended plea for the celebrities to pick another child for adoption: Lanman. “I would love to be their kid,” he said, despite some of the lewder references in the video.

Whereas most student films have low resolutions and poor sound quality, “Brangelina” benfits Laman’s samurai sword-sharp sense of directing. The lighting is skillfully done, and the sound is very clear.

The film was of high quality because the crew was able to use equipment such as a steadycam and a crane borrowed from the Film School. “I got to do a lot of fun stuff that you normally wouldn’t get to do in a little student short,” said Chris Ripley ’10, the director of photography.

The film, however, manages to retain the lightness of a student piece and is often very funny. Scenes that instantly stick in the memory abound; at one point Lanman, George Washington (Julian Kantor ’11) and Abraham Lincoln (Jay Dockendorf ’11) end up humping a piano. Particularly impressive, too, are the clapping dancers whom the crew met on the street during filming.

Pippa Bianco ’11, who plays Angelina Jolie in the video, said she enjoyed working with Lanman, but the scene where she is coddling Lanman after breast-feeding was not her idea. “He didn’t tell me about that when he asked me to do it,” she said.

Lanman hopes that the video will “go viral” on youtube.com with more than 10,000 hits. “This is more geared toward the general public,” he said. “The fact that celebrities are involved will mean it instantly gets a lot of hits.”

The video should be up now at: http://www.youtube.com/user/OrangeRhymePictures.