Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Straight on for You

Whats up with movie posters these days?? Yeah, big head/floating head movie posters have been around for years, and nobody likes them, but now it seems like they're being taken to a completely different level, or, what we can call big-face-and-nothing-else-at-all movie posters. Now we're seeing posters that literally have a picture of the stars head- and nothing else. No stupid city scape underneath them, no supporting actors getting in their way, just their big face straight on, it's crazy! Just today I saw the new posters for Benjamin Button at the theater, and yeah it's cool how the words are backwards, but the posters are literally just pictures of Brad and Cate...and thats it. And duh I'd love a big poster of Cate Blanchett any day, but these are terrible. The font being the biggest problem, even I knew to stop using those fonts when I was like 14. For a movie with such a unique storyline, we really have these to show for it all? The Star Trek posters are exactly the same, but much prettier. I like the greyscale, it's good. Too bad I don't care about Star Trek. Except isn't Winona in this one? I'd like a big poster of her face ha, they prob won't make one though. Anyways, the worst has GOT TO BE the one for Seven Pounds, a movie that, as far as I can tell, is nothing but Will Smith's head bobbing around, which i really wouldn't doubt. It's probably because I can't stand Will Smith at all, but the poster is soo bad, I can't believe it. If we look back a few months we see that Pineapple Express did the same thing, albeit funnier, and with Seth Rogen (so it's okay). These ones could almost be a parody of the big-face-and-nothing-else posters of now except it came out months before these did...so I don't really know what they were trying to do. Atleast though, in these, the actors actually have expressions, expressions that have to do with their character and all, can't say that much for Will Smith, Brad Pitt, and Cate Blanchett. Lets hope not anyway, can't imagine what their characters would be like. Anyways, the poster for Knocked Up did this as well, with style, and first maybe? I'm probably wrong haha, but thats one of the first that I can remember. This probably isn't the first set of posters that this has happened too, but it's so obvious I had to say something. Here's the group of posters I mentioned:


























What is that?! And duhhhh Josh these are all just teasers, right, stop crying- NO. It's sad because they probably work on most people, a huge picture of who is in it, but they really tell us nothing about the actual movie, something a teaser is supposed to hint at. All I'm saying is that I can see why they would do that, it just sucks that they have to, and that they actually do. Expect to see more of these around.
Everyone seems to have such a big head these days huh? Maybe if everyones stories were told, the only way to really represent it would be a picture of their big, fat head and nothing else.

2 comments:

littlej said...

SO TRUE!
This designer woman Gail Anderson came to speak at my school and she showed test posters she did for Benjamin Button but the studio didn't wind up using them. They were absolutely beautiful. She did actually just use the headshot of Brad [which is really boring] but she did all this gorgeous hand-written text on top of the face and it just looked so much better than the cheap mirror-text gimmick they used.

Joshua said...

I'm so jealous you got to see that!! And to hear her speak at all, that's awesome. I'm so dissapointed with the ones the studio picked, it's comforting to know someone actually did make good ones for it haha. The film is going to be incredible, I wish the posters would reflect that!!