I’ve been ruminating on The Town, Ben Affleck’s directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, and it seems a curious choice that the poster and billboard art for the Warner Bros. film features those rubber-faced nun robbers. They grab one’s attention, to an extreme degree, and it just doesn’t translate, on an elemental level; it muddies the water too much, and along with its nondescript title makes the film seem like more of a horror film — or at least opens it up to the interpretation of such, to a casual driver or passerby at a bus stop. It’s a great “give” in the trailer, sure, those images, but not in the print art. I guess it’s meant to be an evocation of the Point Break poster, but that was a more much rooted visual reference, whereas the masks here seem warped/melting, and more overtly creepy. I guarantee some middle-of-the-country impressionable boomers just bought a ticket for the Wall Street sequel instead.
I think you’re right about some middle-of-the-country impressionable boomer not getting it, but who cares about that guy? Apparently not Affleck and Co. since there’s an obvious disregard for the simple and straightforward as was evident early on with his debut, the abstractly (not to mention lyrically)-titled GONE BABY GONE: a juvenile delinquent hod rod flick?
I’m not a huge fan of contemporary American posters (collecting film posters from all over the world being a very passsionate hobby of mine), but applaud the boldness of this poster (along with the previously noted THE AMERICAN poster, which, like you point out, has a very European feel to it, and I dare say, even evokes the Italian giallo thriller genre with its choice of colors) and hope that future ad campaigns take a cue from these two. I, for one, would be more excited about the creativity behind big studio productions if I saw posters like these plastered all over the place. These are two films I’m definitely looking forward to seeing, especially now that I can tell that there’s quite a bit of thought put into them and they aren’t just Oscar-bait fodder that’s been churned out by the big studios.
Btw, I also liked the poster for KNIGHT AND DAY, but read nothing but bad reviews for it. So, can’t win them all? 🙂