Shared Darkness

OK, a word about Blue Valentine, which has been courting controversy and getting attention in weird ways recently. I understand the Weinstein brothers’ penchant for showmanship and salesmanship, but I’ve seen the film a couple times, and it soars on its own merits. The whole ratings controversy, about it being slapped with an NC-17? I don’t get it. It’s a very frank and sexual and emotionally pulverizing story of these two people who are not meant to be together — their respective pasts render them incapable of giving the sort of love the other needs, or is hardwired to receive — but it’s not a movie that is over the top or out of bounds or flippant with its sexuality. It reeks of a baited rating, in other words.

Now there’s the poster, which is a grungy, druggy thing. It’s not terrible, don’t get me wrong. It captures a bit of the intensity of the relationship between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, it’s just that it doesn’t convey the frailty and… essential busted-ness, let’s say, of what’s really under the microscope, which is what Derek Cianfrance’s film is all about.

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 have a bone to pick with studio marketing guys — if you’re making a romantic comedy and the best you can come up with is just putting your two stars on the poster kinda smiling and looking flirty, you probably really don’t have anything new in the genre, so why are even you making it? I mean other than the easy dollar? The latest example of the above phenomenon is The Back-up Plan with Jennifer Lopez and that CBS guy. Amy Adams had it with her Leap Year poster (at least it was green) but c’mon people — design something. Sell me on your idea. Sell me the high concept reason for your movie to be, give me something that makes me think this is gonna break out of the pack and be something worth seeing rather than just something to occupy 98 minutes and hopefully help me score, ya know?

I realize these things trend feminine, and that that is the basic mission statement — to appeal to girls, who will drag along the guy, to put his ass in the seat next to them. But the rom-com poster is by far the easiest poster genre to spoof. I’d been thinking about this as it relates to She’s Out of My League and a couple other films on the horizon, the former of which made a late attempt at mitigating Jay Baruchel’s wincing mug and all those complementary posters of dudes by adding the lovely Krysten Ritter to the promotional poster campaign. But it’s always sappy rom-com mock-ups that first get titters in movies about movies, before action poster spoofs, really. Because they so roundly evidence a complete lack of effort.

The new poster for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, releasing October 23 through Screen Media and starring Robin Wright Penn, Blake Lively, Winona Ryder and others, is out, and I’ll just come out and say it — it’s a far too-cluttered thing.

The flame-edged center is interesting, but its pop is lost in the form of the shadow, and Penn’s armpit cleavage conjures up thoughts of butt crack where it’s placed. And without the other faces flush right, the entire thing feels like it’s going to just tip over. Over reduce that huge credit text, and drop a horizontal crawl box or something.

This still relatively new-ish poster image means a lot to some folks. But not to me, really. Except that Kristen Stewart likes triceps…

Director Richard Kelly shares the new poster for The Box (Warner Bros., October 30) on his MySpace page, and correctly notes the one-sheet’s Hitchcockian vibe, the unnerving red stripe drawing one’s attention to a shadowy figure. The tagline beckons properly, too: “You are the experiment.” No notes; like a classy woman, this sells itself nicely while still maintaining an air of mystery.

Clearly the makers of Duplicity got some sort of sunglasses endorsement deal. Hey, I don’t judge… it’s a hard-knock economy, and look what it did for Ray Bans, and their Wayfarers. Hell, Don Henley probably still gets a free annual pair of the latter, if he still has any assistants worth their weight in wrangled goodies.

The poster for Tony Scott’s summer remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has “launched” over at JoBlo (read: been handed over as a piece of head-patting exclusive content), and it’s a two-tone, brown-and-blue affair that reminds me of nothing so much as The Bone Collector, for some reason. Who will win the battle of goatees between Denzel Washington and John Travolta? Does this product make a cameo appearance? And does Travolta eventually lift up his shirt and reveal the words tatted on his belly: T-H-U-G L-I-F-E?

Could this poster for the direct-to-video Make It Happen, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, be any more of a straight-up gangsta rip-off of the rain-machine-friendly one-sheet for Step Up 2 the Streets? It lacks the volume of precipitation, I guess. Otherwise, I’m hoping someone at DeVry DVD Box Cover Design School got to knock off early for a long weekend.

Baz Luhrmann’s Australia won’t start screening until probably early the week of November 17, due to some characteristically last-minute tinkering by the filmmaker, but the poster has been out a while now, and it’s too vague a thing, conjuring up nebulous feelings of… I don’t know, a Down Under Pearl Harbor? Yes, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are big-name draws, but they’re not romantic leads, never have been, and so the top-shelf lover’s clinch — while gorgeously hued — doesn’t grab a casual viewer. The backgrounded planes, wandering aboriginal kids, shotgun-toting ambler (Jackman in shadow) and setting sun, meanwhile, all come across as very W. Somerset Maugham. Which I don’t necessarily mean as a good thing, just from a commercial pitch point-of-view. After all, does anyone really remember The Painted Veil?

A full review of the film will soon follow, but the poster for this weekend’s College is an effective, less-is-more thing, a great selling of a movie without a lot (read: any… sorry, Drake Bell) name stars. I’d make sure to tone down that wispy hint of potential back hair, and also work up a companion piece of two gals in a similar pose, one holding the other’s hair back. Or at the very least throw a bra into the frame on this one-sheet, just to further underscore the sex and nudity. Otherwise, though, no complaints. Well sold, marketing guys.

More soon on the film itself, but the poster for multi-hyphenate Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride — a chopper opera from the Weinstein Company opening August 8 in top 20 markets, and starring Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Dennis Hopper, Vinnie Jones, the aforementioned Bishop and a bunch of naked chicks — is a beautiful, effective, sun-burnt thing that captures the dusty, Western-sun tonality and open-road throwback mentality of the flick as a whole.

It reminds me of one of those old, giant color-by-numbers posters that you get a kid to keep them quiet for an entire afternoon, and that are still on sale in truck-stops across the country… if someone lost all the accompanying markers save the orange, yellow and black ones.

Clearly, if the poster for Varsity Blues (this one, not this one) went into the military and then had a slightly early 10-year reunion, after the fat dude got killed, it would be the poster for Stop-Loss.