I know they’re just teaser posters, but I can’t think of a worse way to market Good Luck Chuck than the above images of Dane Cook, Jessica Alba and Dan Fogler that Lionsgate used to tout the movie at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
The movie’s concept notwithstanding (Cook plays a guy who’s the perennial perfect lucky charm for women; they meet Mr. Right and get married after sleeping with him), a shirtless Cook doesn’t have the “wow” factor to matter to a large percentage of ladies, and there’s absolutely nothing about that shot appealing to dudes, which comprise most of his fan base. Alba is Alba, sure, but the off-camera glance doesn’t match the melting ice cream cone. Then there’s Fogler… wait a second, who?
Granted, these are international posters, and presumably they would be clustered around one another, lacquered to panel wood surrounding construction sites and what not (they still have construction like that abroad, right?), but if you’re not a comic book movie with a lot of characters and/or don’t have huge stars that you’re trying to flaunt separately, all this does is draw attention to your movie’s shortcomings, from a marketing point-of-view. I didn’t go to advertising school, but that much I know…
UPDATE 5/30: Apparently, I really need more blowjobs, as, per the comment below, I totally whiffed on the visual joke in the picture with Dane Cook. In my defense, though, the above image is fairly small, and the original impetus for this post was actually a set of text-less one-sheets without that, umm, portion of the photo. Funny.
I still maintain, though, that this is a strange way to sell what’s being billed as essentially a raucous love story (for the movie’s trailer, click here) and not a gross-out or full-fledged sex comedy (yes, yes, despite the nookie-charm hook). What exactly about those pictures appeals to women? This also answers my question about these being international posters, and not destined for American subways, etcetera.
Daily Archives: May 29, 2007
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
Directed by Nelson Pereira dos
1971’s How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
is a filmic document of a very particular time and place. In fact, it might best
be described as an anthropological curiosity that just happens to be captured
in film form. Originally banned in its native
and rejected for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival due to the “excessive
nudity” of its aboriginal cast, the movie is a sort of docu-style, very
tongue-in-cheek black comedy, rich with a vein of political metaphor that no
longer holds the same market value.
tells the story of a nameless French adventurer (Arduino Colassanti) who gets
captured alongside a bunch of Portuguese mercenaries by a cannibalistic tribe of
native Brazilians, and then tries in vain to convince his captors — who are in
fact loosely allied with the French, but don’t understand his language — of his
nationality. Sold out by a portly trader who disingenuously tells the tribe he’s
Portuguese, the Frenchman is informed of plans to eventually eat him, months
down the line. Still, the tribe treats him well, bequeathing him a wife, and
including him in the group’s agricultural activities and rituals. The movie,
then, is a picture show of indolent ceremony, custom and idyll, punctuated by
panicked bursts of argument and attempted persuasion.
Little Frenchman is a very loose adaptation of German explorer Hans
Staden’s celebrated and infamous 16th century first-person chronicle, which
details a similar experience that he (obviously) escaped to tell about. As is,
it plays a bit like a foreign cousin of Wicker
Man, one man
raging in culturally isolated vain against a collective who regards him with no
small bemusement. The big problem, though, is that How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is robbed of its contextual rooting.
The film was made in a dark time in
military rule, and regarded as a veiled societal critique. From the outside
looking in, one can appreciate this vantage point, but not be swayed by it. The
construction of the film — with classical music blaring over its opening 10
minutes, and intermittently throughout — comes across as arbitrary, and there’s
too much narrative slack in the second and third act, no matter the 80-minute
running time. Only in the movie’s interestingly staged last 10 minutes — in which
the Frenchman’s wife confesses a sadness at his impending death, but nods when
he asks if she will then still eat him — is there any real downhill momentum or
lastingly memorable drama.
screen, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
comes with an entirely adequate audio track, which is a mixture of French, Tupi
and Portuguese. The problem is that the movie’s English subtitles sometimes lag
distressingly behind the dialogue, leaving one to suss out who is saying what. Boasting
a new digital transfer from a restored negative, the picture for the film is
superb, with only a very small amount of grain occasionally popping up. The
disc’s supplemental extras consist of two interviews, the longest of which is
an 11-and-a-half-minute, rambling and frequently incoherent chat with a
modern-day member of the Krenak tribe, which is depicted in the film. This bit
scores high marks for potential, but there’s no authorial hand here to shape
the material, which actually seemingly begins in mid-thought. The other chat
is, therefore, the best. A nine-and-a-half-minute, direct-address mini-lecture
from
film studies professor Richard Peña, this monologue makes up for in insight
what it lacks in flair of presentation. There’s also a gatefold insert with a solidly
informative essay penned by Darlene Sadlier, a professor of Spanish and
Portuguese and an adjunst professor of Communication and Culture at
On I Know Who Killed Me’s Trailer
In the wake of her arrest on suspicion of DUI, the trailer for Lindsay Lohan’s I Know Who Killed Me has bowed, and is available online here, to complement the low-fi, in-character video blog site that distributor Sony has set up. The trailer offers up a few story point clarifications (Lohan’s Aubrey Fleming is a student, while her post-abduction alter ego Dakota Moss is the stripper and doppelganger), but also raises more questions. I guess that’s the point, really, but they’re also not necessarily questions that seem to have any haunting hold beyond the trailer’s two-plus-minute running time.
Lohan’s dual characterizations seem of such bland, split-the-difference tonalities, and some of her line readings sound like drama class exercises. (Also, her ability to play around her age isn’t helped by the fact that her voice, shredded by cigarettes, already sounds like that of a 40-year-old.) Finally, I’m awaiting word from a source this weekend on a copy of the movie’s script or, failing that, confirmation on a plot detail that would, um… prove fairly interesting. Watch carefully for the glimpses of prosthetic limbs, that’s all I’m saying for right now.
Knocked Up Thoughts
Late in the summer of 2005, Steve Carrell’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin defied
conventional wisdom about R-rated comedies — helped in part, no doubt, by a
self-effacingly chipper poster
— and in the process became a $100-million-plus smash, pretty much allowing
writer-director Judd Apatow the autonomy to do whatever the hell he pleased as
a follow-up.
to center his next own feature film around Freaks
and Geeks alum and The 40-Year-Old
Virgin costar Seth Rogen. The subject: a harmless if mismatched one-night stand gone awry
between a driven career gal (Katherine Heigl) and amiable loafer — and thus, by
extension, the onrushing traumas of adulthood and all its attendant responsibility.
Further, proper reviews will follow later this week, but it suffices to say
that Knocked Up, anchored by a very
funny breakout performance from Rogen, is rightly poised to inherit the mantle
of this summer’s great, lasting comedy.
which he seemingly sublimates his own comedic voice to that of his star or
stars. It’s only upon further reflection that you realize how crafty of a
marionette master he really is. While his lack of allegiance to a strict narrative
drumbeat means his work very occasionally drags (Knocked Up’s second and third acts have essentially three or four
tent-pole moments around which everything else is constructed), his scenes aren’t dumb (they refreshingly have
intros and outros), and Apatow is also
not afraid to let improvisational runs extend into idiosyncratic terrain,
confident that the law of averages will bail him out.
funniest bits, to me (Rogen’s character remarking that Paul Rudd’s hapless
married guy looks “dressed up like a cholo on Easter,” say), might barely register
in
precious about his jokes, which is why Serpico, Matthew Fox, pink eye and Robin Williams’ knuckles all come up. He instead crafts relatable characters who
demonstrate a real investment in their angst and panic, establishes a few loose
parameters and then pitches all around a theme. A bit bawdy but mostly
heartfelt, the results — in the case of both of his movies — are pieces of equal enjoyment and distinct personality. For a full review of the movie, click here.
Casi Casi Gets Out the Vote
Those “Vote Pedro” T-shirts got a lot of attention a few years back, but if the award-winning, Spanish-language teen comedy Casi Casi had anything to say about it, there would be plenty of “Vote Emilio” T-shirts out there as well. Roughly cut from the same sort of satirical cloth as Mean Girls and Election, the movie centers on Emilio (Mario Pabon), an
average teen who finds himself in the principal’s office every week. He nurses a crush on Jacklynne (Maite Canto), the most popular girl in school and, in a rash attempt
to impress the girl of his dreams, he decides to run for Student Council
President. Soon after declaring his candidacy, though, Emilio discovers, much to his
horror, that Jacklynne will be running against him. Emotions fly high as
campaign fever intensifies; not wanting to not lose his chance at winning
Jacklynne’s heart, Emilio devises a risky plan that could end in disaster if the school
principal gets wind of his scheme. The winner of multiple festival awards — including honors at the
San Diego Latino Film Festival, the Boston Latino International Festival, the
New York International Latino Festival, the Vistas Film Festival, the
Philadelphia Film Festival and the Chicago Latino Film Festival — Casi Casi is rated PG for language and some crude humor. The film’s DVD comes presented in a regular Amray case, with an audio commentary track from writer-directors Jaime and Tony Vallés, as well as a brief making-of featurette. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here.