INCONVENIENT TRUTH in Advertising Art
Sometimes I pity the people who create movie posters. They labor for weeks or months to come up with the perfect balance of image and text and movie-star billing. Then the movie will play a couple of weeks longer than its expected run, and maybe a holiday (say July 4th or Christmas) is coming up-- and someone in studio marketing thinks, "We'd better freshen up the marketing campaign."
But the best idea they can come up with is to slap a clip-art a firecracker and an Uncle Sam or Santa hat on the head of Garfield or a machine-gun wielding, zombie-killing Milla Jovovich and that market tested tagline will become "Jingle All The Way Into the New Year!" or "Who's Been Naughty?"
Al Gore's global warming documentary AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH debuted with an intriguing arty poster that showed an industrial smokestack beneath a sky that looked like Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Now that the doc's extended its run to more cities, the advertising art evokes an image from last year's hit nonfiction film THE MARCH OF THE PENGUINS...only the new poster's penguins are marching across a sandy desert.
Who cares about boring old industrial waste? There's nothing cuter than a bird in trouble.