Putting A Name To The Face

I travelled into town yesterday, for the first time in a while, and this poster was all over the tube.

Now I know that the order in which the names appear on the poster is all to do with egos, star billing, and all sorts of important negotiations but every time I see a poster like this, with the cast lined up but with the wrong names floating above their heads I just think it looks like someone's done really badly in a pub quiz.

It just looks like the people responsible for marketing the film don't know which actor is which. And they're really bad at guessing. Someone should just take each of them aside and have a word. "Look, Bruce. I know you've got star billing and that means your name has to come first and all that... but because you're the star, we also want you in the middle of the poster and it's making us look a bit, y'know... stupid..."

It's obviously a composite photo - which explains why it appears with the stars in a slightly different order in other versions... like this one...

... where they've accidentally scored one out of seven by placing Mary-Louise Parker underneath her own name. In this one they also give Anthony Hopkins a completely different head. But no handcuffs.

It may be something to do with the way the poster has been  pasted on to the curved wall of a tube station, but the faces look pretty badly photoshopped too.

I mean, those do look like Bruce Willis's features, and it does appear to be his head... but I'm not convinced they're lined up with one another as they are in the real world.

It looks to me as if his features have been dropped in just a little too low and to the left.

Either that or he's had one of those rare Hollywood face-drops people are never going on about.

And as to Catherine Zeta Jones... well, the last time I saw a head meet a neck like that I was playing Cluedo.

So... knowing that the marketing team for Red 2 aren't averse to a bit of shonky photoshopping, I corrected the whole poster and put the right faces with the right names. I'm only trying to help.

Angela Lansbury Forever

Murder She Wrote Tattoo, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

On Saturday morning I saw this tattoo on a man's leg.

I have a regrettable tattoo on my left arm. I used to feel haunted by it. Nowadays I rarely give it much thought. But on Saturday morning I spent a few moments thinking, "it could be worse... I could have a tattoo of Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote on my leg."