Thursday, July 25, 2013

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.







15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic. Is it a coincidence that the 2 best actors are British and seem to have less of an ego as well!

Anonymous said...

Good point!

Unknown said...

You've missed your calling Dave, it was correcting photoshops all along!

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't be so sure - if you can't be first you want the 'WITH' or the 'AND' the 'AND'is a pretty big deal.

Dave Gorman said...

@Anonymous surely that's the wrong way round. I thought "with" and "and" basically meant, "they're very famous but don't have a big role in this particular film so we can't get away with saying 'starring'". All the names before the "and" are surely getting bigger billing.

Lesley said...

This has been bugging me since I first saw it. And it happens so often, with so many film posters.

It really ticks off the OCD in me.

DisgruntledGoat said...

(Sorry if this comes up twice, I tried posting on the mobile site but it didn't seem to work.)

I don't see why they can't put the main name (Bruce Willis in this case) in the centre and higher up, then slope the other names down to the left and right. Then they could obviously be above the correct people.

Re and/with: the Kermode & Mayo film show talked about this. Supposedly if an actor won't be getting top billing (or top 2-3) they specifically "ask for the AND".

40kaddict said...

Totally agree, this annoys me too. I honestly can't work out which is worse, the RED 2 poster or this one for Brian DePalma's new film - Passion, with Rachel McAdams [who looks an awfull lot like Noomi Rapace] and Noomi Rapace who looks like Rachel McAdams.

What's worse is Noomi Rapace is so far down the pecking orde [of two] she only gets half her face on the poster! Perhaps when they came to Photoshop it they only had half her features and decided it was just easier not to do a hatchet job on it.

Funny thing is from the trailer I saw of this the other week Noomi Rapace actually looks like she has the bigger roll, if not the bigger 'star name'.

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2770904064/tt1829012?ref_=tt_ov_i

Dave Gorman said...

@Dave Weston: I wouldn't have known that one had it wrong as I have no idea who either of them are. But it definitely happens all the time.

Ben said...

haha I was ranting about this poster to my friend as we drove by it the other day. Years back I started noticing the names were all over the place, even on posters with 2 actors on. Just put the god damn name above the god damn actor!!!

Emma Spreadbury said...

Surely the most famous 'and starring': http://blogs.babble.com/famecrawler/files/2010/10/bosley.jpg

Anonymous said...

Bird with a long neck - and it's not even Naomi Campbell!!

Duncan said...

Good lord - that "corrected" (Sir) Tony Hopkins image will haunt me for the rest of my days...

Dave Gorman said...

@Emma Spreadbury: of course... but it goes without saying that "and starring" is bigger than a simple "with" or "and".

Unknown said...

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Yours
John
http://www.thirstymeeples.co.uk/