And The Less Said About Them, The Better
Well, they can’t all be winners. Sometimes an artist or designer (like Drew Struzan in the ’80s or Neil Kellerhouse today) is allowed to execute his creative vision and creates a piece of artwork for a film that becomes as iconic as the film itself. And sometimes an intern who knows Photoshop has to slap some faces on a poster to let people know who’s in the movie. Unfortunately the three posters arriving today look to be veering towards the latter. “Bad Teacher,” based on a Black List script by “The Office” scribes Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, stars Cameron Diaz as a foul-mouthed child-beating teacher. We’re cautiously optimistic about the film based on what we’ve seen so far and this poster featuring Diaz asleep at her desk with an apple that says “Eat Me” does nothing to sway us either way. It’s a decent teaser poster (though the “She doesn’t give an “F”.” looks like an afterthought) but we’d expect to see something with costar Justin Timberlake‘s face on it before it’s June 17th debut.
Mike Mills‘ “Beginners” is a film that we somehow managed to miss at Toronto and we’ve been kicking ourselves for it ever since. Starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Melanie Laurent, the film is supposed to be a funny and touching exploration of relationships and the recent trailer really won us over. However the poster featuring a duplicate lineup of the characters as well as the tagline “This is what love looks like” doesn’t do it any favors. With writer/director Mills’ excellent illustration/design skills, we’re surprised Focus didn’t let him come up with something a little more interesting because he clearly had no input on this poster. But a lame tagline doesn’t do anything to diminish our anticipation for the actual film.
The real travesty, however, is the poster for the Keanu Reeves bank heist/rom-com “Henry’s Crime.” Good Lord, they’ve got to be kidding us. Reeves actually appears to be standing both in front of and behind Vera Farmiga though all three characters look like bleached out Colorforms. (Remember those?) We saw the film at TIFF and thought it was mostly forgettable but this poster will be staying with us for quite some time. Check them out below.
“Bad Teacher” will be released June 17th [via Rope of Sillicon], “Beginners” plays the SXSW Film Festival next week and opens June 3rd and “Henry’s Crime” opens April 8th in NY before expanding wider [via Cinematical].