Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
With so much talk of sex scandals and secret “gay signals” in the news lately, it is interesting to see how Hollywood (via the movie poster) has been marketing a few recent films and how different audiences might interpret them.
Jodie Foster is starring in a new film called The Brave One. In the movie, Foster’s character turns vigilante after her fiancé is brutally murdered. Some of her fans on AfterEllen.com (a site for news, reviews, interviews and commentary on lesbian and bisexual women) have heralded The Brave One movie poster as the “Best. Jodie. Movie. Poster. Ever.” Reviewing the alternate artwork for The Brave One foreign poster, the AfterEllen.com site asks: “Hey, why did they replace Jodie Foster with Zac Efron’s 14-year-old blond cousin?” The site goes on to list several examples of “butch movie posters” from the past. It’s interesting how different audiences react to depictions of women in media, including what some consider a “glass closet” icon.
At the other end of the sexual identity spectrum (or perhaps in the very same spectrum) is the omnipresent How can we work in a visual joke about balls? creative direction that has been issued by many film account executives. One-sheet posters for the two recent films Balls of Fury and Mr. Woodcock are here to add to that growing list. Of course, invoking imagery of said male gentilia as a visual pun in film advertising is nothing new.
All this talk of balls and fury brings back harsh memories of the year-and-a-half long comment flame war centered around the Brokeback Mountain movie poster.
Ang Lee’s new film, Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, isn’t your run-of-the-mill western… or love story. Commonly referred to as the “gay cowboy movie” (although the film’s trailer and Oscar buzz imply it could rise above that label), the film could prove a tough sell to certain audiences.
For the Brokeback Mountain movie poster, the film’s producer James Schamus wanted to emulate the one-sheet for the biggest film of all time — the ultimate “chick flick” — the Titanic movie poster.
When it came time to design the poster for the film, Schamus didn’t research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. “If you look at our poster,” he says, “you can see traces of our inspiration, ‘Titanic’.”
In this case, “traces of our inspiration” means “traces of an exact copy”.
Comparing the two posters side-by-side, the similarities become clear — the layout of Heath Ledger’s shoulder even matches the clothing “steam iron” ship of the Titanic one-sheet.
