News & Notes Inside the Week in Film

Marketing See, Marketing Do

It’s gotten to the point where the marketing materials for all movies based upon Nicholas Sparks books look exactly the same.

by Chris Neumer

When I got the press release that Safe Haven was coming out on Bluray today, I squinted at the image of the box art that was attached to it and thought, “Not only would I swear this movie already came out on Bluray, but I feel like I already wrote about it!”  I started going scrolling backwards through the movies I’d written about and, when I got to late August of 2012, found what I was looking for.  The Lucky One.

It turns out I hadn’t written about Safe Haven, I’d written about another Nicholas Sparks romance with a poster that was almost identical to Safe Haven’s.  And when I say that they are almost identical, I mean that they are almost identical (see above).  Both feature scruffy, brown-haired men on the right side of the poster embracing a blonde woman, just about to kiss her.  Both couples are slightly backlit, both couples have their eyes almost entirely shut and both men are holding the faces of the blonde women.  In short, both posters are of couples about to kiss.

It’s tempting to dismiss the similarities between the posters by rationalizing that since both are romances there will, of course, be some overlap between them.  However, while it’s tempting to think this, it couldn’t be further from the truth.  I googled ‘romantic comedy posters’ and, in the first roughly 400 images that popped up, there wasn’t one poster featuring a male and female lead about to kiss (or kissing, for that matter).  The closest I came was of Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart laughing and touching their foreheads together in the Love Happens poster.  She’s Out of My League and Just Friends feature women pecking the male leads on the cheek, but this is not romantic and, in the case of Just Friends, rather disturbing.

When it comes down to it, romantic leads don’t ever attempt to kiss in a romance’s poster.  Not in Pretty Woman, not in When Harry Met Sally, not in Titanic, not in Friends with Benefits, not in Amelie, not in The Princess Bride, not in Juno, not in 500 Days of Summer, not in Say Anything, and not in any movies with the word ‘kissing’ in the title like Kissing Jessica Stein, Kissing a Fool, French Kiss or Kissing Cousins, the latter of which is now atop my Netflix queue.  The only posters I could actually find where couples were about to kiss were for movies based upon Nicholas Sparks books.  Apropos of nothing, the poster for Nights in Rodanthe was actually more similar to The Lucky One’s poster than Safe Haven’s was (see below).

But the connections between Sparks’ movie posters didn’t end there.  As far as I can tell, if the characters aren’t about to kiss, there are two instructions that are given by the heads of the marketing departments for these movies: 1) Have the characters jam their faces as close together as possible, or 2) Have them sitting on a beach together.  If there’s a way to work rain into the mix, that’s a bonus.  As another aside, I’ve never quite understood the romantic appeal of a rainstorm.  You’re wet, you’re cold and the water stings when it gets in your eyes; all things considered, it’s rather miserable.  I’ll save my thoughts on having sex in an airplane bathroom for a later article.

Most of the time when a movie A’s poster ‘borrows’ a few elements from movie B’s poster, it’s because movie B was a pretty big hit and the producers of movie A want to subconsciously insert the memory of movie B into their own one sheet, making people equate the two without ever consciously equating the two.  What makes the situation with the Sparks movies so unusual is that none of them has exactly been a runaway box office hit.  The Notebook, which is commonly viewed as the crème-de-la-crème of Sparks adaptations topped out at $81 million.  That’s good, but it’s not “Let’s steal this movie poster good.”  That goes doubly true with Message in a Bottle and Nights of Rodanthe.  And yet, here we are.

Let’s examine:

What makes the above two pairings so intriguing is that, not only was Message in a Bottle not a big hit, but the demographics of the films in question couldn’t be more different.  One involves a middle-aged widower and the others involve teens and twenty-somethings in love.  It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but when selling movies to teenagers, you don’t want to ever compare them to movies about their parents.  That’s just not cool.

This combination actually makes some sense.  The younger demographics absolutely love The Notebook and Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth definitely appeal to that same target market.  Frankly, I think it should an admirable amount of restraint that it wasn’t actually raining in the poster for The Last Song.  Of course, this ‘restraint’ is nothing when compared to…

 Somehow the producers of Dear John ended up with a photo of Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfriend about to kiss–in the rain, no less–and it didn’t end up on the film’s poster.  This is probably the most surprising element of the whole situation.

 

The Photo of the Week

Oldboy

Just a great behind-the-scenes photo from the Korean movie, Oldboy.

 

The 5 Things I Learned This Week

Fascinatingly true things to broaden your mind

 

1) The world’s first female, self-made billionaire is 42-year old Sara Blakely.

2) Blakely made her billions as the founder and president of Spanx, a company that sells women’s underwear that slims the figure.

3) Blakely is married to a former rapper, Jesse Itzler.  Itzler’s biggest hit was a song called “Shake it Like a White Girl”.

4) Umpire Angel Hernandez is not only despised but bad.

5) The singular form of the word ‘trivia’ is ‘trivium’.

 

 

This Week’s Stories

New Releases

Jack Reacher

THE PLAYERS: Starring Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, and Richard Jenkins; written by Christopher McQuarrie and Lee Child; directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Released by Paramount. Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: Cruise plays a homicide investigator who looks into a mysterious shooting involving a trained military sniper.

THE SKINNY:
– No matter how many times I see it, Jack Reacher continues to look like the name that would be given to a Tom Cruise character in an Onion article.  Really?  Jack Reacher?  Insert a Jack Reacher’s Around joke here.
+ On the plus side, the tagline for this film is not “A Feature involving Jack Reacher”.  Nor is it “Don’t Cross Alex Cross”.
+ Tom Cruise is about as good a leading man as there is.  Even though his face is wearing some signs of aging, he holds up incredibly well here and delivers a comendable performance as Mr. Reacher.
+ Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Jack Reacher is the best kind of Hollywood glossy.
– I know I mentioned this above, but I need to touch on it again.  This movie was a critically well received, big-budget action film starring Tom Cruise that was released during the holidays, adapted from a wildly popular series of books and directed by an incredibly talented professional.  In spite of these attributes, it only grossed about $80 million domestically.  It would be absolutely baffling… if the movie wasn’t titled Jack Reacher.  If they titled this A Wanted Man, Worth Dying For or even One Shot, the titles of three Jack Reacher books the latter of which this was adapted from, I’ll bet it would have done a lot better.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Tom Cruise saved a hit and run victim and even paid for her medical bills.

Mama

THE PLAYERS: Starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Megan Charpentier; written by Neil Cross, Andy Muschietti, and Bárbara Muschietti; directed by Andy Muschietti. Released by Universal Pictures. Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: Two little girls are rescued by their uncle after being lost in the woods for five years. The uncle is lead to believe that they weren’t alone all that time.

THE SKINNY:
– Sporting a haircut that even Joan Jett couldn’t make work, lead Jessica Chastain looks somewhere between awful and ridiculous in this film.  Chastain is a supremely beautiful woman and why the producers would want to give her a haircut that is so bad it will take you out of the moment is well beyond me.  It’s one thing for a female lead to have a bad choice in men, it’s another thing completely to get an androgynous, sexless blob of a hair cut and to look in the mirror and think, “Yeah, this is okay.”  The scariest thing in this movie is living on top of Chastain’s head.
+ I’m pretty sure this movie was made simply to reintroduce a fear of under-the-bed.  In recent years, under-the-bed has been a refuge for would-be victims—it’s where you go to hide from the bad guys—not a place of terror.  After Mama, no longer.  Now, under-the-bed goes back to its roots of being the place where monsters hide.
– I’m slowly starting to lose interest in even writing about horror movies of late.  They all seem the same.  From the marketing materials to the tone to the locations.  Is it possible to have a horror film set in a residential neighborhood?  Or, better yet, in Williamsburg?  Sadly, the formulas for these films work so well that there isn’t much of a reason to change them, even if it means that it would make my job a lot easier.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Jessica Chastain attended Julliard on a scholarship founded by Robin Williams.

The Oranges

THE PLAYERS: Starring Leighton Meester, Hugh Laurie, and Catherine Keener; written by Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss; directed by Julian Farino. Released by ATO Pictures. Rated R.

THE PLOT: A young woman (Meester) develops an interest in her older neighbor (Laurie) after breaking up with her fiancé.

THE SKINNY:
– The ending to this film was rewritten after the cast had been secured.  You know what that means.
+ Alison Janney is fantastic in almost everything she does.  Granted, she only takes things that she’ll be fantastic in, but that’s no reason to diminish her on-screen abilities.
– The Oranges is too warm for its own good.  It’s not a warm mov ala Toy Story or even a sweet romantic comedy, but it’s decidedly too warm a tone for a movie about suburban dysfunction.  While I’m not suggesting that The Oranges needs an American Beauty like tone to it, this is definitely a film that conveys that people will learn things and be better for having had the experiences that they’ve had; in short, it is a film with a happy ending.  And given the supposed depravity and out-of-the-norm social relationships at the core of this project, ‘warm’ doesn’t quite match up.
+ Wait, you mean if I’m single at 52, I still have a chance to meet, date and fall in love with a smoking hot 24-year old?  Can I get this in writing?

YES, IT’S TRUE: Leighton Meester and Hugh Laurie have previously worked together on the television show House M.D. Meester also played Laurie’s love interest on the show.

Safe Haven

THE PLAYERS: Starring Julianne Hough, David Lyons, and Josh Duhamel; written by Dana Stevens, Gage Lansky, and Nicholas Sparks; directed by Lasse Hallström. Released by Relativity Media. Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: Katie (Hough) moves to a small town in North Carolina, attempting to leave behind a dark secret that haunts her.

THE SKINNY:
– There is a “twist” ending in this film that feels so wildly out of place that, after learning of it, you’re going to be tempted to turn to the person next to you and ask if you just imagined it.  You didn’t.  Spoiler alert: Juliana Hough’s best friend in North Carolina is a ghost.  And not just a ghost, she’s the ghost Josh Duhamel’s dead wife who has been vetting would be suitors for him.  Yeah…  It’s almost like Nicholas Sparks saw Sleeping with the Enemy and thought, “That was good, but there weren’t enough ghosts.”
+ Juliana Hough seems to be cornering the market on young women running away from bad situations only to find love where they end up going.  See also: Rock of Ages, Footloose and the upcoming Paradise.  What is it about Hough that makes on-screen men want to treat her poorly?
– Maybe it’s just me and the sheer volume of psychology books that I’ve read, but I find it immensely hard to believe that a woman who is super attracted to an abusive, controlling asshole could also be super attracted to an intensely sweet, loving man.  If you can buy into that concept—which is an ‘if’—then what does it say for her ability to judge people’s characters?  Of course, if there were another reason why Hollywood would want to make a movie that sends the message that just because you’ve been in a string of bad relationships that a good one is waiting around the corner, I can’t see it.  (There really does need to be a sarcasm font.  And then that font needs to be applied to the last sentence).
+/- I still think it’s Naomi Watts on the movie poster for Safe Haven.  And, frankly, that would make a lot more sense given the age discrepancy between Duhamel and Hough.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Talent must run in Julianne Hough’s family. She and her brother, Derek, are professional ballroom dancers. Their grandparents were also professional dancers.

The New Releases were written by Chris Neumer and Kayla Kinney