Why are so many American movie posters nowadays so lame? It’s like they’re all being made by the same marketing group populated by lazy designers. I suspect their choices are driven by tired group data skewed by polls gathered from freebie screenings at strip malls populated by bored teenagers. The result? Faces and guns are the predominant image.

The reason for my going off on this rant is Terribly Happy (aka: Frygtelig lykkelig, 2008), the terribly good Danish thriller by Henrik Ruben Genz that might soon come to a theater near you. The film is being distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures and I was thrilled to nail down a confirmation last week for my Spring calendar film series. How jazzed am I on this film? I’m already sure it’s going to be one of my favorite releases for 2010 and I want it to be the cover image of my printed calendar. So I asked the distributor if they could send me some posters, and this is what they said they could ship my way:

I was not terribly happy with this poster because I’d seen the original Danish poster and I responded thusly:

Me: Thanks for the sneak-preview. However – I must register my disappointment with the American poster. Guns are so cookie-cutter & passe. Any chance I can get the original poster? (See attached.) So much classier.

Oscilloscope Pictures emailed me back with this:

Distributor: Yeah, on eBay! Nah, really, I dunno. Can’t get it from us. I’m not going to tell you what you can and can’t use on your calendar, though, if you have a high-res enough image.

So, fair enough… we’re off and running and left to our own devices. But, criminy! It’s bizarre to me that somebody got paid to dumb-down the original poster and cheat American audiences of an image that reveals a lot more about the tone of the film, which revolves around mysteries that get buried in the bog by the locals of a remote town far removed from Copenhagen in South Jutland. I’m not exactly sure what “Her er kun det der er. Der er ikke andet…” means, but a friend tells me it’s something like “Here is only what there is. There is no more.” That’s so cool!

Let’s look at a couple more American posters and compare them to European ones, just for giggles:

Guys, gals, and guns. Or as Godard said: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” Which is fine. But c’mon! Let’s ‘zaz up the posters at least! Here are a couple International counterparts to show you the way:

Gun. Check. Guy. Check. But add some cool art and swinging saloon doors with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum etched on them and it’s a whole different ballgame. Speaking of cool art, here’s a Japanese one for Heaven and Earth (1990):

Whoa! That’s one bad-ass Samurai that I do not want to mess with. Now I’m going to skip over to Poland to see what they do with Kubrick:

I’ve got nothing against the iconic image of Jack Nicholson busting down the door with the axe, but this image of Shelley Duvall scares the hell out of me. Now let’s move over to Yugoslavia:

As you can tell from the credits, Oslobadanje is John Boorman’s Deliverance, and this one I just bought from one of my favorite movie poster shops. Which, by the way, is having a sale starting on Monday:

http://posteritati.com/index.php

Before checking out that link be warned that if you’re a serious movie buff there is a high probability of falling in love with a rare poster that might set you back several hundred dollars. That is what happened to me when I came across the above Deliverance poster, along with a Polish poster, below, for Peter Greenaway’s amazing film about twins obsessed with decomposing bodies – A Zed & Two Naughts (1985). Intrepid poster lovers should not, however, be discouraged as much cheaper reproductions can also be found for many of these.

I’ll end on one of my all-time favorites that I love waking up to every day in my bedroom and that measures in at something like five feet wide and seven feet tall:

How many American posters adorn my house? Only a few and they are far outnumbered by other nationalities. This should be a call to arms to any American graphic designers out there who want to make their mark. Take a stand against the sterile data that suggests you need to highlight the face and the gun, and instead highlight your brush against a canvas and make art!