One of the most ignored aspects of the film experience is that of the cover art for a movie, or more specifically what appears on the posters or DVD covers for a motion picture. Though some are truly original and achieve iconic status (\Jaws,"" ""Ghostbusters""), the majority of film posters end up being repetitive or ugly.
The most popular movie poster trend seems to be that of the giant floating head, in which a prominent star or character has a gigantic close-up featured on the cover of the movie poster. The giant head phenomenon is usually prone to film genres that are dialogue-oriented or in cases when a major star is featured in the movies and filmmakers want to draw attention to that fact.
Though there are cases in which the floating head syndrome can be aesthetically pleasing, most of the time it's just boring, mainly because the head is staring off into space and just narrowly missing eye contact with the onlooker. It's as if filmmakers are insecure and think that a giant head staring into your soul will inspire someone to buy a ticket or DVD out of guilt.
Of course there are exceptions to this, one of which is the poster for ""Jerry Maguire."" Though it's far from being the best film poster around, at least it has a close up of Tom Cruise with his head turned to the right while he's smiling, rather than having him stoically staring out at anyone who passes by.
Maybe the only thing worse than the giant floating head poster is that of the jumble poster, in which characters and props are thrown together in a haphazard manner that makes it seem like the equivalent of a term paper that was written two hours before it was due. This design is usually prominent in genres such as science fiction or horror.
To be fair, the jumble poster isn't always a bad idea, as it can potentially work with films that have ensemble casts or numerous story lines. But even then it's very hard to pull off without achieving overload.
The most recent examples of how this concept is abused are ""The Pacifier,"" in which Vin Diesel stands amongst a slew of saucy-looking children and a duck, as well as ""Son of the Mask,"" which is quite possibly the biggest mess of a poster ever made. Among other things it has lazily strewn about are a dog house, the green mask to which the title refers and what appears to be a Viking.
It isn't that the notion of having numerous characters or aspects of a film in a poster is always bad; it's just that you need some sort of symmetry or artistic vision to do it well. It's usually best to try to feature only one or two aspects of a film rather than shoving every character or key element in one big mess, though there are exceptions to every rule. The various ""Star Wars"" movies have some of the best and worst examples of jumble posters.
It isn't that there are any fewer quality movie covers now than there were in the past, but the ratio of quality movie posters versus unoriginal ones is still very poor. Some of the best examples of current posters are those for ""Sin City,"" which avoid both the giant floating head syndrome and the jumble headache to showcase carefully constructed visions. One can tell that the posters had a great amount of thought put into them, which is something that more film posters could benefit from, regardless of their genre.
Dan Marfield's column runs every Monday in the Cardinal. He can be reached at ddmarfield@wisc.edu.
