I do more Photoshop at 5 a.m. than most armies do all day. Like this Zooey Deschanel riff on a movie which I haven't heard of but know everyone else hates.
Nick Nadel gave it a nice synopsis to go along with it (the article was his idea. I was fully a hired gun on this one). My original tagline prior to their edits was "Raise some Deschanel," because the increasing laziness of movie posters makes my job easy. I think I have a knack for writing the banal, meaningless movie taglines that earned their authors 40-100,000 dollars. Seriously, that's what you make for unanchored garbage like "Smurf happens" or "What the Shrek?" Just fart out a vaguely offensive pun that has nothing to do with anything in the movie, and humanity scarfs it up like cheez whiz. I mean, at least in my effort to be that bad, they probably have to raise her now that they adopted her.
Design-wise, too. If it's a comedy, it's all Arial fonts, which you might remember from every bake sale flyer or library notice you've ever written in your life. Shoot, half the time it's an all-white background with some Arial Black font and a picture of Eddie Murphy looking smug.
Movie posters used to have great designs. The best one I've seen lately was Ghost Rider, and even that was ultimately just grey-blue gritty texture and some orange fire, same as everything else ever. Great composition, though, considering this was probably originally a random stunt guy on a stationary bike.
Don't get me wrong, my Photoshop isn't comparable to pros like this, but THAT'S WHY I'M NOT ONE OF THOSE PROS. I do goofy five-hour turnaround stuff for the internet. Whoever dictates that all movie posters follow the same few rules by genre is riding a money train. You could nab 100% of major feature release assignments and still do all your work for the year in about three weeks.
One more that particularly irked me. Who knows what this flick is even about?
Besides photoshopping Kevin James into a wax-polished apple, I mean.
...why am I cranking about this? I'm going to go watch something wonderful.