My husband and I were in the mood for a movie last night, but having seen the majority of films on demand, we really scraped the bottom of the barrel with Swordfish. I had seen it, he hadn’t – but I guess my tastes were less refined back when it was released because I didn’t remember it being so horrifyingly stupid (a bus being picked up by a helicopter and banged into several Los Angeles skyscrapers). In case you’ve also blocked it out in order to live, it’s the movie where Halle Berry hoodwinked a million dollars for a completely gratuitous flash of her breasts.
Once the credits rolled, I was expecting to see “Directed by Alan Smithee” but it was some guy I had already forgotten in the last 20 hours (I googled: Dominic Sena). We joked that the director never worked again. Well, that’s not entirely true. While he laid low for three years, ducking back into music videos, the director of Swordfish is apparently inacting his revenge with the upcoming Whiteout, the poster of which has quickly turned into the very bane of my existence!
Los Angeles is a place filled with movie stars, so consequently, there’s an unholy saturation of billboards, bench ads and bus stops featuring film and television projects. It’s an overkill you can’t even imagine until you cruise down Melrose, La Brea, Beverly, Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. Why? When the stars and executives are out on the prowl, drunkenly wrecking their careers and not wearing panties, they can see their projects plastered everywhere. This way, they really can’t point a finger at the studio’s marketing as the cause of the project’s poor success. The Los Angeles marketing cleverly presents the illusion that the entire country is blanketed in advertisements, when it’s not even remotely as dense in any other market.
So there’s not just one or two Whiteout promotions around town, there’s about 80,000 of the most hideous one sheet featuring the usually lovely Kate Beckinsale looking like Jennifer Aniston with blue acne. Did the designer die in the middle of making the one sheet? I can’t fathom how this happened. Equally mystifying: stars can veto unflattering promotions. Beckinsale didn’t care what she looked like. While I’m annoyed by the eye pollution, I respect her cool attitude. In her place, I would have grabbed the Wacom stylus right out of the designer’s hands and stabbed the “creative” executive who thought to do this to my beautiful, beautiful face. Maybe stabbing is a bit dramatic, but you know: actresses are just passionate people. (I would never actually stab someone – just lightly poke)
