Screen­Fonts a.k.a. Char­ac­ters On The Silver Screen comes to the Font­Feed. The very first cat­e­gory on my FontShop BeNeLux blog Unzipped was borne out of my work as mod­er­a­tor of the Typophile Type Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Board. We reg­u­larly receive requests for type­faces on movie posters, so I gath­ered it was worth turn­ing this into a recur­ring fea­ture on Unzipped. Time has proven it is one of the more pop­u­lar categories.

While on Unzipped I look at the posters of movies cur­rently being released in Bel­gium and The Nether­lands, here I’ll stick to the Amer­i­can releases, both wide and lim­ited. My main focus is the type used on those posters, yet that doesn’t stop me from voic­ing my opin­ion on the over­all design. When there’s noth­ing inter­est­ing to tell about spe­cific posters I will simply gloss them over. I don’t see why I should put up the effort when the people who designed them didn’t try any harder.

The posters below are last and this week’s releases.

The poster for Bangkok Dan­ger­ous is kinda run-off-the-mill, how­ever the (allit­er­a­tion alert! ;) tried and true tech­nique of tran­si­tion­ing from black and white to bright fiery colours always looks cool. It does make the poster look like the new instal­ment of the Mis­sion Improb­a­ble or The Fast And The Ridicu­lous series though. Unfor­tu­nately any poten­tial dynamism in the image is neu­tral­ized by the forced pose and strained facial expres­sion of Nico­las Cage. And tilt­ing the text – with the movie title set in Neue Hel­vetica 93 Black Extended Oblique – is in no way suf­fi­cient to sal­vage that. Quite amus­ing are the remarks on the Inter­net Movie Poster Awards page ridi­cul­ing Cage’s need to wear wigs when doing this type of action movies. Dudes, I can guar­an­tee you – cra­nial hair is so grossly over­rated. Really, trust me on that one ;).

When I first saw this poster for Un Secret (A Secret) I won­dered if they set the arti­cle “A” bigger and in red to stress the fact that (a) there’s only one secret in the movie or (b) “Watch out, this is the Eng­lish ver­sion of the poster; the French one has a big red “Un”!” The poster looks very classy, maybe a little too famil­iar, although I can’t tell right off the bat where I’ve seen it before. Don’t ask me which ver­sion of Bodoni this is (I think it’s Bauer’s). There’s just too many ver­sions and frankly I can’t be both­ered to verify which one. The cen­tered all caps set­ting serves the design nicely, but that’s all there can be said about it.

Every­body Wants to Be Ital­ian has the movie poster equiv­a­lent of a cheap pizze­ria store sign. Roughly trans­lated: it’s way too lit­eral, tries too hard and me not likes very much. Then again, it’s pretty rare that I encounter really good posters for recent Hol­ly­wood come­dies. The movie title face looks uncan­nily sim­i­lar to House Gothic 23, for which I have a cer­tain fond­ness because it was my very first iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the Type ID Board almost six years ago.

I’m not sure if Hallam Foe (Mister Foe) has a good poster but it sure is a very charm­ing one. The won­der­fully naive illus­tra­tions and hand drawn movie title (now that is what I call wood type :) com­ple­ment the left­field imagery very well. The child­like “This is my story” base­line may look hand writ­ten as well, but it really is a dig­i­tal font: FF Child’s Play, Age Seven. As for the obnox­ious angu­lar red type; it is com­pletely mis­cast and very dis­tract­ing. This is a typ­i­cal exam­ple where a simple unas­sum­ing type­face would’ve been perfect.

Scrap that remark about Hol­ly­wood come­dies two posters ago – the poster for Ping Pong Playa actu­ally is quite funny. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of the humon­gous Jimmy Tsai tow­er­ing over, and yelling at, the unfor­tu­nate chubby little kid is a clas­sic comedic device but it never fails to elicit a chuckle. This poster doesn’t pre­tend to be what it’s not – it is simple, straight­for­ward and effec­tive. It uses an extended ver­sion of Basic Com­mer­cial. Yeah, I know the exact type­face is avail­able under a dif­fer­ent name from The Com­pany Whose Owner’d Rather Spend Money On Lawyers To Bully Type Design­ers And Small Foundries With Cease And Desist Let­ters Than Pay Roy­al­ties, but I’d rather suck on a dead dog’s pos­te­rior than send traf­fic their way. Don’t even ask… :/

I didn’t include The Pool so much for the poster; but rather after seeing the trailer. It has ten­drils grow­ing out of Cochin, which adds a nice little touch to the oblig­a­tory text screens.

I must say the type orna­men­ta­tions in the trailer are far more ele­gant than the illus­tra­tive bits added to the image on the poster. I reckon they’re sup­posed to look naive, but to me they just seem poorly drawn in some vector illus­tra­tion soft­ware. It’s either too much, or not enough. The type on the poster is Jeremy Tankard’s Bliss, a typ­i­cal British human­ist sans in the tra­di­tion of Gill Sans and John­ston’s Under­ground type. Other con­tem­po­rary exam­ples of that style are Eng­lish Grotesque or Agenda for example.

What­ever you may think of the poster for Burn After Read­ing, I think we can agree on one thing – it proves the studio has some seri­ous cojones. Instead of show­ing off the high pro­file cast of the movie – fea­tur­ing George Clooney, Frances McDor­mand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swin­ton and Brad Pitt! – they opted for a typo­graphic poster in the tra­di­tion of the great Saul Bass. The poster’s clear struc­ture, the intense red back­ground, the hand cut let­ters rem­i­nis­cent of Jim Parkin­son’s Com­rade, the play­ful black sil­hou­ettes; it all adds up to a strik­ing, witty design. Its strat­egy reminds me of Ocean’s Eleven, which won the Bravest Movie Poster of 2001 on the Inter­na­tional Movie Poster Awards web­site, and Ocean’s Twelve, which was amongst the Bravest Poster Nom­i­nees of 2004. The Bravest Movie Poster is a great con­cept, award­ing those poster designs that resist the urge to plas­ter the faces of their stars all over the damn thing. Neat. :)

The poster for Right­eous Kill is equally effi­ca­cious. Its dra­matic effect is achieved by com­bin­ing a crude halftone black and white pic­ture with two force­ful red paint stripes accen­tu­at­ing the degraded and splat­tered type (DIN 1451 Engschrift/FF DIN Con­densed and an uniden­ti­fied con­densed grotesque with tiny spiky serifs). The relent­less gaze of co-​stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino lifts the design to new levels of inten­sity. The new pair­ing of these two heavy­weights made me check out the poster for Heat (1995), their very first col­lab­o­ra­tion (although they both were in 1974’s The God­fa­ther Part II, they never shared a scene as DeNiro played a young Vito Cor­leone in flash­backs while Pacino played his son Michael). The Heat poster is quite good but the simple fact that both actors look away, not straight at the viewer, make it far less powerful.

I never quite got the dis­tinc­tion between cer­tain alter­nate ver­sions of movie posters. The reason for having a Korean and a Span­ish ver­sion is pretty obvi­ous, but some­times there are alter­nate posters with the exact same con­tent, just a com­pletely dif­fer­ent design (and I’m not talk­ing about teaser posters and final ver­sions). For exam­ple The Family That Preys has a pretty lame main­stream poster that fea­tures a group shot of all the actors topped with the typo­graphic aber­ra­tion that is ITC Gara­mond. This one def­i­nitely is not a Brave Movie Poster. ;)

Yet the other poster is a thing of sheer beauty. A simple Matisse-​like painted sil­hou­ette, com­bin­ing the gor­geous pro­file of an African woman and an out­stretched hand, divides the poster in two halves. And it is truly painted, as the strokes of either water­colours or China ink are clearly vis­i­ble, giving it a very “tac­tile” qual­ity. The movie title set in a con­densed Gara­mond which I am not going to link to for the same reason as before – white with just the word “Prey” in a classy grey­ish blue – is thought­fully set and posi­tioned with care.

The Women also has two alter­na­tive ver­sions of its poster, but in this instance nei­ther of them is very good. The main­stream poster fea­tur­ing a group shot of “the women” the movie is about is quite unre­mark­able. Not a can­di­date for Brave Movie Poster nei­ther. The only reason I men­tion it is for that movie title set in Filosofia, Zuzana Licko’s kinky inter­pre­ta­tion of Bodoni which also has a uni­case variant.

Though the vari­ant poster has poten­tial, it ulti­mately fails in the exe­cu­tion. Draw­ing a female sil­hou­ette with lip­stick and fill­ing it up with womany catch words in Didot – the quin­tes­sen­tial glam mag type­face – isn’t such a bad idea, but the end result doesn’t really do it for me. It feels a bit… flat.

If you know what The Flam­ing Lips are all about the trippy poster for Christ­mas on Mars shouldn’t sur­prise you too much. Hel­vetica was nicely embell­ished in a way sim­i­lar to Si Scott’s stun­ning typo­graphic enhance­ments. I prefer the black on red poster which is def­i­nitely the most dra­matic, while the weird black and white image in the left one reveals a bit more about the tone and con­tent of the movie. Or does it?

And we con­clude this episode of Screen­Fonts with the poster for Tow­el­head. The com­po­si­tion is great, with the type – ITC Avant Garde Gothic redrawn by hand – beau­ti­fully lock­ing the figure of Summer Bishil into place in this arti­fi­cial look­ing sub­ur­ban set­ting. Sub­sti­tut­ing the “O” in the movie title with the actress’ head may seem gim­micky, but you won’t hear me com­plain – it works.

Oh dear. This Friday edi­tion has become a week­end edi­tion, and it’s nine hours later here, so I think I’ll hit the sack. ’Till next time. ;)

Tags: film, lettering, movie posters