Anybody who reads Stale Popcorn knows I love a great piece of poster art. Revolutionary Road broke two of my biggest pet peeves on its snooze of a poster. First, it used the tired stripe motif and second, it filled 50% or more of it's space with empty white nothingness. If your movie is a reteaming between the two stars of the highest grossing movie of all time I would think they'd be able to come up with something a bit more exciting than a film still placed on a white background, but I suppose not.
And that brings me to the FYC ads for the movie. Yet again, another dull affair, which certainly won't help the movie get attention in the season of Slumdog and Benjamin Button. No, they have decided to - yet again - go with the stripe design pattern. Even worse, they have done another version of the movie's poster as a means of campaigning for Roger Deakins' cinematography. Because "Kate and Leo standing on the lawn while sprinklers go by" screams GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHY!!
Maybe I'm just naive, but surely it isn't that hard to make a pretty ad. Plenty of other movies are able to do it. Even much smaller movies from studios with far less ad dollars can make a striking and eye-popping design. I'm not sure what it was about a movie co-starring LEONARDO DiCAPRIO and KATE WINSLET that was so uninspiring, but maybe if they'd done something a little more exciting then we wouldn't be on the verge of having this film disappear down the Oscar black hole.
I don't think this ad for Australia is particularly well-done, but it relates to what I was saying earlier. If your ad is a big splurge for your cinematographer (in this case Mandy Walker) then this is the sort of image you use, not a boring image of your two stars looking bored. I know Revolutionary Road doesn't exactly have anything like this moment from Baz Luhrmann's movie, but I'm sure there are a few striking compositions to throw on an ad that would make voters go "oooh, pretty!" which, really, is what Best Cinematography is all about to this Academy branch.
