This still looks like a bunch of kids playing dress-up and acting out juvenile cops-and-robbers fantasies. Think Bugsy Malone remaking LA Confidential. Maybe it's the weirdly 'let's appeal to the kids!' rap song on the soundtrack. Maybe's it's Sean Penn acting as badly as he can. Maybe it's the marketing department trying to sell the idea that we're supposed to *care* about the forbidden romance between Emma Stone (as "the girl", I hope merely as a favor to Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer) and Ryan Gosling. But this frankly looks rather silly and, R-rating and apparent ultra-violence notwithstanding, like a stereo-typically CW-friendly remake of LA Confidential or Mulholland Falls (yes, I know the latter also starred Nick Nolte). Anyway, also dropping over the last couple days are a bunch of posters. The theatrical one-sheet is notible in that it resembles the cover of a low-budget straight-to-VHS gangster movie from the early 1990s. Not *bad* so much as having a distinct 'B-movie' vibe. The character posters are more disconcerting. As you'll see after the jump, we've got nine actors getting billing and just five character posters. Amusingly, the cast's lone African American castmember, Anthony Mackie, doesn't get his own poster, having to stand at the back of the proverbial bus behind box office dynamo Giovanni Ribisi. What about Michael Pena? Hispanics apparently don't get face time at all, as he, along with the very Caucasian Robert Patrick are completely MIA. Stay classy Warner Bros, stay classy.
Scott Mendelson
Scott Mendelson
Is it just me, or are even the posters stock Hollywood duochrome? (Blue and orange are the right colors for noir in color; teal and orange just aren't right, period.) And I think even less of the gratuitous rap soundtrack; it just doesn't lend itself to white-boy gangster stories, especially pre-rap ones like this. I mean, if it's not ghetto, rap just won't cut it. And when I think of what went on in the studio executives' minds when they thought (sic) this up...
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