wear your love like heaven

Not being someone who has cable, I usually only encounter movie advertising in two places: at the movie theatre and on the subway. Every day for the last week or so I have got on the subway only to encounter the most obnoxious movie ads I’ve seen in a long time. They’re for the evocatively titled Valentine’s Day that comes out next week and they make me want to lovingly caress the third rail every time I see them.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the subway version of the ads that are displayed on either side of the subway doors, so I’ve had to approximate them here. (My ire is so great that it compels me to open Photoshop. I recognize I have a problem.)

While I haven’t managed to recreate the obviously finely crafted taglines for each ad, I think I’ve captured the unique and not remotely stereotypical attitude behind the sentiments. Except for “WHAT A DAY”, which is what that poster actually does say in real life.

Allow me to use an unordered list to express my hatred, since no one can refute an unordered list:

• Laziness! Photo collages of huge casts are the defacto, no-imagination solution to this. I’m willing to bet there’s a Photoshop action that you can download for this purpose.
• Ageism! Really, it would have been omgsohard to squish Kathy Bates and Shirley MacLaine on there? Apparently this would compromise the obviously heightened sense of aesthetics the design team came up with. Please see above under “laziness”.
• Gender stereotypes! Women are pink and men are blue! Women live for Valentine’s Day and men always forget it, the lovable scamps!
• Heteronormativity! Normally this would be pretty unremarkable given the plot of the film, but after reading up on the movie at Wikipedia, we find out that “An on-leave army officer named Kate (Julia Roberts) is a passenger on a flight from Iraq to Los Angeles when she meets Holden (Bradley Cooper), a gay man whose lover is a closeted football player (Eric Dane).” Obviously the Big Gay Love Story isn’t alluded to at all in the trailer, and even less so in the poster since Eric Dane didn’t even make the cut on the men’s side.
• Banality! My overuse of exclamation marks might imply that they copywriters might have managed to come up with something with a little pep, but you’d be wrong. The poster of the women reads pretty close to “Flowers. Chocolate. Jewelery. … What a day.” I can obviously appreciate not feeling enthusiastic about this movie, but I’m not sure that the posters are the place to express those lukewarm feelings.

If I didn’t have to look at this every day I’d probably be less annoyed but these posters seem to be on every. Single. Subway. I. Take.

Also, posters aside, this movie just looks fucking ridiculous, so there’s that.