Dakota Fanning's Eerie Floating Head

First up, Retrocrush has an awesome collection of Polish movie posters. Unlike American movie advertisements, which tend to feature the floating, disembodied heads of movie stars looking approvingly over the film's setting...



Yeah, just like that. In this one, there's the additional, creepy element of Dakota Fanning looking out approvingly over herself walking with a horse. "Wow, I am doing a great job of walking around with that horse," says disembodied Dakota Fanning Head. "I wonder, if I hocked a loogie on myself from up here, whether I'd feel it on the back of my disembodied, floating neck?"

In Poland, they just hire artists to draw interpretations of the movie for the poster. Many of the posters come out extremely cool. I've seen this image for Rosemary's Baby before, and it's awesome...way better than the bland, greenish cover of the regular American DVD.



Totally sweet...Not a whole lot like the movie, but it captures the spirit of the enterprise a lot more than a mist-encircled baby carriage or whatever.

Some of the posters are spectacularly odd, and would provide people with an extremely warped, not at all accurate concept of the movie. Like, say, this poster for Robert Zemeckis' light-hearted romantic comic adventure Romancing the Stone.



Why do I think this artist might have only received a vague plot description before beginning work on his design? I mean, I get how it ties in to the film's plot, but still...inappropriate...In fact, there has not been a Danny DeVito movie yet for which this is a viable marketing image. Unless he finally signs the deal and agrees to become the new Pinhead, which of course we all hope he will.

Similarly off-putting and unassociated with the actual film being advertised is this Polish take on Weekend and Bernies. Please note the fact that this poster is horrifying and would lead a consumer to believe he or she was about to view a movie about an evil hand that goes around plucking out people's eyeballs and wearing them in necklace form, a la Dolph Lundgren and ears in Universal Soldier.



Maybe this poster was a public service. Perhaps, in Poland, that hand sign indicates extreme danger, and added to the presence of eyeballs, the overall meaning of the poster might translate as "don't watch this stupid Andrew McCarthy movie, lest your brain ooze out your ears and on to the dirt floor of this Polish movie theater."

Anyhoo...

In other movie news, the trailer for Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's follow-up to the significantly funny Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is online. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (...sigh...I don't like the name repetition thing) is the story of NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, played by Ferrell, who has a rivalry with a French driver played by Ali G. star and CBI personal hero Sacha Baron Cohen.

This all sounds promising, but from my perspective, the trailer is a real disappointment. The last little bit - with Ricky Bobby praying to all the gods he can think of in a moment of crisis - made me laugh, but other than that it seems really...well...dumb and obvious. I mean, making fun of NASCAR fans to begin with is setting your sights pretty low, but I'm honestly surprised at how desperate a lot of this material seems based on the trailer.

Hopefully, I'm wrong. Maybe the best bits from the movie are so crazy and outrageous that they couldn't work into a trailer. Or maybe Ferrell and Cohen (and co-star John C. Reilly as Ferrell's pit crew manager, or something) rise above the material to make the final product funny. But I'm more concerned than I was 10 minutes ago...