To add to the other reviews, the sole engine driving this documentary is nostalgia. Which is a real shame...
I watched hoping to learn something about the business side of movie posters. After all, through some cultural osmosis we can all look at a movie poster and, with 95% accuracy, judge the genre, the valence, the budget, the extent to which we will or won't like it. That's a pretty impressive communications medium! And it has been getting more and more efficient; the posters are, in some "what should I expect" sense more accurate than ever, with very few attempts (in my experience) to deliberately portray the movie as something it's not (less so, substantially, than the trailers).
So I would find fascinating a documentary about that, about how companies, artists, and the public, all evolved this implicit communication. With surrounding issues like -- how much do movie posters vary from one country to another, and why? How many are tried before the final one (or few) are chosen? Are there any stories of notoriously poor poster choices (or exceptionally good ones)?
But this movie is none of that; it's wall to wall nostalgia. The movie posters from the childhoods of everyone interviewed were the best, things have gone downhill since then, a few brave renegades are making things better by (in some fashion) recreating that nostalgia. It's mildly interesting in the sense that it's always entertaining to see a few minutes of someone spending vast amounts of energy on something you consider pointless or actively misguided (honestly I not only think today's movie posters are astonishingly sophisticated compared to the 70s or 80s, I also think they're more attractive on average). But that mildly interesting can sustain 20 minutes or so, not this full documentary.
I watched hoping to learn something about the business side of movie posters. After all, through some cultural osmosis we can all look at a movie poster and, with 95% accuracy, judge the genre, the valence, the budget, the extent to which we will or won't like it. That's a pretty impressive communications medium! And it has been getting more and more efficient; the posters are, in some "what should I expect" sense more accurate than ever, with very few attempts (in my experience) to deliberately portray the movie as something it's not (less so, substantially, than the trailers).
So I would find fascinating a documentary about that, about how companies, artists, and the public, all evolved this implicit communication. With surrounding issues like -- how much do movie posters vary from one country to another, and why? How many are tried before the final one (or few) are chosen? Are there any stories of notoriously poor poster choices (or exceptionally good ones)?
But this movie is none of that; it's wall to wall nostalgia. The movie posters from the childhoods of everyone interviewed were the best, things have gone downhill since then, a few brave renegades are making things better by (in some fashion) recreating that nostalgia. It's mildly interesting in the sense that it's always entertaining to see a few minutes of someone spending vast amounts of energy on something you consider pointless or actively misguided (honestly I not only think today's movie posters are astonishingly sophisticated compared to the 70s or 80s, I also think they're more attractive on average). But that mildly interesting can sustain 20 minutes or so, not this full documentary.