Anyone notice the fundamental difference between these two movie posters?

I’m not talking different actors, different directors (though going by their initials, they both shot a bunch of B.S.), different decades, different millennia even. I mean something even more fundamental, something that goes to the heart of what a movie poster is, or should be, about.

Look closely now.

Got it?

And isn’t that wonderful?

I believe it started in the mid-nineties; in fact, I believe it started with The Usual Suspects (what’s in a name). Movie posters appeared all over town, and each and every one of them annoyed me to no end.

Why? I’ll tell you why!

There was the movie poster. Okay. There was a key scene from the movie (or, in the case of Tropic Thunder, an image that might conceivably have been taken from an early, justly unreleased cut). Check. There is the lineup of the key characters. So far, so good. And there, across the top, the names of… wait. That’s not Stephen Baldwin, it’s Kevin Pollack! And that’s not Benicio Del Toro, it’s Stephen Baldwin! And Chazz Palminteri isn’t even in the poster! In fact, only Kevin Spacey has his own name above his mug.

Like I said, it started in the mid-nineties. Apparently, some totalitarian graphics design committee somewhere in the dark, smelly bowels of Hollywood decided that it provided undue clarity to print the actors’  names over their own heads. So ever since then, whenever a movie poster contains more than, say, A SINGLE ACTOR, their names MUST be shuffled!

Obviously, this drove me to fits of uncontrollable rage for 15 years of needlessly confusing movie posters.

But peace of mind returned last night, when I saw Tropic Thunder announced in our TV guide, with a thumbnail of the movie poster.

So now I move to give Ben Stiller a retroactive Academy Award for this pearl of movie excellence. Not for content, not for the quality of his direction, the wealth of satire in the screenplay, or for his leading role (as a matter of fact, I didn’t even watch the movie—it didn’t appeal to me at all). No, I say he should receive an Oscar for his courage in defying Hollywood movie poster convention (as early as 2008 even).

From left to right: Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey Jr.*!

* Must admit I had to look up the movie on IMDB to confirm that it was, in fact, Mr Junior, and not a cameo by Richard Pryor’s youngest son.