Ray of Light, or thereabouts

Getting innumerable emails from publicists asking me to watch movies I’ve often never heard of can be a blessing, just as it can be a curse. Sometimes, however, like the fella says, it’s blessing and a curse. It was blessing and a curse just the other week when I received an email about an upcoming film called “Friendsgiving.”’ I cannot speak to the quality of this movie and may never well be able to speak to the quality of this movie. Perhaps it’s sharp, funny, perceptive, who knows. I could speak to the title. Because Thanksgiving with friends is Thanksgiving! But don’t get me started. What I want to speak to about “Friendsgiving”, however, is the poster. This poster. 

I mean, what’s going on here? This looks like a rush job by a confused marketing intern who thought the release date was, like, you know, Thanksgiving, not October 23rd. It’s an abomination of photoshop, each image oddly out of tune with the others, cluttered, confusing, displeasing.

First of all, Aisha Tyler is up there in the right hand corner pretending to take a drink out of a giant flask, culled straight from the Spencer Gifts school of comedy. But her right arm is virtually obscured, making it appear on a passing glance that this flask is just hovering there by itself. 

The size of the flask, meanwhile, is in strange conflict with the normal sized wine glass Kat Dennings is holding in the bottom right hand corner. Shouldn’t she have an oversized novelty wine glass?

Chelsea Peretti, meanwhile, in the bottom left hand corner has her hands folded in prayer, signaling it’s going to be one of those movies where opposite personalities find harmony over turkey and mashed potatoes. 

If Peretti seems to be looking toward Dennings, like she’s judging her, and Dennings is looking at us, Wanda Sykes is looking past us and Jane Seymour is looking off to her left, not so much at Tyler but at some unnamed character in some scene in the movie where they grabbed this image.

The real problem, though, is Akerman. She’s at the center, she’s supposed to be tying the whole poster together, but her subdued expression is at loggerheads with all the chaos swirling around her. Rather than bringing the poster together, she causes the whole thing to come apart, fragments of Photoshop scattered around the poster’s edge, leaving us with no idea where to look or what to think.

Plus, if you’re gonna stuff so many people in there willy-nilly, can’t you at least find room for Christine Taylor with, like, a designer scarf around her neck and a poodle in her arms?