They Don't Understand: That Font is a Movie Killer.

You know what's interesting? At least to me to whom almost everything is interesting or sometimes "interesting"? It's the way you can so easily tell from the font and style of a movie advertsiement in your local paper just how bad it is. As soon as I saw the ad for "Get Smart" I knew it was going to suck. I was so disappointed! The old TV show was one of my favorites - one of the few shows on television that would make me laugh outloud - hysterical, side-splitting (also by the way, a bad-news descriptor in an ad) guffaws. But as soon as I saw the bad, generic, uninteresting photo that they were using for the ad (trying to make it convey Smart's trademark incompetence by having each of the characters hiding the face of the other - a decent idea badly realized), and then the cheap, unremarkable, standard font they were using, I knew the movie was going to be one of those ones that breaks your heart because you really, really wanted it to be good.

It was one of those that you wait for with excitement and anticipation, hoping that the filmmakers were clever, that corners were not cut, that the writer was not a hack, that the female lead was not a full-lipped piece of cardboard. Hoping against hope that the director didn't listen to the notes that the Executive Producers from the studio handed out ("It would be funny if he fell down! Can he fall down on page 22 and also page 30?" "We want to see Smart learn a lesson here!" "His leading lady should have a backstory - can she have a degree in something? Something not too smart, but smart enough so that we know she's smart but she can still act dumb? Like a teacher? Or a nuclear physicist?"). But no, you can tell from the font that the director was powerless, the actors thought someone must know what they're doing (you just imagine them saying to one another over craft service tea: "I don't know about you but it seems to me that none of these lines or situations are the least bit funny."), and that the studio was also coasting on the casting of Steve Carrell. Listen, Execs: it's not enough! It has to be funny to be funny!!!

But the font says it all. That straight lettering - it just looks like they got it at half price from Staples. You can just hear the Publicity Department arguing: "Listen, we can mix a few different fonts or we can even use Bank Gothic or Harrington, to make the ad look kind of cool, but since we cast Steve Carrell, and therefore everyone is going to go to the movie anyway, we at the Pub Dept think we can save a couple grand and just use Bauhaus 93 which is very, very readable and doesn't put off kids and illiterates!"

But even more than the cheap font: once the reviews start coming in and you see those kiss-of-death initials: FOX-TV, CBS, NBC, KTV, next to the reviews, you know all is lost: you are not going to have a movie to go to this weekend, and you might as well line up now to rent it on NetFlix, or wait for it to be on pay per view, because it's going to be a big, big disappointment.