Crap Film Taglines No1

While on the subject of Bromance (dear god, please put a stop to these neologisms) the billboard ad for 'I Love You, Man' officially has the weakest tagline in movie-poster history.

Placed at the center of the poster, an unusual location for this kind of copy, the tagline rather sheepishly reads 'HE NEEDED A BEST MAN... HE GOT THE WORST'. It was wise marketing director who decided to hide this weakling somewhere obscure. Taking the words alone we have a perfectly acceptable, if not particularly original, tagline for a film whose plot revolves around a groom's search for a best man, the problem arises when we take the supporting visuals into account.

Let's do this one step at a time. We know the groom is the guy in the black suit with the bride on his arm, there's no way they could have fucked that bit of visual communication up, so we clearly allocate the role of best man to the only other male in the image - the man in the chair in front of the bride and groom. So far, so good.

Moving onto the second half of the tagline and, oh dear, things aren't looking so good here. When we see the words 'the worst' written down in the context of a Hollywood comedy we expect something at least a little shocking, like when we realise why American Pie is called American Pie. Instead what we get is, horror upon horror, a fairly normal looking guy leaning back in a chair drinking out of a paper cup being watched by a small dog. If we scrutinise the image there appears to be another paper cup, a box of tissues and some kind of dispenser bottle on the floor next to the chair. Is this really an image of the 'worst best man', I mean truly THE WORST? Okay, he has a shit 90s curtains haircut and brown t-shirts are generally a no no, but THE WORST, seriously? I don't want to give up on the tagline just yet there must be more going on here, after all we have the dog and the hankies and stuff to work with. Maybe it's like one of those Rennaissance paintings where the incidental imagery contains important symbolic information crucial for a complete reading of the image.

Okay, so let's start with the hankies. Well he's a guy and guys and hankies can mean only two things - a cold or masturbation. He doesn't look like he's got a cold, so let's go with masturbation. Nice. Things are looking better already, this sounds like the perfect basis for a few cheap laughs at the expense of the 'worst best man' ever. Based on this clever piece of detective work I think it's safe to assume that the dispenser bottle contains lubricant. Now, the dog. Well it's a bit of a stretch, but maybe he masturbates the dog and collects it in the paper cups and, erm, drinks it. That would make a pretty bad best man by anyone's standards, I guess, although I wouldn't go as far as saying the worst. But Christ it took some working out. Is the average punter, who spends approximately 2.5 seconds looking at a given ad according to latest statistics really going to get all that out of it and still walk away believing this is really the worst best man ever? Adding to this mountain of disappointment I'm pretty sure there is no dog masturbation in the film leaving me more confused about what the marketing people who put this thing together were thinking. So because the stupid tagline makes no sense I've wasted an entire blog post and far too many minutes of my life. I'm so not going to see this film.