A Single Man publicity
I’m holding my breath for an announcement about when A Single Man will be released in Poland. It’s kind of odd - I think it’s the first time I’m this excited for something quite that art house. Usually, it’s only the big publicity machines that generate quite this amount of excitement from me ;)
Anyway, now that they’ve realized the film has some commercial potential due to the excitement that Colin Firth’s performance has caused, they’ve put together a second trailer (which is almost identical to the first, but with a few key differences). Here’s a bit of a puzzle for you - can you make out the differences between the original one and the re-cut one?
One of them is obvious - the re-cut one has loads of corny quotes from reviews and the Best Actor win at the Venice Film Festival mention. They’re milking what they’ve got, which is fair enough. But here’s the twist - the two trailers are almost exactly the same length despite the addition of the review quotes. So which shots are missing from the new version?
No gay kiss, the straight one is still firmly in place though. Almost anything else that can be construed as gay innuendo is missing too. The shots of two men splashing about in the water near the end of the trailer have been removed also. The shot of Colin Firth looking at what must be his lover’s corpse is out as well. And, a bit more puzzlingly, the shots of the hustler-like man smoking while Colin Firth looks at him a bit desirously are missing as well (I didn’t think that was any more suggestive than Colin Firth and Nicholas Hoult staring and nodding at each other from across the table, but whatever).
You’ll notice that the two posters rather make it look like the romantic pairing is going to be straight as well.
And check out the synopsis:
A story that centers on an English professor who, after the sudden death of his partner tries to go about his typical day in Los Angeles.
It carefully avoids specifying the gender of said “partner”.
Ugghhh… is about all I have to say. I’m probably going to follow the publicity for the film anyway because I’m just so excited for it, but it’s clearly going to be frustrating :]
On a less frustrating note, here’s the one and only scene from the film that I’ve seen released (naturally this was still before they figured it had commercial potential or they would not have released a scene that alluded to the lead character’s orientation so directly ;-P). Not sure what I think of it - not enough context really.
Here you can see Colin Firth’s two on-screen lovers talking about him *grin* There’s a few other short interviews relating to the film that are floating around, but that was the only one that made me giggle and that’s the kind of publicity I like best ;) I guess this film is on the serious side of things, so I’m not going to get many of those *sigh* The interesting thing about Colin Firth in those interviews (this one for example) is that he’s clearly really attached to the character. There are moments in them when you can actually hear him getting a bit emotional.