Saturday, March 06, 2010

stupid in stone

The movie theater across the street from my home has, like many movie theaters, images of famous moments in film in blurry representation on the walls and on huge signs. ICONIC!, they scream. ICONIC! I've never liked those kinds of oppressive images in theater lobbies. I want a blank canvas in my head when I'm going to get it filled it up. Or a very bold graphic image to scratch those kinds of mental itches. I am like a toddler when I go to the movie theater: I want really clear high-contrast graphics to stimulate the synapses, cleanse the palette a little. Not big fuzzy people.


Anyhow: way, way worse than the forty-foot tall Tom Cruise are the collection of famous--ICONIC!--quotes embedded in the terrazzo floor of the main concession area, right when you get off the escalators. Not because they're dumb--in the sense of being stupid--but because of the TYPE!

It's one thing to see dumb (not smart) quotes in a newspaper ad, or big on a billboard, making you wince in twitchy fonty pain, and then have them pass from your life, but to see them embedded, forever, permanently, in the floor below you is awful! Gah! Like this (note also the apostrophe):



And this!



And THIS!



Not only THAT, but one of the quotes (you can probably guess which it is) has stupid quotes and FORCED ITALICS. Here:



Agony. Agony under your feet! Makes your toeses sad! It's hard to see that much bad typography set in stone.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

Makes me want to get out my non-repro-blue pen and do some aggressive circling!

Whetstone said...

Well, from my perspective, it makes the movie theater floor much easier to import into a database.

Elizabeth M. Tamny said...

It is *slightly* cool, like seeing an askew ASCII graphic chipped into marble or a huge billboard with a typo: it's almost sort of interesting to mistakes writ so large.

But mostly it's awful!

Elizabeth M. Tamny said...

heh. whetstone. :)

Anonymous said...

You might have to watch Casablanca again to confirm this, but I believe that Boggy doesn't actually say "Play it again, Sam" in the film. A double oops in stone!

Elizabeth M. Tamny said...

Yeah, that's right--nobody ever actually says that in the movie!