I GIVE IT A YEAR - How to sell a romantic comedy to foreign audiences

Did you know that studio marketing departments often have to make major cosmetic changes to a film's poster in order to promote it effectively in other countries? Take I Give It A Year, for example...

Did you know that Jason Flemyng was removed from the Australian version of the poster due to an incident at a party in Sydney where he went around making everyone tell him that he was their favourite Jason to appear in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels?

Or that Belgian audiences find an abundance of unused white space to be more entertaining than Stephen Merchant's gangly frame and have always had a dislike of Minnie Driver ever since they found out that she actually prefers to drive a Volvo?

How about the fact that audiences in Germany also carry a dislike of Jason Flemyng stemming from a different incident, but are big fans of exclamation points and anachronistic, poorly hidden sofa bombs?

Well now you know. Or maybe some international marketing departments like messing about with posters just for the sake of it.

Not So Hunky Dory - How I Managed To Make Life Just A Little Bit Harder For A Small Welsh Film

What do you get when you cross one inquisitive film blogger, one of the world's best known film magazines and a small Minnie Driver starring Welsh independent musical-comedy with an erroneous quote on its DVD cover? This whole debacle...

BARNEY'S VERSION DVD review

Out now on DVD and Blu-Ray, read on to find out what I thought of this Paul Giamatti starring comedy...