[I]t's clear that they've been studying the ad campaign for "300" very carefully. Among many stylistic and clear similarities between each films' trailers, here are a few highlights:

Should we be surprised that the largest visual Beowulf marketing placement in Tinseltown is a customized gift-wrap of the Public Storage facility squatting at the corner of Santa Monica and Highland? Nay! The well-researched placement is simply Paramount's attempt to sequester a share of the eyeballs normally reserved for Apple's longstanding "We are fucking huge, and we are here to stay" tribute to dancing and antisocial behavior directly across the street.

With the family-friendly nature of Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium probably precluding the possibility of a cutting-edge web campaign featuring clips of Dustin Hoffman trying to blow away the child patrons of his magical toy store with a gun made of enchanted Tinker Toys, the marketers at Fox Walden have decided to instead gently push the envelope of the print medium, bringing the first! ever! ad that uses scented ink to simulate the smell of cake for understimulated LAT readers. Adorable!

There is perhaps no more efficient way to warn potential ticket-buyers that they will be disappointed by the humor content of your movie than by rendering its title in a red font on a one-sheet. [JTylerHelms.com]

As pointed out to us by a reader, the movie posters for this weekend's release Balls of Fury and mid-September's Mr. Woodcock demonstrate that there's no hotter trend in one-sheet design than testicular imagery that subtly reinforces the "ballsiness" of either a movie's concept or its characters. In the case of Mr. Woodcock, however, we assume that this was the studio's fallback version; while the MPAA let the Balls marketers go forward with their nonthreatening wooden phallus, they probably were never going to allow the public to see Billy Bob Thorton dangling a more conceptually appropriate, 34-inch Louisville Slugger between his legs.

A reader angry over the unexpected eye-diddling he received from the seemingly crazed Alan Arkin, his gang of tiny pals, and a scrapie-afflicted sheep emerging from page 7 of today's Variety wrote in a little while ago to request that we share with the world "the ugliest, most confusing, bizarre movie ad I've ever seen. It looks like it was designed by a Bollywood crack-addict."