Angelina "Wanted" Poster Banned Abroad

Reuters:

Angelina Jolie might ooze Hollywood glamour, but if she's armed and looking dangerous, the actress is not welcome in Britain.

Britain's media watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), has banned two posters of Jolie promoting the film "Wanted" after upholding complaints that the images of the gun-toting actress glamorized the use of guns and violence.

One poster showed the actress crouching and holding a gun pointing upward while the other showed her lying on her back across a car's hood, brandishing guns.

Read the whole story: Reuters

Comments

[Samirah1368]

I happen to agree with the decision and I love Angie and Brad. I don't think its censorship to take away the gun in the poster. Here in the US we glamorize guns and the lifestyle that goes with it. Of course if you go see the movie you still are going to get that glamorization BUT its not all over the city for everyone to see. jmo

[SlippingInTheDip]

Tatoo Freak...

[hypnotoad72]

One word too many. Just say "freak".

If nothing else, she's half of this media name called "branflake", "brangina", or whatever it is...

[freedomtothepeople]

wish i lived in a country that said "enough" to brangelina. with the prospect of rove/palin­/mccain08, maybe emigration on the horizon- although it rains too much in the uk. take a lead from jolie herself, who can profit wildly from the promotion of shameful gun crime here, but then disappear to 'no guns allowed' france to protect her children. pouvez vous a dire "celebre hypocrite"?

[tkondaks]

Wow.
You call yourself "freedomto­thepeople" yet you seem intent upon reducing freedom. You may not like the images of the "art" that is the movie poster in question but it is free expression nevertheless and if the artist -- be it an individual or a corporation -- wants to promote guns and violence, then so be it.
You want to restrict it and thus restrict freedom.
As for "shameful gun crime", the crime rate on the whole is higher in Britain (and also in Canada).

[freedomtothepeople]

wow.
must be a republican to be spouting off inaccurate stats. the usa has 20 times the number of murder by a gun than the uk. as to freedom to promote violence, i could possibly support it if those corporations and individuals doing the promoting picked up the tab for its fallout, not unlike tobacco cos. paying out claims for nicotine addiction/death. freedomtothepeople so that they may be free of the burden of others' poor judgment or "art" as you claim it.

[hypnotoad72]

Define "freedom" and you'll get a few million, equally differing, answers - thanks to freedom.

The sepia-tone poster itself is simple: Two thugs, one of which is anorexic and tattoo-laden. They like to play with guns and look real mean. A word, "WANTED", is prominently displayed. I don't want them. Who does? Such a person can have them.

Also, with high crime rates and other factors influenced by "peer pressure", I hope you don't whine about those. The incorrect use of freedom has led to that. People forgot that while we have freedom, we still need to instill the difference between being nice and being file. Our "art" and "artists" are nothing of the sort, since that's all people want. Anything violence- or sex-related. REAL art has been dead. Mostly because it can't be mass-produced.

[TheBlackCat]

Obviously by my numerous posts this is an issue near and dear to my heart, as an artist. So here are some censorship quotes by great minds who put it better than I ever could:

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot" - Eugene Gladstone O'Neil, American playwrite

"Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the ONE un-American act that could most easily defeat us" -William Douglas

"Fear of serious injury and violence cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women." -Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

[TheBlackCat]

I'd slit my own throat before I'd ban a book, a movie, a piece of art, a song, anything. Censorship belongs to Nazis, fascists, inquisitioners, and communists; not modern, civilized societies. If your kid murders someone because he saw a picture of Angelina holding a gun, then you failed as a parent. Exposure to something does NOT mean you then do the thing you are exposed to. Holland has legalized prositution and sex EVERYWHERE- sex shops, sex festivals, pornographic advertisements running during prime time family programming but they have THE LOWEST teen pregnancy rate (including aborted pregnancies) in the entire world because they bother to EDUCATE their children on what they are exposed to in their daily lives!!!!

Give me a world full or art and life, with all its offensiveness, dangers, failings, triumphs, and beauty, over a Pleasantville-like, whitewashed, Orwellian society ANY day of the week.

[TheBlackCat]

This is ridiculous, its not like the movie was banned, or trailers for the movie, or the comic book the movie was based on, so what's the point of banning a poster? Not to mention how stupid it is to ban ANYTHING because a whole 17 people complained.

This movie kicked A$$ and took names, btw. I especially loved the assasination scene where they played Andrea Bocelli's "Time to Say Goodbye" - one of the best action movie sequences I've ever seen. I never would have pegged James Macavoy for an action star but that kid did a great job, hope to see him in similar roles again!!

And for anyone who wants to lecture me about how fictional violence should be censored...I'm a comic book fanatic and artist, so you'd just be wasting your time. I have zero tolerance for censorship of any kind, including censorship of things I find personally offensive (Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter). Not to say you're not entitlted to your opinion- just that I promise nothing you would say would change mine.

[UsofA]

Angelina, all about world peace and adopting children from poverty, is seemingly incapable of making a movie without a gun. She glorifies it in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and this piece of cinematic pandering, "Wanted." Anybody know any others? Keep in mind, "bombs" are not the same as guns.

[TheBlackCat]

What part of fiction don't you understand? Are you saying no one can even PRETEND to do anything bad? That is someone is a good person in real life but PRETENDS to be a bad person, they're a hypocrit? Could you BE anymore of a member of the thought police? Trust me, all those nice European countries with virtually no violent crime still LOVE violence in entertainment. I live in Amsterdam. All the American tv shows, movies, video games, books, comics, etc which glorify violence are JUST as popular in Europe as they are in the US. These things aren't what causes violence, if they did, everyone else in the world would be just as violent as America.

[hypnotoad72]

The difference is, you lot manage to teach your kids how to be civil. Maybe Americans don't have time or prefer to let the TV set and "Grand Theft auto" be the nanny, I don't know.

All I know is, if it's true you lot don't have problems and America does, what are you doing right and what happened that Americans stopped doing it? For what it's worth, of course.

[ktano0]

Just as well. I love Angelina, but her arms (elbows especially) are not her finest feature. Goes to show, nobody's perfect. But she is darn close!

[awcbuddy8]

Guns okay in US. Sex okay in Europe. Got it.

[AdV2k1]

whatever. I loved the movie and I am no gun nut. I don't own a gun, or ever used a firearm or an desire to kill people.

[Jasel]

Nice to know that others developed nations that have nowhere near our murder rate (while we sit around asking ourselves "Why? Why? Why?" after violent shooting sprees and rampant gun violence across the nation) actually set standards for themselves.

Sometimes I wonder what the founding fathers would have done if they knew what the 2nd amendment would do to our country 200 + years after the fact. Somehow I doubt the state our country is in relation to guns is what they had in mind.

[newpotusplease]

One persons gun picture is another person's cigarette picture
are the brits banning images of people smoking cigarettes? if not, why not.
this is stupid.

[UsofA]

Do cigarettes accidentally go off, killing eighty thousand US citizens a year? Do criminals use stolen cigarettes to commit robberies and murders at the rate of 250, 000 yearly in the United States?
How about, due almost exclusively to handguns, the US murder rate being the highest, and growing, in the world? Does that raise any red flags? How about the glorification of guns affecting young children just as the glorification (now banned) of cigarettes once did? Trust me, young men and women lying dead on the inner city streets of America aren't dying from cigarettes.

[OhComeOnNow]

My hats off to my British cousins who showed enormous class and judgement in banning that worthless dreck.

[lechatnoir]

The poster should be banned because it pushes anorexia/bulimia to little girls (again!)

Jolie, peut-être...mais conne, ça c'est sûr.

[MorpheusXNYC]

Umm.. The movie is about a guild of gun weilding assassins that can curve bullets and hit targets from over a mile away.

What do you expect the poster to show?

If it was a war movie, would you not expect to see soldiers with rifles in the posters?

Glorifying guns is necessary when you're advertising a movie about ASSASSINS.

Sheesh. There's sensitivity and then there's plain silliness.