[Editor's Note: Poster Lab is your weekly dose of movie poster dissection, wherein the House examines the pluses, minuses, and in-betweens of the poster design(s) for a buzzworthy film.]

Call off the dogs. The absolute worst poster of 2011 has been found. Just as surely as Adam Sandler regards viewers as mindless, indiscriminate subway rats, so, too, do the sickeningly shallow media makers pushing Garry Marshall's "holiday" series, the McDonald's-drive-thru answer to the sweetly experimental Je t'aime films. A touch of the bubbly meets a touch of evil in the latest one-sheet for New Year's Eve, a tacky A-List nightmare that—can you believe it?!—boasts even more glossy celebrities than its saccharine predecessor, Valentine's Day. These movies are insulting even in their conceptual stages, when it's decreed that a mess of famous faces playing characters who can't possibly see ample development is as valuable as a well-considered tale of folks with actual dimension. But the slap in the face is entirely unrestrained and out in the open with the New Year's Eve poster, a ridiculous collage that any of us could have made on our lunch breaks if we had enough unused holiday gift wrap and back issues of Us Weekly.

Whereas the leading Valentine's Day poster at least had an appropriate shape with which to frame its glitterati, this New Year's Eve image, unable to squeeze the cast into a champagne-flute silhouette, opts for the laziest, most laughable grid in memory and sets it against a Party-City New York backdrop that's cloying and contrived right down to the pixie-dust fireworks. It's hard to think of a recent advertisement for anything that's so transparently offensive, as from the exaggerated use of AmEx gold to the shameless showcasing of the shiny, happy 1 percent, it's soulless commercialism at its most flagrantly manipulative. Continue Reading »