When is a breast not a breast? When it's a shadow.
Allegedly.
In the wake of a big hoo-hah - or carefully orchestrated media-baiting - (delete as applicable) last week's controversy of a promotional poster for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For looks to have been touched-up and sorted out. The issue started when the poster, featuring star Eva Green as femme fatale Ava Lord was pictured in a loose, white gown and was said to be showing more than the requisite amount of skin. The MPAA - the Motion Picture Association of America - which dicates in matters of 'taste', was unhappy that if you squinted your eyes and looked at the area of the gown where the character's right breast would be, you could arguably make out the outline of a possible nipple and slightly darker areola.
Seriously - somebody gets paid to do that.
While guns, bullets, carnage, explosions, bloody knives and dismembered bodies have all found their way onto posters - and the first Sin City film, based on Frank Miller's hard-boiled graphic novels, was hardly an all-ages romantic comedy... it was decided (possibly even before the controversy broke?) to explain that the poster would be altered to deal with those concerns and not offend anyone who'd never seen a breast. Thus, a few pixels have been tweaked and the errant nipple has been forever banished. And lots of column inches have been written.
In Eva Green herself found the controversy unlikely and told Vanity Fair: “I find it a bit odd. It seems like it’s all just publicity—a lot of noise for nothing. You have so many more violent things in the movie business and this is kind of soft. I’m not naked. It’s suggested... I find it really sexy, actually... It’s kind of beautiful. But if it shocks people, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t want to upset anybody.”
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a prequel to the original film and once again shot in the high-contrast rotoscope/green screen format, is released in the UK in August and has a supporting cast including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Juno Temple, Josh Brolin, Alex PenaVega, Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson...