Okay, here’s a good example of type used creatively. You may have seen these ads for the recent movie Gone Baby Gone; this one is from the Arts section of today’s New York Times. There’s nothing very subtle about the ad as a whole (big close-up head shots, lots of WORDS IN ALL-CAPS, excited declarations of awards and award nominations, a cacophony of visual noise), but the use of descending weights of type in the title is evocative, playing off the meaning of the words themselves. Not beautiful, but expressive and appropriate.
I won’t say anything about the competing sans serifs around it. My lips are sealed.