Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring drops on June 14 from A24 Films, based on the true story of a bunch of young, party-happy fame junkies who take to knocking off the homes of tabloid celebs like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and the like. Its teaser poster, below, is a catchy thing, stacked up as it is with five pairs designer sunglasses. For auteur filmmakers and young ensembles, as is the case here, this is the type of imagination for which more one-sheets should be aiming.
That’s the movie’s visual shorthand selling, though. Its trailer is a slightly more conventional thing, pitching it as a gum-snapping, bubbleheaded heist version of The Perfect Score, with maybe a pinch of Spring Breakers. We’ll see if it possesses the latter’s allegorical punching power. Time will tell. I’ll say this, though — Emma Watson totally nails that voice of vacuous, proudly blithe entitlement, for whom demi-celebrity is an occupational aim. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website.
Category Archives: Posterized!
Olivia Munn and Paul Schneider Are The Babymakers
So the trailer for The Babymakers (Millennium Entertainment, August 3) is now online, and it feels like a loser in the August comedy sweeptakes, up against For a Good Time, Call… and The Campaign, just to name two other films off the top of my head.
It’s a jizz-heist laffer, from the Beerfest and Super Troopers guys, in which Paul Schneider’s character tries to break into a sperm bank to get back his donated seed so that he can get his wife (Olivia Munn) pregnant. Notwithstanding the weird-match factor and seemingly dubious chemistry on display between the two, can Munn really convincingly play sweet, or basically a straight woman, after the leak of all those delicious sexts to ex-boyfriend Chris Pine? That mode wasn’t exactly her forte to begin with.
And the film’s poster is atrocious, let’s just be honest. Any one-sheet that features a guy with that look on his face is just announcing its knuckle-dragging intentions and phoned-in lack of ambition, honestly, or making a misguided play for female sympathies. “Dumb,” i.e., ribald and loose-limbed and full of bong rips, is all fine and good (it’s what the Broken Lizard guys have made a career out of, after all), but the repartee here feels stale. If one feels like cycling through its wonky set-up that features other movies’ preview clips, though, The Babymakers‘ red-band trailer, inclusive of boobs, is also over at Yahoo, here. So there’s that.
Blue Valentine Poster Proves a Head-Scratcher
OK, a word about Blue Valentine, which has been courting controversy and getting attention in weird ways recently. I understand the Weinstein brothers’ penchant for showmanship and salesmanship, but I’ve seen the film a couple times, and it soars on its own merits. The whole ratings controversy, about it being slapped with an NC-17? I don’t get it. It’s a very frank and sexual and emotionally pulverizing story of these two people who are not meant to be together — their respective pasts render them incapable of giving the sort of love the other needs, or is hardwired to receive — but it’s not a movie that is over the top or out of bounds or flippant with its sexuality. It reeks of a baited rating, in other words.
Now there’s the poster, which is a grungy, druggy thing. It’s not terrible, don’t get me wrong. It captures a bit of the intensity of the relationship between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, it’s just that it doesn’t convey the frailty and… essential busted-ness, let’s say, of what’s really under the microscope, which is what Derek Cianfrance’s film is all about.
Rubber-Faced Nun Robbers Steal Poster for The Town
I’ve been ruminating on The Town, Ben Affleck’s directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, and it seems a curious choice that the poster and billboard art for the Warner Bros. film features those rubber-faced nun robbers. They grab one’s attention, to an extreme degree, and it just doesn’t translate, on an elemental level; it muddies the water too much, and along with its nondescript title makes the film seem like more of a horror film — or at least opens it up to the interpretation of such, to a casual driver or passerby at a bus stop. It’s a great “give” in the trailer, sure, those images, but not in the print art. I guess it’s meant to be an evocation of the Point Break poster, but that was a more much rooted visual reference, whereas the masks here seem warped/melting, and more overtly creepy. I guarantee some middle-of-the-country impressionable boomers just bought a ticket for the Wall Street sequel instead.
Does The American’s Poster Art Tip Its Tone?
So I have the sneaking suspicion that the stylized poster and advertising art (above) for George Clooney and Anton Corbijn‘s The American (Focus, September 1) is saying what the TV trailers cannot, which is namely that this isn’t a commercial endeavor, and those seeking assassin-on-the-lam thrills would be wise and better served to look elsewhere. The orange background color is a purposefully jarring arthouse choice, and the female eye — at once lurking and alluring — is too esoteric a thing for Joe and Jane Popcorn. “Prepare for European styling,” the above says. Only several more hours until confirmation on this.
Studio Rom-Com Poster Designers Evince No Effort
I have a bone to pick with studio marketing guys — if you’re making a romantic comedy and the best you can come up with is just putting your two stars on the poster kinda smiling and looking flirty, you probably really don’t have anything new in the genre, so why are even you making it? I mean other than the easy dollar? The latest example of the above phenomenon is The Back-up Plan with Jennifer Lopez and that CBS guy. Amy Adams had it with her Leap Year poster (at least it was green) but c’mon people — design something. Sell me on your idea. Sell me the high concept reason for your movie to be, give me something that makes me think this is gonna break out of the pack and be something worth seeing rather than just something to occupy 98 minutes and hopefully help me score, ya know?
I realize these things trend feminine, and that that is the basic mission statement — to appeal to girls, who will drag along the guy, to put his ass in the seat next to them. But the rom-com poster is by far the easiest poster genre to spoof. I’d been thinking about this as it relates to She’s Out of My League and a couple other films on the horizon, the former of which made a late attempt at mitigating Jay Baruchel’s wincing mug and all those complementary posters of dudes by adding the lovely Krysten Ritter to the promotional poster campaign. But it’s always sappy rom-com mock-ups that first get titters in movies about movies, before action poster spoofs, really. Because they so roundly evidence a complete lack of effort.
President Obama Dictates Course of The Book of Eli’s Promotion
Does anyone doubt that if Barack Obama had not been elected president in 2008, The Book of Eli would have a slightly fairly different advertising campaign, one that did not involve character-specific posters and billboards that make the entreaty to “believe in hope”?
The Privates Lives of Pippa Lee Gets a New Poster
The new poster for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, releasing October 23 through Screen Media and starring Robin Wright Penn, Blake Lively, Winona Ryder and others, is out, and I’ll just come out and say it — it’s a far too-cluttered thing.
The flame-edged center is interesting, but its pop is lost in the form of the shadow, and Penn’s armpit cleavage conjures up thoughts of butt crack where it’s placed. And without the other faces flush right, the entire thing feels like it’s going to just tip over. Over reduce that huge credit text, and drop a horizontal crawl box or something.
Uma Thurman Brings Soupçon of Grace to Motherhood
The trailer for Motherhood (Freestyle Releasing, October 16), starring Uma Thurman as a harried New York City mom of two prepping for her daughter’s sixth birthday party, is now online, and it pretty much delivers, in beat-by-beat fashion, everything you’d expect based on the above logline: playground quibbles, rumpled clothing, appropriately distracted line readings. Minnie Driver is the best friend; Anthony Edwards is the husband whose impassioned, sensitive-guy speech of reconnection/reconciliation is given away about three-fifths of the way through the trailer.
It was perhaps inevitable that Thurman would end up in something like this, which might slot nicely alongside One Fine Day as a modern-mom DVD double feature, if only there were the time for such a thing. Thurman’s timing is so completely crackerjack that she’s a natural fit for studio genre product, but I still feel like her best work is a bit off the beaten path, in stuff with more complicated motivations and less cleanly delineated emotional mooring. Those striking eyes help her capture and convey the oblique in a way that a lot of actors and actresses simply cannot. Prime was halfway an attempt at something at once poppy and scruffy, with some real-world edges if not really grit, but it didn’t really work. Still, there
Selling only one thing, and to one audience, the poster is a garish thing seemingly straight out of the 1980s… actually, I take that back. It’s effectively, attractively streamlined. The background color (reading, quite literally, caution) is what makes it feel like a home video box. But the 1980s version would have a lot more clutter — bottles, baby strollers and the like, plus something in her hair.
Thurman elicits sympathy and smiles, and the trailer evidences a pinch of wit in some of its dialogue, but the movie seems saddled with by-the-numbers direction through and through. What makes one most wince, of course, are the squealing bus tires used to cover up the intimation of profanity (a tired trailer foley trick that should be permanently retired, unless used ironically) and, to perhaps an only slightly lesser extent, the obligatory dancing-in-the-kitchen scene, which probably pegs the moment that Thurman’s character recaptures her chi, or groove, or creativity or whatever the movie is calling it. I again wonder, though: since The Big Chill, has anyone over 14 ever danced unselfconsciously about their home with another person?
New Moon Poster Elicits Shrug
This still relatively new-ish poster image means a lot to some folks. But not to me, really. Except that Kristen Stewart likes triceps…
Richard Kelly Showcases Poster for The Box
Director Richard Kelly shares the new poster for The Box (Warner Bros., October 30) on his MySpace page, and correctly notes the one-sheet’s Hitchcockian vibe, the unnerving red stripe drawing one’s attention to a shadowy figure. The tagline beckons properly, too: “You are the experiment.” No notes; like a classy woman, this sells itself nicely while still maintaining an air of mystery.
Knowing Poster Features Lame Eclipse
Don’t know what it is, but title renderings which invoke waxing/waning/eclipsed heavenly bodies as a substitute for the letter “O” just turn me off, in gut level fashion. It’s not awe-invoking or intriguing anymore, if it ever was. It feels cheap or desperate, especially for a movie not actually set in outer space. There was some TV series/project not too long ago which played the same card as the poster for Knowing, and I immediately lost all interest. Also, it may just be the taint of Andrew Niccol’s Simone, which dropped a bunch of 1s and 0s in its title and advertising campaign, but I can do without the numeral as well. Mainly, though, it’s that eclipse that has me inwardly sighing.
Duplicity Poster Sees Future, Deems It So Bright…
Clearly the makers of Duplicity got some sort of sunglasses endorsement deal. Hey, I don’t judge… it’s a hard-knock economy, and look what it did for Ray Bans, and their Wayfarers. Hell, Don Henley probably still gets a free annual pair of the latter, if he still has any assistants worth their weight in wrangled goodies.
Taking of Pelham 123 Poster Reveals Battle of Goatees
The poster for Tony Scott’s summer remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has “launched” over at JoBlo (read: been handed over as a piece of head-patting exclusive content), and it’s a two-tone, brown-and-blue affair that reminds me of nothing so much as The Bone Collector, for some reason. Who will win the battle of goatees between Denzel Washington and John Travolta? Does this product make a cameo appearance? And does Travolta eventually lift up his shirt and reveal the words tatted on his belly: T-H-U-G L-I-F-E?
Step Up, Make It Happen… and Dance!
Could this poster for the direct-to-video Make It Happen, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, be any more of a straight-up gangsta rip-off of the rain-machine-friendly one-sheet for Step Up 2 the Streets? It lacks the volume of precipitation, I guess. Otherwise, I’m hoping someone at DeVry DVD Box Cover Design School got to knock off early for a long weekend.
Australia Poster Fails to Live Up to Continent’s Hype
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia won’t start screening until probably early the week of November 17, due to some characteristically last-minute tinkering by the filmmaker, but the poster has been out a while now, and it’s too vague a thing, conjuring up nebulous feelings of… I don’t know, a Down Under Pearl Harbor? Yes, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are big-name draws, but they’re not romantic leads, never have been, and so the top-shelf lover’s clinch — while gorgeously hued — doesn’t grab a casual viewer. The backgrounded planes, wandering aboriginal kids, shotgun-toting ambler (Jackman in shadow) and setting sun, meanwhile, all come across as very W. Somerset Maugham. Which I don’t necessarily mean as a good thing, just from a commercial pitch point-of-view. After all, does anyone really remember The Painted Veil?
Juneau What I Mean?
Whatever one thinks about the pregnancy of the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, you have to give it up for the above poster, taken from a post on Perez Hilton, a site which I most assuredly do not frequent. Rarely do satiric conceptualization, actual execution and PhotoShop persuadability so nicely intersect. Solid. Though the idea of McCain in yellow short-shorts spawns its own, entirely different level of howling discomfort.
College Poster Best of the Weekend, By Far
A full review of the film will soon follow, but the poster for this weekend’s College is an effective, less-is-more thing, a great selling of a movie without a lot (read: any… sorry, Drake Bell) name stars. I’d make sure to tone down that wispy hint of potential back hair, and also work up a companion piece of two gals in a similar pose, one holding the other’s hair back. Or at the very least throw a bra into the frame on this one-sheet, just to further underscore the sex and nudity. Otherwise, though, no complaints. Well sold, marketing guys.
Disaster Movie Poster Is Half True
After cycling through a couple long-lead teasers early on, the main theatrical poster for Lionsgate’s forthcoming Disaster Movie, which of course echoes back to the crammed visual-gag posters for Superhero Movie, Scary Movie and all the other spoof flicks of the past half-dozen years, just goes kitchen-sink character collection, under the tagline, “Your favorite movies are going to be destroyed.”
I suppose I get all the superhero inclusions (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Hellboy), but then there’s visual riffs on… Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical? Plus animated flicks like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Kung Fu Panda? Am I the only one confused, and disheartened? Ever since Not Another Teen Movie, which actually had some smarts, these genre-spoofing titles have, broadly speaking, been on a big-time downward slide, from an already middling perch. And sure, cheats have been part of the last couple Scary Movie flicks, but are filmmakers (and I guess I’m thinking chiefly, though not exclusively, of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who’re jointly responsible for Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and now this latest flick) even trying anymore? Hell, are executives even reading scripts anymore, or are these things greenlit solely on a title and coverage written up by a 22-year-old intern fresh off the bus from Ball State?
I assume (hope?) there’s at least some tossed-off plot contrivance that serves as a tip of the cap to the title, but if you’re not trying first and foremost to lampoon genre conventions why call it Disaster Movie, I guess is my point — why not just Popular Movie, or Money-Making Movie? And, more to the point, can flat-tire “satires” of this ilk — which seem to consist of people dressed up like characters from other movies, doing bad impressions and getting hit in the balls or plowed over by speeding vehicles — be long for a world in which any number of YouTube creations can offer the same sort cheap, dumb, double-F laffs, and often do it much better?
Hell Ride Poster Reflects Lost Markers
More soon on the film itself, but the poster for multi-hyphenate Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride — a chopper opera from the Weinstein Company opening August 8 in top 20 markets, and starring Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Dennis Hopper, Vinnie Jones, the aforementioned Bishop and a bunch of naked chicks — is a beautiful, effective, sun-burnt thing that captures the dusty, Western-sun tonality and open-road throwback mentality of the flick as a whole.
It reminds me of one of those old, giant color-by-numbers posters that you get a kid to keep them quiet for an entire afternoon, and that are still on sale in truck-stops across the country… if someone lost all the accompanying markers save the orange, yellow and black ones.
The Foot Fist Way Employs Talking Heads*
Paramount Vantage’s ad-buy promotional campaign for The Foot Fist Way — a film for which I didn’t much care for, though through no particular fault of star Danny McBride — is a pretty smart thing, utilizing face-identified quotes from big screen colleagues Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill, Patton Oswalt, Seth Rogen and even the director’s father, Paul Hill. Some are semi-earnest pitches, most are tongue-in-cheek, but, individually and collectively, they give off a guerrilla-cool vibe, which is exactly the right thing for this movie, which is trying to tap the same low-fi vein that made audience-owned hits out of first Napoleon Dynamite and then last autumn’s Juno. The original poster is graphically catchy — it’s got a good color scheme and tagline — but this concept should have been pumped even earlier as the official second-round poster.
* not the band
On Street Kings’ Marketing
This poster for Street Kings is a nice enough Rorschach splatter of urban shoot-’em-up mayhem, with a pinch of bikini-clad temptation from 7 Dias‘ Martha Higareda (not a prominent component of the film, I can disappointedly tell you). It gets enough names and faces in frame, let’s admit, which is basically the thrust of Fox Searchlight’s entire marketing campaign for the film — to make it seem like it’s a really interesting, labyrinthine character ensemble cop actioner, like a gritty cross between Training Day and L.A. Confidential. The trailer for the movie, however, plays like a complete parody of testosteronized macho-cop bull-crap — which isn’t too far off the mark, I can tell you, having seen the finished product. More on this next week…
Jesus Only Halfway Up the First Base Line…
The web site for Bloodline, Bruce Burgess’ documentary investigation about the controversial assertion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who subsequently fled to southern France with their child, has gone live, and it looks to be a pretty slick and smart affair, with talk of how it will peddle out “insider tips” and other info leading up to the movie’s May theatrical release. Expect the crazies to start coming out of the woodwork in about two weeks, I’d say.
The movie’s stained-glass poster, meanwhile, is a
simple, straightforward and… classy? No, that’s not the right word. Effective, let’s say that. It’s an effective and evocative selling of its controversial subject matter… even if Jesus isn’t really halfway up the line to first base. You want real shitstorm-style controversy, show him heading hard for second. The only strikes? I know you want to sell that it’s a theatrical release, but that can be done with a smaller type size on a solid black background. Oh, and the font on the bottom is all wrong — too straight-to-video. For more information, click here.
That’s How They Roll In Texas, I Guess…
Clearly, if the poster for Varsity Blues (this one, not this one) went into the military and then had a slightly early 10-year reunion, after the fat dude got killed, it would be the poster for Stop-Loss.
That. Just. Happened!
So this monster shot of Danny Green janking on Greg Paulus, taken by Inside Carolina’s Jim Hawkins during UNC’s righteous dunking of Dook last night, 76-68, at Cameron Indoor Stadium, gives proper meaning and heft to the “Posterized!” section here at Shared Darkness. Oh, it’s a good day. The only bad news is that Dookies get one less hour of wallowing in the misery and despair that they so richly deserve. Spring forward, my ass…