So not to go on a total poster bitch-fest jag, but the one-sheet for the forthcoming Whiteout, starring Kate Beckinsale, has dropped, and it also looks like a weird Photoshop job, albeit a better one than Good Luck Chuck‘s sorry poster.
 <b>But the proportion of feet to gun to head is off; it doesn’t quite play</b>.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m subconsciously pissed because this shot affords no glimpse of skin. Or maybe I’m just unnerved because it reminds me in passing of a recurring dream I had as a young kid, wherein a hooded Eskimo tried to violently shiv me.<br /><a href=)
After all, that’s a large part of the reason that to this day I bear a grudge against the Inuit. Well… that, and the fact that they clubbed the rest of my family to death with baby seals when I was 10.
A consensus slice of cinematic crap screens at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles on August 10. Released in 1990, Troll 2 has nothing to do with the
original Troll. In fact, there isn’t a single troll in it. Instead, a traveling
family is menaced in the town of
by vegetarian goblins (!) that turn their victims into plants and devour them.
With endlessly quotable one-liners, terrible acting, plot non-sequiturs, homemade
special effects, and ’80s synth music, Troll 2 epitomizes the type of movie to
experience in shared darkness, in a theater with an enthusiastic (and possibly intoxicated) crowd.
Stephenson, George Hardy, Jason Steadman and Darren Ewing, as well as the
film’s director/co-writer Claudio Fragasso, and co-writer Rossella Drudi,
coming all the way from Italy. All will be present to answer questions
about the production of the worst movie ever made, and lead actor Stephenson
will also be compiling footage from the event for his documentary on the film’s
cult following, Best Worst Movie.
Good Luck Chuck‘s set of teaser posters, but its one-sheet takes misguided idiocy to a whole other level. I know this shot has been out for a while now, and I’ve meant to tackle it sooner; I even had the photo saved and loaded. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger.
Where to begin? First, yes, of course I know it’s a riff on the famous John Lennon/Yoko Ono Rolling Stone cover shot. But this appropriation of it is wrong on so many levels. First and foremost, it reveals more of Cook’s haunches than I ever wanted or needed to see. Secondly, how does it advance the actual plot or conceit of the movie in any legitimate way? Finally, it’s just awful, awful Photoshopping. If you’re going to do something like this, stage the goddamned thing in a one-setting shoot with both parties. The fact that you didn’t merely confirms the obvious — that this is a desperate, see-through ploy, conceived long after the wrapping of principal production, to try to polish a turd and sell some tickets.
During a recent interview for Sunshine, the subject of humanity’s self-destructive impulse — a steady thread through many of his movies — came up with filmmaker Danny Boyle, and in asserting his personal optimism, he made an interesting connection to the rest of his canon, and how maybe his experience on The Beach has informed his work since. “Yeah, I think [issues of man grappling with self] are certainly there, and I think that’s why a lot of my scenarios are almost apocalyptical. I love those set-ups. But I think you
do battle against it. I am
optimistic and positive, and I want that to be in all the films. The only
one I think it’s not in, in a funny sort of way, is The Beach, which is a very depressing film in the end, a very
negative film in many ways. It surprised me why it came out like that.
Because normally, even in the bleakest scenarios, I kind of dig out
some spirit and hope.”
“The Beach was a
big film, but it wasn’t a big film — it just was big, though it shouldn’t have
been. It became,” continues Boyle. “It wasn’t Leo, who was fantastic. But it’s a big movie star,
and a big studio, and it suddenly becomes a gross, inflated thing. Suddenly
there’s 400 people working on the film everyday, and you think, ‘I don’t need
400 people to make this film, it’s a film about a bunch of hippies in a jungle!
I need only maybe 30 people.’ And it just grows like that. So [Sunshine] was big,
yet we controlled it. We kept sealing it — I didn’t want money, I didn’t want
loads of extras. I wouldn’t have got it anyway, because we didn’t have any big
stars in it. But I didn’t want money, I didn’t want a big star in it… I wanted
to try to make it with restraints, real disciplines that we had to work around
and be creative about how we got round them, and to make it feel like $150
million, but not force it.”
I went for another walk-run-lounge (my own version of the triathlon) in Santa Monica this past weekend, and in three weeks or so the wraparound trashcan ads for Hot Rod have faded mightily in the sun, in addition to some of the expected petty graffiti (fake mustaches drawn on Isla Fischer, rather appropriate considering the movie’s fascination with them). Advance word via viral and new frontier advertising is all well and good, but when you’re heading into the home stretch prior to your film’s release and a string of its posters look worn and faded… well, that has to have a psychologically dampening effect. Underdog ads, meanwhile, have taken over some of those same trashcans. And that movie releases this Friday as well, along with Hot Rod. Smart, that Underdog. For once.