Mondo Tee’s highly varied series of posters on P.T. Anderson are certainly worth a look. Above is the design for Hard Eight, aka Sydney, which flirts with the connections at play in the film, from the iconic opening shot of Phillip Baker Hall walking to the road-side diner. Mondo Tees has made quite the cottage industry out of issuing boutique posters to collectors and fans, and they give an eclectic assortment of designs all of them already sold out, at their online shop.
Both in their films and in their marketing, the Coen Brothers seem to always have a love and respect for good old fashioned typesetting. From the art deco of The Hudsucker Proxy to the wanted poster stylings of their True Grit remake. For their latest film, this simple, but boldly styled teaser poster continues that tradition with a playbill kind of vibe. The eye in the guitar is the only graphic element, and it evokes the kitty cat that Oscar Isaac is carrying around with him in the trailer. It’s subtle but there. In the day and age of photoshop clutter and generic blue tinted hero collages, I tend to gravitate towards the simple and elegant.
While I like the typographical simplicity of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac teaser poster, this weeks highlighted poster goes to the Sam Mendes produced triller, Blood. Desaturated color and a bright red, very clean, typographic integration to the design, a healthy respect for the rule of thirds, a late 1970s model car on the horizon and a corpse buried beneath the mud — Can you say gritty paranoid thriller? The chilly open space (which takes full advantage of the UK Quad format) is also reminiscent of the ending of the Mike Hodges/Michael Caine Get Carter, which is a good thing to allude to in your marketing materials if you are going for bleak Britain-set drama. I know it is keeping with the time period to use those little picture boxes featuring the top billed cast, but that really is my only complaint with the otherwise clear design. Judging from the poster design and the synopsis (below) I expect this to be in the vein of the handsome and engaging Red Riding Trilogy from a few years ago.
Thriller charting the moral collapse of a police family. Two cop brothers, smothered by the shadow of their former police chief father, must investigate a crime they themselves have committed.
Directed by Nick Murphy and featuring a great character-actor cast including Paul Bettaney, Brian Cox and Mark Strong, Blood had a brief run on the festival circuit in the UK and is making its to wider release at the end of the May.
With Canada’s Hot Docs festival underway, I feel it is worth highlight good poster design for documentaries. Playing this years festival is one called NCR. It is aa film about a woman who was stabbed by a man who wasn’t in his right mind at the time. The defense in court used to be called criminal insanity, but is now called, ‘Not Criminally Responsible’. The poster for the image, emphasizes us looking down on a person in a padded cell. A real flair for typography, not only with words providing the wall paper (these cases where someone avoids prison for hospital care are always talked about) and the letter C in the title is encircling the head of the person like a broken halo. A great design overall.
I love the simplicity of the design here in yet another teaser poster for Only God Forgives. Scratched glass and pale neon, and the tagline in the maw of the dragon. Everything marketing-wise has been excellent in Nicholas Winding Refn’s follow-up to Drive. Will the film be all style and no substance? I’m not particularly worried, because man, this is stylish as hell.
Irvine Welsh gets another big-screen adaptation of this satirical outlook on junkies and low-lives. Here it is a cop played by James McAvoy who is in therapy for his less-than-acceptable predilections while on or of duty. The poster, however, cheekily depicts lines of cocaine acting as a ladder for McAvoy’s malfeasant bobby to climb (not out of his drug and hooker problem, but to career success!) and amusingly, he’s snorting his own ‘life-line’ as it were. While the colour scheme or cartoony is not the most aesthetically, the idea behind this poster is a winner, and really, you don’t want ‘pretty’ in an Irvine Welsh adaptation.
I don’t know who started the trend in movie posters of splashing big font text across the front of the movie posters. Was it the Italian movie, I Am Love? Was it Michael Clayton or The Social Network? Certainly these three films popularized things to the point where it is quite ubitquitous at this point. Nevertheless, As trends go, it is one of the better ones, and I dig how Sundance entry The Kings of Summer handles the characters jumping thru the text, as it were. Also, isn’t the green palette here kind of magnificent? Here is some fine key art that just got me to buy a movie ticket.
While this is a very eye catching one-sheet, it compares Zombie’s to bugs, and while the idea is quite scary, the CGI execution in the film leaves a bit to be desired. Prediction: This poster will be the best thing about the film.
To further underscore my point: This.
It’s already that time of year again to be thinking forward to the most prestigious celebration of cinema (and often, celebrity, wealth and glamour) on the planet, The Cannes Film Festival. The festival has a history of putting out classy, minimal one-sheets which highlight a major film star or director. This year, they have chosen the husband-wife duo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward whose marriage defies the cliche logic of showbiz, even as the two actors worked together on films spanning their breadth of their union. The source image is from Melville Shavelson’s 1963 comedy, A New Kind Of Love and the couple also starred together in 1990s Merchant/Ivory award winner Mr. & Mrs. Bridge.
Nicely echoing the original minimalist poster for The Shining, the new poster for Room 237, is simply lovely. Keeping the color (albeit a shade darker yellow) and typeface intact, but replacing the ‘scared-y face’ with a keyhole and film’s iconic hedge maze, the key art offers up what the film is about – or at least it does for those who are tangentially aware of the documentary about conspiracy theories and unusual interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s cult horror film. The pull quote does the rest of the work in helping out a more general audience, while the all-block-capitals disclaimer at the bottom gives it an edge of ‘unauthorized!’
(Note that the actual film is far from perfect, but nevertheless worth a look.)
The original Shining Poster is tucked under the seat.
With the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival kicking into high gear, we offer this handsome poster for Zero Charisma. A comedy From the folks behind popular movie-focused documentaries Best Worst Movie and American Scream, I hesitate to recommend the film based on its trailer (which leaves me rather cold), but I will happily acknowledge that they know how to make clean key art design with a swanky credit block to boot. Who can resist the 20 sided die?
Far from the first film to make a poster from a layout of the tools of the trade, but I wish more films would take this elegant approach. The lollypop and condoms are a nice touch. Crowds may have kept me from a screening of Harmony Korine’s Disney-Girls-Gone-Wild film, Spring Breakers at TIFF last year, and an epic slushstorm (ironic) this week did the same for an early screening, but March cannot come soon enough.
