Pretty amazing collection of movie poster art from Poland. Certainly better looking than the Hollywood equivalents and often better than the actual movie they’re advertising.
Category: Movies
You may not get all the answers you want
Yikes, there’s a Jandek documentary on the way.
And to complain some more
The UK DVD of 24 Hour Party People has twice the amount of extras than the lame US release.
Take your design artists out back and shoot them
Awhile back I blogged about the decline of magazine cover design. Today it’s the miserable state of DVD covers – specifically the awful cover for the American DVD of 24 Hour Party People. What the HELL is up with this?
Yuck yuck yuck! Who the hell at MGM decided that a movie about a conceded nut-job record label impresario needed a murky and poorly designed generic “rave” cover? American ravers aren’t really going to be into it because half the movie is centered on Joy Division and the whole post-punk scene. OK, the other half is about the Happy Mondays (who I’d call more Benny Hill than rave), but this has to be the worst case of a cover having nothing to do with the movie.
The UK DVD is a little bit better. At least there’s a picture of the cast…
What’s funny is that the soundtrack album has the best cover of all. Very striking design that evokes Factory Records’ whole look.
In general DVD covers seem to be afterthoughts these days. For example, the remake of Oceans 11 had a great design to the marketing and advertising posters:
But the DVD? Boring and uninspired:
Perhaps not surprisingly, the net comes to the rescue. Spleenworld has full resolution replacement DVD cover art to hide the ugly ones from the studio (including the boring Oceans 11 one). I’m sure there are more sites out there.
Hilarious Ebert rant about the new Star Trek movie
From his review of Star Trek: Nemesis
I’ve also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I’m thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven’t fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.
The Top 10 Outsider Videos
So your copy of Heavy Metal Parking Lot is so mint you want to “jump its bownes” and the audio on your Senator Bud Dwyer Blows His Head Off video is so clear you can hear “hey Bud, Bud, don’t!” in your nightmares. You have punk Quincy, punk CHiPS, and a straight-from-TV version of the A.B.C After School Special: The Day My Kid Went Punk. You even made sure to own all three TV Carnage tapes in case your collection left out any Gary Coleman shit. You’re done, right?
And the top 10 are (which is kinda weird since they’re randomly selected)…
- Jan Terri – Rockin’ Video collection
- Anna Nicole Smith – Outtakes
- Peace and Love – the movie pitch
- Orson Welles – Paul Masson commercial
- Elton and Betty White
- Todd Weeks – Self-Defense Guru
- What I Really Want
- Best of the Worst Star Search Audition Tapes
- Martin Carlton Stunt Special
- Winnebago Man
What? No Jonathan Bell. The Orson Welles clip on that site is totally worth the link.
[via Boing Boing]
Turn On. Tune In. Geek Out
Just picked up my tickets for The Two Towers premiere next week.
Lift your cardboard 3-D glasses in respect
Lift your cardboard 3-D glasses in respect.
Sidney Pink, the film producer who is considered the father of the feature-length 3-D movie, has died. He was 86.
Pink, who is also known for giving Dustin Hoffman his first big break, died Saturday at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla., after a long illness.
He produced more than 50 films, including the groundbreaking 1952 three-dimensional feature “Bwana Devil.”
Pink was also the writer/producer on a couple of my faves: the ultra-weird Angry Red Planet, Journey To The Seventh Planet, the Danish Godzilla-knockoff (aaahh! monster in Copenhagen!) Reptilicus, and a bunch of late-60s Italian exploitation movies. IMDB entry here
Two articles on Minority Report
I saw Minority Report on opening night, but didn’t get prompted to comment about it until after I read these two articles:
The first from the Village Voice:
Minority Report is the new lord of the allegories, dethroning that movie whose screenplay was basically rants from Society of the Spectacle with the word “Spectacle” crossed out and “Matrix” written in in crayon.
Difficult to imagine Cruise or Spielberg, avatars of wealth, privilege, and domesticity, lasting more than five minutes in a Philip K. Dick worldview. Dick, like Burroughs and Kubrick, is all about the disintegration that occurs when doubt unravels belief in a Perfect System. Dick didn’t believe in systems or in Mom and apple pie, which is why he seems so prophetic now, when the corporatization of consciousness has become such a totalizing, repressive, and relentless force.
And the second from Slate…
Minority Report has virtuoso grit, but it wipes off with one swipe, like waxy buildup in a commercial. Philip K. Dick’s original hero dreads noir betrayal by his dame; Tom Cruise’s wound is the morally irreproachable loss of a child. (Cruise says boosting the kid theme was his big script contribution.) Cruise is great, huffing street drugs like the Bad Lieutenant – but his grief lets him off the moral hook. What’s his depraved kink? Watching 3-D home movies of his angelic son and his perky ex blushing coyly in a PG negligee.
Sure Minority Report pushed the right tech buttons and will give nightmares to the Adbusters set, but it didn’t sit well with me. It’s basically a wind-up toy movie. Events happen for no other reason than to advance the plot. After stewing on it for awhile, I’m now convinced that the movie ended when Anderton went down for the count in the stasis chamber and that everything that transpired afterward was his dreaming.
Still it’s nice to know that Broguiere’s Dairy will still exist in the future – and that it’s milk will still be sold in glass bottles
Things I haven’t done in years part 2: The Drive-In
So over the weekend, I did something I haven’t done in years… Went to the drive-in! I don’t know why I thought of it, and I didn’t even know if there was one left in LA/OC, but a short web search turned up the last drive-in movie theater in the Los Angeles area: the Pacific Vineland up in the City of Industry.
Sort of a long drive up from Garden Grove, but totally worth it to escape the unrespectful who chatter away on a cell phone, kids that won’t shut up, and the whole damn rigamarole of going to the suburban theater hive.
It was a total blast.
You can bring as much food and drinks you want. It was cheap ($6 a person). The movies were first run features (the major features at the Vineland were XXX, Signs, Goldmember, and Spy Kids 2) and are double-billed with a second run flick (like Men In Black 2). You can adjust the volume. The seats were a lot more comfortable. In short, pretty much everything I would want out of a regular theater that you can’t get anymore
So there are a couple of drawbacks… The Vineland is right next to the train tracks so there was one brief moment when we couldn’t hear because of a passing train. There’s a neighboring industrial plant that is a little over-eager with there security lighting (but that wasn’t a big deal after the initial shock). And yeah, there’s that whole rain issue, which is negligible in Los Angeles anyway.
I’ve always had a “if I won the lottery” dream of opening up a revival drive-in theater and show nothing but old black and white noir and atomic bug movies (with a gourmet concession stand), but for reality – I’m happy with the Vineland (may it live on)