Monday, March 10, 2014

Riske Business: Let's Talk About Posters!

In this week’s Binness, Patrick and I discuss our favorite movie posters, Type 2 Diabetes and Susan Sarandon in her underpants. She gives us both the sugar sickness.

Adam: Kicking off my list of favorite posters is Jaws. The Jaws poster feels so threatening. I'm convinced 1% of the people who look at it will die within 30 seconds. Someone is going on their merry way; they see the Jaws poster, stare at it and somehow get sucked in and are flailing in the ocean with that ominous John Williams music playing over their imminent consumption. The shark in the movie was BIG, but the shark in this poster looks EVEN BIGGER in scale, as if it's 100 feet long or maybe even half the size of the ocean.

I can't even imagine being a moviegoer who didn't know what Jaws would become seeing the movie for the first time based on that poster image. They must have been terrified just entering the theater with that level of threat hanging over their heads. I love the juxtaposition that the movie may be too intense for younger children even though the PG rating is just to the left. Imagine how INTENSE an R-rated movie would be under that logic. The poster also follows a trope I love of "Who's the biggest star?" You would think it's Roy Scheider because he comes first when reading left to right, but then Robert Shaw gets that middle bump as if he's the alpha. I love pissing matches.

What’s your first pick, Patrick?
Patrick: I'll pick John Carpenter's The Thing because I want to have something from Drew Struzan and I love how the image he created for this one isn't just "awesomely lifelike drawing of the star" and is actually a scary, mysterious image that says something about the movie it's representing. Like with Jaws, the poster is so simple and striking and evocative. It also helps that I love, love the movie.

Adam:
Great choice! I love that poster. Some posters are just, if nothing else, great artwork you would want to hang on your wall. The Thing is one of those pieces of art. If I'm picking a favorite Drew Struzan, I have to go with the one he did for Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade. I just think it's as exciting as an action movie poster gets.
Continuing in chronological order for my picks, I adore the poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I've always wanted to like The Rocky Horror Picture Show more than I have ever actually liked The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The music is super catchy and the first third of the movie is fun, but then it all gets tedious quickly for me. However, that poster will momentarily make me forget all of my criticisms of the movie and always put me in the mood to watch it again. The tagline, "A different set of jaws," is actually one of the better jokes to come out of the movie and a good representation of the saucy tone of the movie itself. I love the bleeding font in the poster and those lips, which are such an iconic image.

Patrick: Great call on Rocky Horror; I, too, like the poster better than the movie. It drove me crazy as a kid because the title meant nothing to me but it had the word "Horror" in it so I wanted to see it, yet could glean nothing about the movie's plot from the poster -- and this was at a time when the film wasn't available on home video, so I just had to keep wondering. Susan Sarandon in her underpants was totally worth the wait; the rest of the movie not as much.

Adam: Always Susan Sarandon in her underpants.  What’s your next pick?
Patrick: Saul Bass's Vertigo poster is a classic and deserves to be. Again, there's simplicity to the image (a common theme in many posters I love) that still gives us the fractured, maddening vibe of the BEST MOVIE EVER MADE (TM).

Adam: I had a bet with Saul Bass back in 1958 that Kim Novak would hold up better than his Vertigo poster. I win! #ThanksOscars
Next up for me is the teaser poster for Batman. This poster is so simple, yet so perfect. It's basically “Fuck you, it's Batman!" What the poster tells you is that on June 23rd you will be watching Batman because Batman is the most important thing that will ever happen to movies. Don't even think about going to school, or work, or celebrating your anniversary -- June 23rd is for BatmanThe Dark Knight will likely forever be the best Batman movie, but no Batman movie poster will ever sniff this one in terms of awe and power.


Patrick: Holy shit! I can't tell you how many times I drew that logo on every flat surface I could find in the summer of 1989 (sorry about your back, Grandma). It might be the best marketed movie of all time, and it all starts with that poster. That poster changed the way movies were sold. A bunch of movies tried to create the same kind of identifiable single image (like Dick Tracy the following summer, or Jurassic Park a few years later with greater success), but none of them could come close to Batman. Though it did always bother me that they changed the symbol on his suit and it didn't match the poster. Pick one, dicks.

Adam: If I were drinking something, I would have spit it out when I read about you drawing the Batman logo on your Grandma's back. So funny. What’s next on your list?

Patrick: It’s a completely personal choice, but I love the alternate poster art for Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise -- enough that we've got it hanging on the wall in our basement. Of course it's because it's one of my favorite movies, but I also love the way the artwork makes the Phantom look like a total monster (he actually isn't) who's twice the size of the girl, which turns the movie into King Kong. I love the overly long tagline text, and I love the fact that "fantasy" is spelled with a "PH." I can't explain why. It just makes me happy.



Adam: The Phantom of the Paradise poster is great. Are you a fan of the "official" poster?

Patrick: I like the "official" Phantom of the Paradise poster, but the actual design is so small surrounded by too much black space. They've got all that room and they concentrate everything right in the center?
Adam: Yeah, the alternate poster is much better. My next pick is probably the most unconventional choice of my top five: Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Many of my favorite posters call back to childhood moments where I was instinctively grabbed by the design of a poster. Gremlins 2 is one of those, because it embraces the crassness and commercialization of the movie more than it hides behind it. It's as if it says, "Yes, this is a sequel and being excited about it is going to be more fun than being superior to it." I love the tagline and how authoritative and disappointed it feels; I can easily imagine it being read to me by Christopher Lee. The painting quality of the images fits right in with the movie, which is essentially a live-action cartoon. It piques my interest right away because I'm wondering how a gremlin got to be behind the desk of a white-collar NY office. The finishing touch is Gizmo coming out of the drawer. It might be unfashionable to be Gizmo fan (I know Joe Dante sees him as a sort of red-headed stepchild), but I've always loved Gizmo. He's cute like a Muppet Baby and if that makes me less hard-core and sentimental, I can live with it. Plus, those drawers and handles bear a resemblance to every drawer and handle I saw in my home growing up.

Patrick:
Interesting that you choose Gremlins 2 over the first one. I totally get your reasons and don't disagree with any of them (every single thing about that movie was a comment on sequels, down to the marketing), but for me it's hard to top that first teaser poster with opening box.
Spielberg knew how to keep shit a secret back in the day. I don't think that sort of thing is even possible anymore because of the internet (we would be getting constant leaked images of Mogwai or Gremlin toys). It's what J.J. Abrams keeps trying to do but hasn't yet gotten right.

What’s next on your list?
Adam: To close out my choices, I’m going to choose Pulp Fiction. I don't have many movie decorations up at home, but I do have a wall of Tarantino near my home theater setup. Tarantino movies typically have terrific posters (Grindhouse and Kill Bill Vol. 1 come to mind), but the granddaddy is always Pulp Fiction for me. The poster feels tactile with its worn edges resembling the beat up paper of a book or a magazine, and also evocative of heavily-handled film stock which is in the spirit of the genre movie roots Pulp Fiction so lovingly recreates and enhances. Everything about this poster is cool: the yellow on red of the backgrounds and fonts, the touch of putting a 10 cent price on the "cover" and the cursive used for Tarantino's name. I also appreciate the loving care put into listing the cast, as if the poster knows you're going to read it and get more and more excited as it goes along. It's funny to me how little I noticed the background lamp and window shade until just now. That foreground image of Uma Thurman dolled up to resemble Anna Karina is so striking that you almost forget to look anywhere else.
Patrick: I'll use your mention of the Grindhouse poster to name it as one of my favorites, too. I like the Pulp Fiction poster (though, like the movie itself, now have a hard time separating the image from the mid-'90s hype surrounding it), but Grindhouse is, for me, the only poster that lives up to what Tarantino pulls off in one of his movies (well that and Four Rooms, but that goes without saying). I'm sure part of my affection for the poster is because I'm such a big fan of the movie, but I love that it's a piece of art, too. Just looking at the poster makes we want to watch the movie again.

Adam: Four Rooms has a good poster too! It’s much better than the movie at least.

Patrick: I think it's interesting that several (but not all) of your picks are for movies you love. One of my favorite posters for a movie I don't love is that original teaser poster for The Phantom Menace. It's just such a clever idea and such a promising and haunting image (the movie would fail to live up to those qualities; eeesa not that good). It also delivers more important exposition than the entirety of The Phantom Menace's 136 minutes.
Do we like posters more because we have such positive memories associated with the movies? Or are those just the first ones that come to mind because we love the movies?

Adam:
Good question. I think fondness for the movie has much to do with it but when I was narrowing down my list it included many movies I don't enjoy all that much (The Addams Family, Alien [been established, moving on], Escape from New York [sorry, sorry] and American Beauty). Hell, I even like the teaser poster for Freddy's Dead, which confusingly states he died at 7 years old??? There are also posters I love that are for movies I've never seen, such as The Last Emperor and Amadeus. Those are the last two left. Then I will have seen every movie.
Patrick: I feel like we need to stop this discussion for a moment to address the fact that you don't like Escape from New York. I understand Alien (even if I don't agree), but Escape from New York? Have you completely forgotten the Kurt Russell rule?
Adam: I can’t believe you just invoked KRR against me.  Kurt Russell does rule, but that doesn't mean that Captain Ron rules. RE: Escape from New York - I don't want to dump on a movie you like, but you said you said you wanted to discuss this so.... the score is great, the lead character is cool, the scenario and sets are awesome. That's all in the first 20 minutes and then it flat lines.



Patrick: No, no, I get it. The world is a rainbow. They can't all be Hocus Pocus.
Back to posters. I really like the Amadeus poster, but it promises a very different movie. When I was a kid I really wanted to see the movie because it looked like it was about a cool-looking supervillain type dude. And then I was all "Um...classical music? What am I, 10? No. I'm 7." But I really love that movie and it has Elizabeth Berridge from The Funhouse.
Speaking of The Funhouse -- TERRIBLE POSTER. The only thing worse than a movie you don't like (you know, like Escape from New York) having a really cool poster is a movie you love having a HORRIBLE poster. What are some of those for you?

Adam:
1. Top Gun's poster is pretty unexciting the tagline seems to have asthma (Up There.....With The Best......................Of The Best).
2. Cool Runnings' poster is racist and possibly doing everything it can to convince you against seeing the movie.
 3. Scream's poster resembles a Del Amo Fashion Center bag.
Were there any posters you had hanging in your room as a kid? I used to have the poster for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles up for years. I still think it's pretty great.
I also remember being stopped dead in my tracks back in 1987 by the Masters of the Universe poster. My parents knew I loved He-Man, otherwise they might have just wondered if I liked guys that work out. There was some kind of cookie giveaway (I think it was for Oreos) where you could mail in Proof of Purchases and $5 and the cookie people would mail you that poster. My neighbor did that and he had the MOTU poster in his room. I was SO JEALOUS but my family didn't eat the insane amount of cookies needed for the quantity proof of purchases necessary, so I asked my neighbor to keep eating cookies and give me the POP so I could get the poster myself. He did (this kid ate ALL THE COOKIES) and I eventually got my poster. It's an American success story.

Patrick: You got He-Man on your wall, and he got Type 2 diabetes. So it's like win/diabetes.

I did have posters up on my wall. For a while it was really just Flatliners and the first two Naked Gun movies, which I got through a Paramount giveaway. I don't know remember how I got the Flatliners poster, but I'm pretty sure it was given to me by a kid named Billy Mahoney while I was in the spirit world. He was all "Tell my story" and I was all "Cool hoodie, bro."
Then I started being to buy some of the real two-sided one sheets from the theater by my house after they were done with them, so I got Point Break and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. And then my high school girlfriend started working at that theater, so I got hooked up with True Romance and Army of Darkness. My room was pretty much just movie posters and a poster of a girl in a swimsuit that Heather Wixson gave me by accident in junior high.

Adam: I feel so left out. I need to watch Flatliners. I guess there are three movies I haven't seen.


Patrick:
Some lines shouldn't be crossed, dude. Some lines shouldn't be crossed.

Adam:
Dude, your references are out of control. Everyone knows that.

What are your favorite posters, F-Heads? Is there a poster you love for a movie you don’t enjoy?

45 comments:

  1. Holy poo Adam, I had a really similar experience to you with that same MOTU poster giveaway! My friend Stu had gotten the poster, but since Oreos weren't marked kosher at the time (they are now because fuck you, Hydrox) my mom wouldn't allow them in the house so I couldn't get any proofs of purchase. Also, if you've ever tasted a goddamn Hydrox you understand that this was just the worst situation on many levels.

    I have the original one-sheet for Superman (just the chrome "S" and a streak of red, blue, and yellow through the clouds along with the tagline "you will believe a man can fly") framed in my living room. Love that poster. I always really liked that Freddy's Dead teaser poster too.

    All of the ones you both chose are terrific, and it says so much that none of them are the boring, floating-head nonsense that there's so much of now.

    As for a great poster for a bad movie, I love the "I [hockey mask] NY" teaser poster for Friday the 13th VIII. Lousy movie, fantastic image.

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    1. Agreed on the Friday the 13th Part VIII teaser poster. Since we're on the topic, I really like the final one-sheet for Freddy vs. Jason. It's another example of a poster being better than the movie.

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    2. Even the title is better than the movie, because some movies should just remain at the concept level.

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    3. Stop picking on my What Women Want vs. Think Like A Man concept, PBroms!

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  2. Right on with the Pulp Fiction poster! It's one of my favorites, and one I have proudly hanging in my movie room.

    I dig the posters for Almost Famous, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, The Godfather, Star Wars, and Casablanca. There's also a poster for Inception that I really like that features several of the cast members, some of whom are upside down, standing on tilted buildings (this one: http://godsofart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Inception-Movie-Poster-Christopher-Nolan-Leonardo-DiCaprio.jpg). It looks super cool to me.

    Speaking of Nolan, I thought the posters for The Dark Knight were really nice, too.

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    1. OH! And how can I forget the Back to the Future poster?! In my opinion, it's almost as awesome as the movie itself.

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    2. I love the Godfather, its simplicity elevates (?) it to iconic, and I feel that the movies reputation give the icon much greater meaning. Very complementary art.

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    3. That's precisely why I love it, Brad. as well. The simplicity of the poster for The Godfather is what makes it so great.

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    4. Sorry, but I keep thinking of others I like. I just watched the trailer for the sequel to Sin City, and it reminded me that I love everything about the first movie's style, including its poster.

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    5. I never thought I'd say this but I hope Sin City 2 is more The Spirit than Machete Kills

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    6. Are you just saying The Spirit is the lesser of two evils there? I haven't actually seen either one, so I don't really get the reference. I remember The Spirit getting a lot of negative buzz, so I kind of stayed away from it, and Machete Kills didn't really interest me, mainly because I didn't see the first one, but it seemed like it wasn't that great either. So basically, I hope Sin City 2 is better, and more appealing, than both, haha. Personally, I quite enjoy the first Sin City. I like the noir tone, and the style approximating the graphic novel I found to be just great and struck me as very creative.

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    7. I don't think The Spirit is good but it's definitely watchable. Machete Kills is one of the worst movies I saw all last year. I like the original Sin City too. My reference was more that I don't trust Robert Rodriguez at this point.

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    8. Ah, I get it. Yeah, it seems he's been on a bit of a downturn lately. I really, really hope Sin City 2 redeems him and proves to be good, if not great. We shall see, and I'll try not to get my hopes up too high in the meantime.

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  3. One of the things I love about Blaxploitation movies is the whole super-cool vibe they try to give off, sometimes wonderfully, other times wonderfully terribly. The poster for Super Fly oozes the same vibe, and for years it was the symbol of the unobtainable cool. When I eventually got to see it there were such high expectations stacked against it from the poster that I was unfortunately quite underwhelemed (with the exception of Curtis Mayfields soundtrack, which is superb no matter who, when or what you are ), that is until the end when Priest says "You better take real good care of me. Nothing, nothing better happen to one hair on my gorgeous head. Can you dig it?" I got smacked upside my honkey head with a lesson in Soul Brotha 101. the way that line is delivered by Ron O'Neil in the climax just made everything the movie was and everything I wanted it to be click into beautiful sync. After revisiting it again shortly after it quickly became a favourite. One of the Big Blax 3 (with The Mack and Coffy)

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  4. Chinatown, Alien, Back to the Future, and Rear Window. Ah, the days before Photoshop.

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    1. I have always loved the Chinatown poster, too. It's very classy and cool. It's very well done.

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    2. Yes! Chinatown's poster is great. It's like the best Mondo poster that Mondo never made.

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    3. I agree about Chinatown poster, I think it has a great film noir feel. Another cool example of that is the Out of the Past poster!

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  5. This is great. I'll have to think about my favorites, but the Phantom Menace and Freddy's Dead posters got me SO EXCITED. Great choices.

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    1. Freddy was only 7 years old??? WTF New Line.

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    2. They were only murdering the franchise, not the man. Or maybe the dates were just referring to his "life" as an undead dream-stalker.

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  6. Fun article guys - Jaws will always be my absolute favourite and would be hanging on my wall right now if I had interior decorating privileges in my living room - certainly that and probably Pulp Fiction will be in any future ManCave.

    I was big into movie posters growing up because my bedroom had the ugliest wallpaper ever that my parents refused to do anything with at the time, so I literally covered my entire room with them. Thing is I never actually spent money on them, so they consisted entirely of what I could snag at the town's video store. Though there were a couple okay ones here's a selection of the motley crew of movie posters that adorned my walls through junior high school:

    The Housesitter, Universal Soldier, Boomerang (coincidentally also my first CD bought for me by my mother - I have never seen the movie), Some Movie with Rutger Hauer, Passed Away, Batman Returns, White Men Can't Jump, Lethal Weapon 3.

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    1. Whoa, whoa, whoa...you've never seen Boomerang? You're missing out on one of the most average movies ever made.

      Remember how Sandra Bullock had a Lethal Weapon 3 poster in Demolition Man? I'm still waiting for the LW3 surge in popularity that would have that beat make sense.

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  7. I'll throw my hat in and agree that Jaws is the best poster ever. Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Jurassic Park, E.T., Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs, Casablanca, Fargo, and Raiders of the Lost Ark also rank up there as some of my personal favorites.

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    1. I might be alone in this but I think the best Star Wars poster is the 1997 re-release poster for Empire Strikes Back. It's fantastic.

      Both E.T. posters are awesome too. Do you like the moon one or the glowing finger one better?

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    2. Those re-release posters for Star Wars are terrific.

      I like the moon one better, but both E.T. Posters are great.

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  8. Agreed about Pulp Fiction, it is currently the centerpiece to my dining room (oh the joys of being a bachelor). I always liked the simplistic posters, which is why I always thought horror movies had the best posters. Most of them didn't have a big cast to sell to you, so you never got the irritating "floating head" poster. The Exorcist sells you on it's ominous tone in 1 image. The 2 best from this year I thought were You're Next and Gravity. YN had that great Sheep head holding his machete, and Gravity just had that great image of the spaceman falling away into nothingness, not the one with the sun "peeking" around the earth, that's terrible.

    Most of the greats have already been mentioned (Fargo is my personal favorite), but I'm going to give mention of my favorite in the last 10 years- District 9. Easy, simple, compact- gives you the synopsis without saying a word. Good thing it had no actors to sell you. Although, I would love to see a poster with Sharlto Copley standing heroically with a prawn embracing him (Iron Man 3 style).

    As for terrible movies with great posters, can I get some love for Independence Day?

    Oh, and the worst posters are any ones featuring Vince Vaughn. We get it, you're wacky.

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    1. I don't love the Independence Day poster, but I do love Independence Day. Shhh.....

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    2. I guess I was thinking of the alternative poster, the red one with the ship hovering over the Chrystler Building. Not the White House one, which I hate because of the Spoilers.

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  9. I'll add the posters for Army of Darkness, The Silence of the Lambs and Lord of War. I remember seeing the first two at my local video store and thinking "WTF are these movies about?!" and "I want to see these now!"

    As far as great posters for bad movies, I really liked the poster for Saw V(the one with someone wearing Tobin Bell's face as a mask). Unfortunately, Saw V made me swear off the remainig Saw movies

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    1. You should at least see Saw VI. It's the best of the series. And then stop there, because the next one is the worst.

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    2. Saw VII (or 3D or whatever its called), retroactively made me hate the whole franchise that I was starting to enjoy up until that point - you should definitely see Saw VI to cap off the kinda trilogy that is 4-6, but yeah, stop there!

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    3. Yeah, listening to your Saw retrospective podcast made me want to see it. I think my disgust with Saw IV & V didn't help but also remember that awful reality show "Scream Queens", where awful wannabe actresses did stupid stuff to win a role in Saw VI while an embarrassed James Gunn was a mentor? The whole thing just helped turn me off the Saw franchise even more at the time.

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  10. I'll throw in some love for great Bond posters. You Only Live Twice has a great "gatefold" style poster with 007 hanging upside-down above the Spectre Volcano that is still way cool. It's ironic that Roger Moore had some profoundly mediocre Bonds that were nonetheless blessed with awesome posters - Live and Let Die's tarot motif, the lovely Britt in Man with the Golden Gun, and the 70s chic of The Spy Who Loved Me. And how about For Your Eyes Only, with the famous reverse-leotard?

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  11. Any of the posters illustrated by Richard Amsel are pretty great. The poster for "Chinatown" is a good example of his work. He also did "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

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  12. For those of us who were kids at the time, the STAR WARS posters are stuff of legend. When they released the second version of the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK poster that was the same one but with two new characters (Lando and Boba Fett) shooting laser guns, we all went freakin’ nuts.

    For worst, I’d have to go with the super-fancy posters for ARMAGEDDON, which had a little electric clock in the corner, counting down the days, hours, minutes and even seconds leading to the movie’s premiere. The Bruckheimer marketing machine was the real asteroid.

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  13. If I may join the par-tay, I have to agree 100% on both Pulp Fiction and Jaws; fantastically clever posters for great movies. I also love the shout out to the Gremlins films, everyone I know rags on them but they just make me smile thinking of them.

    For one of my favorites I say V for Vendetta; most of the posters are fantastic, though http://www.impawards.com/2006/v_for_vendetta_ver5.html is by far my favorite. The movie is so wonderfully executed and this poster captures the emotional turbulence between Natalie Portman's lead and the world she lives in, the political usurpation within the film, along with the strong theme of anarchy present from the original graphic novel. The style also reminds me of Communist propaganda, which is a brilliant choice.

    Though before I sign off, I have to ask; why does Adam dislike Alien??

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    1. Hi Douglas! Thanks for commenting.

      I don't want to crap on a movie you like so I'll just say that Alien is a movie I admire from a technical standpoint but am left totally cold by when it comes to characters and story.

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    2. Haha, thanks for the self-control hahaha. I mean I can understand your argument, I guess I just always hold it dear to my heart because it's a 'sci-fi' film that doesn't simply create a cgi disaster, and plays more off suspense and isolation than gore and special effects. On a side note, I have to say I truly enjoy the sense of dread in the beginning scenes of Aliens when Sigourney Weaver discovers her 7 (10?) year old daughter has grown up and passed from old age in her absence. It's like 'whoa.'

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  14. I agree with Jaws and Vertigo!

    A poster I have just printed off my own A4 version is the Thunder Soul poster where you can see music notes and mini saxophones as a part of the person's afro. I think this is a great image as it reflects the people you are going to see in the documentary with how much music means to them and how positively it affected their lives.

    The La Belle et la Bete poster by Denis Malcles is so beautiful and also feels like it has the same kind of vibe as the movie: http://www.m2jc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/la-belle-et-la-bete-1946-a02.jpg

    I have two books that I have just had another look through (Movie Posters of the 30s & Movie Posters of the 40s) and I found this one, which I really like: http://www.emovieposter.com/gallery/inc/archive_image.php?id=6481055
    I really love Dietrich and have a poster of The devil is a woman on my desk.

    I think the M poster is very effective and there is something very striking to me about The Letter poster. I think it is something about the way that Bette Davis looks as well as the fact she is holding a gun and boy I wouldn't mess with her at any point but definitely not holding a gun.

    Posters that make me happy: Back to the future, Fright Night, Lady on a train, What's up doc. Honourable mentions: Jackie Brown, The series of Sherlock Holmes posters with Basil Rathbone and Sholay. I think I saw Sholay's poster as well as my lecturer describing the movie to us and went 'fuck yeah I'm seeing that shit' to which my lecturer laughed and told me it was in the DVD library. I friggin love it. http://static.ibnlive.in.com/ibnlive/pix/sitepix/08_2010/sholay_120810.jpg

    Also Toy Story 3's poster just because I have such affection for the movie. shamless plug please go over to Josh and I's new blogsite to check out our review of Toy Story 3: http://projectedacrossthepond.blogspot.co.uk/
    Please tweet us some feedback - we'd love to hear it!

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    1. Oh god, how did I forget Fright Night? Annnd Jackie Brown? Nice save! Two of my very favorite-est films!

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    2. High five Douglas - those movies are awesome :)

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  15. Another great thing about both Gremlins posters: if you have a full-size version of either (or at least a really high-res image), you can have fun trying to find the tiny Amblin logos hidden in there by the artist.

    As for other great posters, I've always had a fondness for the original Darkman one-sheet and the elegant simplicity of the original Halloween poster.

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    1. I've never noticed those Amblin logos! Great call on Halloween, and I have to say the Halloween II skull-pumpkin poster scared the hell out of me when that movie came out (I was six, but still, yikes).

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  16. I've always loved the Metropolis posters.

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