Posterized: Naomi Watts

It's good to be Naomi Watts right now which is something of a surprise since last year it wasn't. But then the blonde Aussie's career has always been like that. Let's investigate.

Naomi Watts photographed by Mark Abrahams for More magazine

In the Posterized series, now beginning a new season so expect one each Friday, we look back at a star's career through their movie posters. Sometimes it's their giant sized faces and sometimes they don't appear on the poster at all. Such are the vagaries of stardom and advertisements.

In Naomi's film debut she didn't even get a name. The then 18 year old actress was billed as "Leo's Girlfriend" I couldn't find a movie poster of that one so we begin five years later when the actress, after a few TV stints debuted properly opposite her best friend Nicole Kidman in Flirting (1991) a terrific Australian coming of age movie you should seek out. A few random TV stints sprinkle her filmography but it's been mostly movies ever since. Out of kindness I'm not including Movie 43 (I'm assuming the hundreds of stars in that one want to forget it, right?) so let's look at the other 39 films. 

HOW MANY HAVE YOU SEEN? 

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Thought I Had... While Staring at the American Sniper Poster

Careful where you point that thing, Bradley. 

New Posters (Now With Less Floating Heads)

Manuel here to whet everyone's appetites with some recently released posters.

Fall movie season can sometimes feel much more thrilling for the way it builds anticipation than for what it actually delivers. Every year we can count on plenty of films to entertain, amaze, and awe us, but I'd wager that that number is usually lower than the number of films you were looking forward to. This is partly a math game and partly an acknowledgement of how PR and marketing savvy distributors (both big and small) have become. 

Take, for example these new posters for, respectively, Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children (as divisive after its premiere in Toronto as the film's trailer proved here), Justin Simien's Sundance sensation Dear White People, and Jon Stewart's first feature film Rosewater. I have to admit I love these posters not only because they aren't full of floating heads or beautifully lit silhouettes, but because they manage to signal the film's sensibility. Arguably, this is what we expect from movie posters, but it's not often we get artistic posters like these that embrace the expressiveness of the medium without resorting to distractingly obvious photoshop.

Men, Women and Children clearly works overtime to let you know that it is a Reitman joint what with the imagery evoking that opening credit sequence from Juno and placing Jennifer Garner front and center; yet it also (if a bit bluntly with that tagline) lets you know what the film's core problematic is, something the poster needs to do when the title itself, unless you know the source material, gives you little to no information. How many people do you think are reading The Film Experience on their phones in this poster? 

But if Reitman's poster goes for both quirky and serious, Dear White People openly goes for laughs in a way that is keenly attuned to the racial politics of the film, with Tyler James Williams' character's equally exasperated yet sardonically knowing look letting you know precisely where the film's humor lies. (You can actually read more about the poster's design over at Vulture; turns out a fan of the film went ahead and created this design only to find it becoming the film's official poster when he sent to Simien who loved it!).

The stark color scheme, the off-center image of Gael (covering up his entrancing eyes! the horror!), the prominence of that ever ubiquitous "Based on a True Story" tagline -- or is it more a disclaimer? a promise?; the poster is clearly wanting to associate "Jon Stewart" with something other than the comedic satire he's known for, going instead for a bleak poster that nevertheless bleeds into a hopeful light in the right hand corner. I particularly love the single bullet hole above the S.

What recent posters have nabbed your attention? Has any of them already secured a spot on your movie poster wall? If you could design a poster for one of your all-time favorite films, which one would it be? 

Thoughts I Had... on a bunch of new posters

We've neglected to share new posters so, let's do. A few brief thoughts, in the order they came, after each poster: Starred Up, Whiplash, The Seventh Son, Theory of Everything and American Horror Story: Freakshow.

Discuss!

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Posterized: Famous Singer Biopics of the Past 50 Years

Oscar loves a lot of movie-things with predictable regularity though it should be noted that those things go in and out of style (when was the last time you saw a hooker with a heart of gold?). But one thing that never seems to go out of style with filmmakers: Biopics of musicians. Whether or not Amy Adams ever gets around to her Janis Joplin picture, or Hathaway goes through with the Judy Garland picture (I'd so prefer her to do Liza Minnelli who hasn't been done!) or Jane Krakowski ever gets the greenlight for Jackie Jormp-Jormp, there's plenty to choose from in the library already. And awards bodies, not just Oscar, often choose them. It's as good a way as any to be noticed.

How do you think Get On Up, from the director of The Help will fair with AMPAS? Reviews may be mixed but they don't seem to be for Chadwick Boseman's playful performance in the energetic title role. Hollywood is always searching for "the next Denzel Washington" and he's one of the candidates even though 'the next...' is always so problematic since true stars are always their own unrepeatable thing. Remember that uncomfortably weird forcing of so many actresses into 'the next Julia Roberts' tag? Even Julianne Moore (lol) was once in that lineup in a major magazine.

Let's look back at the past 50 years within this particular subgenre and see how many films we've gotten and how many of them won awards traction. I came up with about 27 pictures (excluding biopics of musicians who weren't singers or snapshots of the industry more than individual singers because you have to narrow it down somehow) though it's possible I missed a few.

27 FAMOUS SINGER BIOPICS (1964-2014)
How many have you seen?

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