This & That: Pop Songs, Oscar Campaigns, Carnage Poster

Bill Pullman's new roleAV Club is success spoiling AMC? More rumors and commentary on the increasingly troubled network of Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Macleans also reacts to this 'blame Mad Men' meme going around
i09 expresses shock that Bill Pullman is so amazing as a creepy motivational speaker/murderer on Torchwood: Miracle Day. I haven't seen it yet because we don't get Starz but Bill Pullman can do anything. Why are people surprised? Oh, right. Nobody goes to the theater. Pullman's performance on Broadway in The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia? is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen, I kid you not. (pun!) The movie roles obviously didn't challenge him enough.

The Hairpin has an interview with Kate Beaton who writes what may be my favorite webcomic "Hark, A Vagrant!"
Cinema Blend I was just talking about Patrick Wilson to a friend last night and bingo: today there's news that he's joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. I should talk about actors who don't get enough good parts every night before I sleep so they'll be cast the next morning.
Inside Movies A story that the web will undoubtedly love: Andrew Garfield on the size of Spider-Man's package.

Oooh, lookie. It's the first poster for Roman Polanski's Carnage.

That's a weird loud poster but at least it's interesting. The moody faces are kind of an interesting way to get at the play's rollercoaster tonal shifts and convey that it's an actor's piece.

The Campaigning Begins
Gold Derby is already claiming the Best Actor Oscar for Leonardo DiCaprio in J Edgar. We'll see. Believe it or not he's still kind of young to win an Oscar. They make the men wait, you know. Different rules for men. Although I suppose it helps that he didn't turn out as elfin gorgeous as he looked like he might back in the days of his youth. Oscar likes his women drop dead gorgeous but doesn't like his men too purty. Just ask Paul Newman how long he had to wait. Or Brad Pitt who still hasn't won.
IndieWire Glenn Close to receive the lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Festival honors of the career variety are a standard stop on the way to would be Oscar glory. 
Just Jared just posted this promotional pic of Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn but labelled it a "still". If it's really a still in the proper sense than the movie is taking some adventurous chances with its look. 

For Laughs... Movie|Line is listing four reimaginings of princess movies that it never wants to see.

And in other news... True Blood has been renewed for a fifth season. Yay! Get caught up on The Film Experience commentary. 

Best Song of the 1980s?

Music makes the people come together.... yeah  ♪
Critical Condition's Ultimate Pop Song Tournament has come down to the final four: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" (89), Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" (84), Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (82) and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" (81) This has been such fun for the past few weeks and it also just goes to show you how classic the 1980s are in the cultural canon since songs from other decades were eligible. You already know who I voted for, duh. Go and vote yourselves. May your favorite win... unless it's different than mine.
Boy Culture conjecture about Madonna's upcoming schedule
Examiner DC This is a good piece on the music industry's ability to keep the public interested in the classics, and the film industry's inability to do the same. A provocative mystery, that, right?

Posterized: Weekend, Drive, Like Crazy, I Don't Know She Does It

How 'on message' are the crop of posters that have been harvested recently to announce the fall movie slate? Let's take a look starting with this lovely hazy poster for Weekend (2011). I'll ask you first what you feel about it at first glance before I talk about the movie after the image. The poster was shot by Quinford + Scout a couple who have been documenting their own relationship in photographs.

Andrew Haigh's romantic drama follows a quiet gay man (Tom Cullen) through a one night stand with a political artist (Chris New) and watches as it stretches into the next morning and beyond in ways that surprise both of them. The film has won festival awards at SXSW, OutFest and Nashville (yours truly was on that last jury) and when it finally arrives in the fall it will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Before Sunrise for the surface reasons that it's a small, talky, mostly two character romance (though otherwise its quite different). The deeper similarity is that it's actually very, very good. I think this poster is exceptional at conveying that you're in for a mood piece, something memorable to hang on to like a faded treasured photograph and as such I think it's great. But I've actually seen the film. Maybe it won't say much if you haven't?

Two other new posters are also going for moods that verge on nostalgia if more traditionally warm and golden: another romantic drama Like Crazy which will attempt to convert its Sundance buzz to Oscar hype on October 28th,  and a film I'd never heard of called Tanner Hall about a girl's boarding school starring Rooney Mara. Ah, that's why. It was filmed in 2009 but it's coming September 9th now that Mara's star is in the process of ascending.

Am I forcing trends now?

Sarah Jessica Parker, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling after the jump

Click to read more ...

Sick Character Posters for "Contagion"

 

Paolo here, apologizing for the pun. If you'd like, you can leave yours in the comments section unless you think it's too early for that kind of fun.

Because the 'city' poster for Steven Soderbergh's new film Contagion wasn't enough, MovieLine via Yahoo! has uploaded the new character posters for the film, bearing the images of its six major stars. This is much better than the boring poster designs wherein actors faces are separated by boxes. The sepia tone also works well here. But the unfortunate thing about character posters in this case is that it doesn't convey the interpersonal and global reach that should come with films about diseases or plagues. But if we're looking to see how these characters are connected to another, the trailer (previously discussed) conveys that pretty well.

Gwyneth Paltrow (the first victim) has the strongest poster. The other ones aren't as exciting, with Beth's husband (Matt Damon) being scared, Marion Cotillard running or driving away from something within the big city, Jude Law in plastic and Laurence Fishburne and our girl crush Kate Winslet's character Dr. Erin Mears frantically talking on their phones. Someone tweeted to me that only Larry and Kate look good in these posters, the rest of the actors rightfully mangled within the drama of their scenes. [For larger images, click the actor names.]  

A little factoid that you all probably know is that Gwynnie and Kate to the left were both in the running for the Oscar winning role of Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love. Both women frequently show up in Miramax/Weinstein films but they're lending their talents to the Warner Brothers this year.

Why aren't we getting Bryan Cranston and John Hawkes character posters? You want to see them right?

The Ides of March Poster Splits the Difference

Robert here (Distant Relatives) with a look at The Ides of March poster which gives us half of Ryan and half of George staring out at us. What do we call this being? The Cloosling?

Still, it give us a look at both featured actors, throws in some political intrigue with the "is this man our next president?" line and is sure to get a few double takes hanging in a movie theater lobby. In that sense it's a well done poster. Then again, it's just about the only way to get George Clooney and Ryan Gosling together on a poster and make it somewhat aesthetically offputting.

It also reminds me of three similar face-mashing images in politics and movies.

• A famous magazine cover from 2000 that it might be intentionally referencing much in the way that Clooney's campaign posters reference Obama's.
• Ingmar Bergman's unsettling imagery from his film suggesting two people combining to build a bigger Persona.
• Or perhaps it's a more blunt assessment of a quality often found in politicians or operatives.

Newsweek 2000, Liv Ullman & Bibi Andersson in Persona, Two-Face

Posters Should Be Seen and Not Heard. And Other Grievances.

So Annoying! Let it be known: I'm not going to post the leaked teaser to The Amazing Spider-Man. I didn't even watch it despite it popping up everywhere. I don't understand the internet fascination with getting everything before you're supposed to even if that means crappy quality fuzziness. Why spoil a first view with a bad copy of something? 

So Annoying Part 2! That Hunger Games motion poster that everyone is posting. I opted to just screengrab it for y'all because it's so NOISY. At one point with all the windows I open up when I'm working it sounded like my whole apartment was on fire and it's already hot enough up in here.

In addition to setting your computer aflame virtually -- thus denying you marshmallows to make up for it --  the poster counts down the days until the movie opens which will unfortunately NOT put an end to the constant publicity and internet jabbering about it since it's going to be a quadrilogy or something and if Harry Potter taught us anything it's that the world likes television more than the movies and would like the movies to just become television series with new seasons lasting 2 1/2 hours opening for as many years in a row as possible. The minute that Season One of The Hunger Games opens people will just start speculating about Season Two of the Hunger Games. 

Y'all know I love the movie posters and anything Hollywood can do to liven them up is appreciated. Only please do so very quietly. Like you're in the library. Or a church. The Holy Church of The Cinema.

The movies aren't silent anymore but posters still should be.