"The Link! The Link!"

My New Plaid Pants Meet Brienne, who'll be very important on Game of Thrones. Eventually.
Critical Condition asks what it will take to get Ewan McGregor an Oscar nomination? We've been asking this for years. He ought to have at least two by now (Moulin Rouge! and Trainspotting)
Tom Shone makes a sound ExPat confession about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Heh.
Frankly My Dear remembers Richard Linklater's Slacker for its 20th.
Pajiba Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) will play Hervé "the plane! the plane!" Villechaize in the biographical My Dinner With Hervé. Like Pajiba I don't see a resemblance at all but Dinklage is a great actor so we wish him all the best in the role.
Sunset Gun recommends Over the Edge with Matt Dillon as a great time capsule and timeless rebellion teen film. I haven't seen this one but I'm now intrigued.
PopMatters I'm not going anywhere near Zookeeper but I'm finding the reviews somewhat interesting in a staring through thick glass kind of way. This one wonders which voice actor has the worst job in the film. That's a good question! 

Several blogs have been noting the revision of the Straw Dogs poster -- the original version is to your right where Alexander Skarsgård is mysteriously inside of or ramming into James Marsden's eye (ouch!) rather than reflected in his glasses. Poster design is so half-assed these days, right? It looks much better (to your left) now all black and white and reflected. BUT while they were revising shouldn't they have come up with their own design rather than just recreating the original poster from the 70s Dustin Hoffman film?

Poster design is just so frustrating in Hollywood. The internet reminds us every single day --  and usually several times an hour -- that there are abundant graphic artists out there with the talent to make this another golden age of movie poster design and it just never quite happens. Hollywood, which runs on images, doesn't trust the visual literacy of its clients.

Maybe they shouldn't. I mean I'm sure you've all heard someone look at the rare illustrated movie poster and say "is that a cartoon?" but it's still sad-making.

Links: Refn Gosling Love, Tang Wei Wins, Green Lantern Bile

Alt Screen rounds up takes on Martin Scorsese's New York New York (1977) now that it's freshly released on Blu-Ray. Liza Minnelli is so great in that movie. I'm so excited to see it again. The Blu-Ray is still in its wrapping though. Must get to that soon.
Film Dr "12 notes comparing a purple bottle cap with Green Lantern" (One thing I deeply appreciated about dumbass movies like Green Lantern is the creativity they inspire in critics.)
<--- Movie|Line goes to the LA Premiere of Drive (2011) and enjoys Nicolas Winding Refn's freewheeling intro speech including this bit.

Now, I want to thank Ryan Gosling, because he gave me the opportunity to come to Hollywood and do this movie with him. It all started on a very strange blind date between us that led to a very strange, notsexual encounter, but it led to a mental creation between us. And of course, we couldn’t have done that without Jim Sallis’s book called Drive, which I highly recommend. 

i09 great find: an old "Equal Pay Act" PSA starring Batgirl from the Batman tv series.  ♥ 
Twitch has a series of neon movie posters from artist Mr Whaite. Here's Pulp Fiction.

I said god damn.

Pajiba "how homophobia lost its cool" good piece from a hetero man which kicks off with the homoeroticism of Michael Fassbender & James McAvoy in X-Men First Class
The Awl really lets loose the bile with Green Lantern and what's become of a too dominante subgenre of movies. (Note: We all know that reviews do not exist in a cultural vacuum so will the mass hatred for Green Lantern help or hurt Captain America reviews next month? It could go either way...) 
IndieWire Vera Farmiga hits Provincetown to promote Higher Ground 

FINALLY...

I'd like to personally congratulate Tang Wei, who many fine actress connoisseurs have been rooting for ever since her startling debut in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007). In the past two months she's picked up not one but two awards for recent performances in the romantic films Crossing Hennessy and Late Autumn. To make those rewards more impressive, one was from China (and remember they forbade her from working for a time after the sexual explicitness of Lust, Caution) and the other was a Korean Award which had reportedly never gone to a Chinese actress before. You can see her winning that one in this clip below. (She starts in Korean, switches to English, and then moves over to her native tongue.)

Will Crossing Hennessy and Late Autumn ever make it to US or European theaters? Stay tuned.

Lisbeth Salander's Wardrobe Malfunction

The internet is very excited today by this snapshot of a poster image for David Fincher's take on the popular property The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in which Daniel Craig embraces gothic Rooney Mara from behind.

It's a great image but it immediately gave me an acid flashback to Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's infamous Superbowl calamity. Perhaps Janet Jackson paved the way, martyring her career, so that decorative nipplage could one day wallpaper the land in movie poster form? Well done, Janet!

 The Playlist, who posted this image, suggest that David Fincher won a marketing war with this, but I can't imagine that this is the poster that will actually be up all over movie theaters... at least not in the USA where nudity is verboten... and this is tame for a European poster but it's still neat and grim looking.

The tagline is fun but no match for the "THE. FEEL. BAD. MOVIE. OF. CHRISTMAS." Here's the cleaned up red-band trailer to follow that camcorder version.

and now the American teaser poster (notice the order of the dates changes)

Curio: Poster Designs by Matt Needle

Alexa here. Matt Needle is a freelance designer living in the UK with a knack for poster design. I've been following his work since last year, when I was on the lookout for cool indie posters for Inception.  Lately he's added so many new designs to his portfolio that I can barely keep up! Here are some highlights from his film poster collection; check out his flickr to see more, including some great music and television posters (and a very cool Don Draper).  All are available for purchase from his bigcartel shop.

Click to see Hitchcock, Miyazaki and more...

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Sidney Lumet: 43 Feature Films, 5 Oscar Nominations, 1 Fine Career.

A goodbye with gratitude to prolific director and Honary Oscar winner Sidney Lumet who died this morning at the age of 86 from lymphoma. He was small in stature (5'5") but his legacy looms large as one of Hollywood's most prolific and beloved directors. 

He was a stage actor and a television director before moving into feature films. Actors always loved him and he returned that love guiding several of them through signature roles. He worked with some stars multiple times including, notably: Sean Connery, Timothy Hutton, James Mason, and Al Pacino. The stage-to-screen movie, the courtroom drama, the social conscience narrative, and the true crime story would never have been the same without him. He is survived by his wife of 31 years Mary Gimbel, and children and grandchildren (you'll remember that his daughter Jenny Lumet wrote the blissful Rachel Getting Married screenplay. Our thoughts go out to the family today.

After the jump, the posters for all 43 of his theatrical features with thanks to google, the IMDb and IMP!

How many have you seen?

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