Link's Cutoff

Your Movie Buddy has already named a few "best of the year" posters (and it's only March!) including this absolute beaut for Meek's Cutoff to your left. Seriously. I like this poster better than the movie and I like the movie pretty well.
The Wrap has an open letter to David E Kelley about his new Wonder Woman series that doubles as a love letter to Joss Whedon. I think it's time the internet gave up that ghost as sad as it is to say farewell to.
Scene Stealers gives a fist up to Duncan Jones's Source Code with our Jake Gyllenhaal.
Slant also looks at the new scifi tinged thriller
Towleroad speaking of... some lame person at SXSW tried to snap a photo of Jakey doing his business in the bathroom. Uncool.
Critical Condition unburies 80s stinker Just One of the Guys and treats it like a hidden treasure.
Old Hollywood shares a great 70s quote from Peter Weir on Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
My New Plaid Pants Eeek. How did I miss this old Michael Fassbender commercial? So funny. And naked.

Finally, The Hairpin has curated an Netflix instant watch program called "Newman's Ownly" that sounds more delicious, soul-fattening, and spiritually satiating than any solo triple feature evening has any right to be

"'Hombre' means 'man'…and Paul Newman is 'Hombre'."

Should you partake in this orgy of celluloid Newmanliness, I only ask that you make it a double feature instead or replace Hud (1963) with another film somehow. Hud should be rented on DVD or simply bought on BluRay as it deserves better resolution than the generally good but still streamed "Instant Watch" can provide. It's one of those crispest and most perfect looking black and white films ever made, like it was carved from the purest cinematic marble by Michelangelo himself. There's one cold-eyed close-up of Newman that is so heart stopping I needed a defribulator to make it through the rest of the movie. Plus, Hud (1963) is one of the best movies of its entire decade so give it the space in your head that it deserves.

Best Posters of Best Pictures?

I visit the IMP Awards pretty often since it's such a great source for movie posters, and because they get posters from different markets, not just the typically lesser American ones.

At the moment they have voting open for you to choose the best movie posters from all 83 Oscar winners. I'm telling you about this because West Side Story (1961) is not in their top ten at this current voting tally and that is yo-yo, schoolboy... KRUP YOU, voters!* You'd think that this would be the one type of voting where the most recent movies wouldn't automatically win from familiarity because it's a visual marketing opinion, not a "which movie is your favorite?" question.

The famous poster conveys two things that you'd think wouldn't go together. It gives us the gritty edge of inner city stories and the transcendent power of the musical genre and it manages both in perfect harmony. It's just Reason #100,721,009 that Saul Bass was a buggin' ever lovin'* genius. I have the West Side Story poster framed on my wall right next to the All About My Mother poster as they're maybe my two favorite posters of all time.

Go vote... and tell us what you selected in the comments.

*Creative profanity courtesy of the immortal West Side Story, the 50th anniversary of which we'll celebrate this coming October.

Curio: Oscar Minimalism

Alexa here.  In the weeks since the Oscar nominees were announced, graphic artists have been busy designing alternative posters for the best picture contenders, and I've been busy bookmarking.  But this week, with all the competing films floating in my head, I'm especially fond of designs that manage to strip a film down to a single, representative image. David Lopez took it upon himself to design a poster for each of the nominated films by doing just that.  His poster for The Fighter is especially effective, but I do wish he could have included the full title in more of his designs.

More Minimalist Beauties after the jump

Click to read more ...

Desperately Seeking Good Movie Posters

For all of you 80s film buffs, movie poster enthusiasts and/or Madonna fanatics out there, My Life as a Blog has a terrific behind the scenes retrospective of the making of the Desperately Seeking Susan poster. From someone who was directly involved at that.

Movie fanatics often like to bitch about the lack of illustration and graphic design in today's movie posters but even the photography-based movie posters, rarely are pulled from photo-shoots these days. They just do quick slapdash photoshopping of different images of the actors or blow up their faces from stills and work around that.

It's so depressing. Especially when a movie poster that's illustrated or photographed separately merely using the movie as inspiration can be so iconic and worth loving apart from the movie they're attached to.

I Could Go On Bitching.

Reid writes...

Nowadays photo shoots like these are a big deal, with limos for talent, and a gaggle of publicists and studio executives, but the only people from the movie were me and the wardrobe supervisor Melissa Stanton (who brought the jackets, costumes and accessories), Herb’s crew, and Madonna and Rosanna, who cabbed over themselves. [Why am I so sure they didn’t get cars? Because afterwards Madonna complained that she couldn’t take the subway anymore. She had only recently reached the level of fame where people hassled her on the trains...]

I've always really loved this poster and it's hilarious to read that studio executives were worried that people would think it was a lesbian movie. GASP.

Rosanna and Madonna had a peculiar relationship. On one hand they were friends and even hung out together outside of work, but on another… Madonna had a way of sucking all the air out of the room. It’s my understanding that the movie was greenlit because Rosanna, red-hot after “The Executioner’s Song” and “Baby, It’s You,” had agreed to be in it. Rosanna was unquestionably the lead and worked practically every day, while Madonna’s role was much smaller in terms of actual scenes. But there was no denying that Madonna was Madonna and she was “Susan,” in a movie called “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Once, when somebody on the street asked who was in the film, I heard Rosanna say, “Madonna.”

Madonna sounds incredibly bitchy in this article (as she often does in such anecdotal evidence) but I love her all the same. She's like an inextracticble  part of my soul.