This Week in Posters and Stills: 47 Ronin Looks… Kind of Cool?

THIS WEEK IN POSTERS – This Week in Posters & Stills is our weekly round-up (and critique) of all the posters, publicity stills, one-sheets, and set photos that hit in the previous week, a nice little early preview of what’s to come in the movie world. Posted every Wednesday, or as close as we can get. Will you like it? Well, my mom thinks it’s great. I mean, she doesn’t read it, but she likes that I keep busy.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES: Leading off with this week’s coolest poster, from Randy Ortiz at AllCity. It probably doesn’t sell the movie as well as that picture of Ryan Gosling looking like a sad puppy dog (could anything?), but the abstractish art work fits the actual content of the movie perfectly. In fact, if I had to explain the plot, I’d just show you this picture. All it needs a drawing of Nick Refn flipping you the bird with both hands.

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS. Ah yes, the close-eyed headbutt makes a comeback. When you love someone a lot, you close your eyes and headbutt them, according to movie posters. Ka-bonk.

TAGLINE: “A grand, doomed love story.”

Hmm, I don’t know, I generally prefer movies about successful love stories. Especially the ones that show the dongs going in.

SQUIRREL TO THE NUTS: Via FilmMagic and Getty Image, here’s Jennifer Aniston on the set of Squirrel to the Nuts in New York. I can barely see Jennifer Aniston through how much I want to hug that dog. I miss my German Shepherd. Anyway, I’m not sure what the movie is about, but I’ll tell you what it’s not about: bras.

According to IMDB, Squirrel to the Nuts comes from director Peter Bogdanovich, with co-writer Louise Stratten, and it follows…

A married Broadway director [who] falls for a prostitute-turned-actress and works to help her advance her career.

It co-stars Owen Wilson, Kathryn Hahn, and Eugene Levy. Ooh, I wonder if Jennifer Aniston plays the Broadway director.

ANTISOCIAL: Hmm, so it’s about a virus, but the poster is a girl with an axe. So what does the virus cause, trees? Anyway, I thought it was clever that they took a pull-quote from a film festival synopsis to make it look like a review.

THE CANYONS: You’d think that in a photo this heavily photoshopped (GRR, LENS FLARE!) they could’ve made Lindsay’s bad collagen job look more natural. Then again, given her on-set behavior, maybe they weren’t trying to make her look good.

EDGE OF TOMORROW: Here’s that Tom Cruise sci-fi film from director Doug Liman that used to be called “All You Need is Kill.”

Now, if I gave you 10 guesses what actresses this was supposed to be, do you think would’ve ever come up with Emily Blunt?

Mmm, Emily Blunt. Hey, by the way, didn’t British people used to be ugly? What the hell happened over there? Emily Blunt, Henry Cavill, Olivia Wilde, Tom Hardy – they look like they came from a different gene pool than your stereotypical snaggle-toothed gravy chuggers.

UPDATE: Oops, I guess Olivia Wilde isn’t British, though she does seem to have fancy-pants WASP ancestry.

I’d like to be excited for this movie, and the posters look cool (well, except for the grey background – who designed that, Terry Richardson?), but the fact that they had two opportunities to name it and both times came up with something super lame doesn’t bode well. Hopefully it’ll be more good despite its bad title, like John Carter, than exactly as good as its bad title, like Quantum of Solace.

ELYSIUM: Save us? It looks like he wants to f*ck us. Mop your brow, you sweaty freakshow, you’re creeping me out.

47 RONIN: As luck would have it, the trailer for this one, from director Carl Rinsch, just hit. I hope it’s good, because as limited as Keanu is as an actor, he seems like the nicest guy ever.

If you’re going to do a martial arts epic, you gotta go big, and it looks like they did. Set boner to cautiously optimistic. Yes, my boner has a number of settings.

Everyone gets off on the mysticism and artistry of the sharp, two-handed samurai sword, but honestly, wouldn’t a Viking or a medieval dude just bop them in half with a gigantic, dull broad swoard? 

Say what you will about this guy’s personality, but he’s got a real unique style.

OH MY GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING!

THE GETAWAY, starring Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez. I’d like to think this is an Asylum remake of The Chase, starring Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson. Man, remember how hot Kristy Swanson was? Remember how Henry Rollins and Anthony Keidis were in that? Aw, I miss the nineties. Well, except for the unrequited loves and inappropriate boners, but some of the other stuff was cool.

Oh hey, they also released a trailer:

So… Taken meets Jack Reacher, basically? With a dash of The Last Stand? Also, Selena Gomez has the face of a four-year-old and it creeps me out.

GODZILLA. “Hey, chopper pilots, I know you can fly, but don’t go up to high. In fact, just fly down real low where the Godzilla can crush you with his foot. You know, really give it a sense of scale.”

HERCULES. The Rock has been tweeting out pictures of himself on the set of Brett Ratner’s Hercules movie (which is called “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” according to IMDB). It’s pretty cool that wrestlers can tweet out pictures and be like, “Bros! Check out how big I look!” and wrestling fans will be all, “Bro! That’s awesome how big you look!”

Say what you will about wrestling, that’s a business that really understands its fan base.

Meanwhile, I think Ratner is still trying to make amends for his “rehearsing is for fags” comment by making the gayest movie imaginable.

INSIDIOU2: “Chapter two, in case you didn’t realize that the 2 at the end of the title was meant to indicate that this will be part two of something. INSIDIOU2: Chapter Deaux 2 II TWO.”

LAST VEGAS: Wait, that’s supposed to be DeNiro? Did they have to put him in his Raging Bull-after-he-got-his-ass-kicked make up so that Russians would know who he is? 

METALLICA: THROUGH THE NEVER. I have a hard time believing any Metallica documentary could top Some Kind of Monster. Though I doubt this movie would exist without that one.

This looks like they decided, “Hey, what if we were in a documentary that didn’t make us look like a bunch of old, bickering women?”

MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN: I like how they cut off half of Mr. Peabody’s head and you can still tell he’s doing the Dreamworks face

RUSH: One of two new character posters for Ron Howard’s F1 movie, Rush. Say what you will about it, it probably won’t be hard to follow. 

The Playboy, and The Perfectionist. So let me get this straight: these two characters, they’re opposites? Wild, man, just wild. 

SHORT TERM 12. Jesus, this poster sucks. It looks like a community center mural. Is someone about to deliver a slam poem?

It’s sad, because the movie is pretty good. I don’t want to spoil it, but they should just take a still from the final scene of the movie, which was incredible, and an amazing visual.

SMURFS 2. Oh hey, you didn’t know that Smurfville had a radical white Smurf with dreadlocks now? He works at the indie coffee shop with the chick with the artist bangs next to him. As JasperFrowns points out, the new guy is a dead ringer for Jack Black in I Know What You Did Last Summer:

According to IMDB, Jack Black was actually in I STILL Know What You Did Last Summer, but I cannot confirm.

THE TO-DO LIST. Here’s the poster for The To-Do List (trailer here), starring Aubrey Plaza, one of two very different hot-chick-plays-lifeguard movies coming out this year, the other being The Lifeguard, with Kristen Bell. I like the art, I just wanna know why they let Quentin Tarantino wear his Tijuana pancho in the pool like that. He probably came to check out all the hot feet.

300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE. The studio decided Zack Snyder’s version of shredded shirtless Greek dudes flexing at each other in slow motion wasn’t gay enough, so they fight in a giant tub of Astroglide in this one. 

ADORE: Here’s the poster for Adore, in which Robin Wright and Naomi Watts have sex with each other’s kids. Man, why couldn’t my mom have cool friends like this?

VAMPIRE ACADEMY: Ooh, a new vampire movie, I can’t wait to see what new take they have on the zzzzzzzzz….

THE WOLVERINE. Here’s a new Wolverine still courtesy of YahooMovies. I believe those machines are filled with schoolgirl panties and octopi. Though of course this is based on my incredible racism.

“Wolverine, do you like girls now?”

“NEVER, GIRLS ARE YUCKY!”

(*he struggles for a while, then goes still*)

(*she takes off a piece of clothing*)

“How about now?”

“GIRLS! YUCK!” (*he spits on her*)

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. Here’s some of the new Trask Industries posters from Comic-Con. I took a girl to Wolverine last night and I actually had to explain the entire Trask storyline, which was basically like a Hindu trying to explain the bible.

Sentinels. Yes, please.

What Professor X lost in hair, he gained in telepathy skills.

Michael Fassbender is inside of all of us. Oh God, so big, it hurts.

ZERO THEOREM. Courtesy of Empire, a shot from the set of Terry Gilliam’s Zero Theorem, starring Christoph Waltz.

Christoph Waltz, billiard-smooth of head, if not mannerism, is the film’s ever-present protagonist. As Qohen Leth, a programmer for “entity-crunching” corporation ManCom, he is, Gilliam explains, “waiting for a phone call that will give meaning to his life”. Like Brazil’s Sam Lowry, Leth is befuddled by the info-dump world he lives in and the Heath Robinson tech tangle that surrounds him. Unlike Lowry, he’s something of a hacker genius whose attempts to solve the “Zero Theorem” could unlock the key to life’s meaning.

Look, you had me at “Christoph Waltz and Terry Gilliam.”

KARL HUNGUS TOO?! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[Posters via IMPA except where otherwise noted]

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