This Week In Posters: February 20, 2014



I’m really glad Authors Anonymous was first alphabetically this week, so we get to open with the most entertaining poster. I love this. The fact that it’s Chris Klein, the fact that it’s about “authors…” everything. Letting a costume designer from Hollywood envision what someone who writes books might look like is sort of like a 6-year-old girl drawing a mechanic, or a dinosaur. “Well, they all have… glasses! And… side parts. And they wear subtly patterned shirts and have vaguely smug expressions on their faces at all times!”

What, no pencil behind the ear? Maybe they could be staring intensely at a typewriter with a sheet of paper between the lips? So much restraint here. I think you could put Chris Klein’s glasses and plaid shirt on an golden retriever puppy and it’d look just as intellectual as this.

I bet if you asked this poster/costume designer/director to create a poster for a film about professors, we’d get Zac Efron smoking a pipe, wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.




All I can think about when I look at this poster is David Koechner pinning me against the bar and grilling me with questions when I tried to walk by him at the premiere of this at Fantastic Fest. You know how some actors who play loud, gregarious characters are actually shy and reserved in person? David Koechner is whatever the opposite of that is.

This one has “fact not fiction” above the title, and then depicts a sexy lady standing right on the tarmac. Hmm.

Usually when they do the “dead love interest’s ghost helps the protagonist hook up” thing, they do it with young, bland actors, like Josh Duhamel and Julianne Hough. Using ones that appeal more to the mom crowd seems like a wiser business strategy. Then again, it didn’t work for Labor Day, so who knows. Also, I think Ed Harris has been the same age for the last 25 years.

In Joe, from director David Gordon Green, Nic Cage plays a burly lumberjack. Did you know burly lumberjacks shop at Urban Outfitters?

If you don’t know Tye Sheridan, you should, he gave an incredibly underrated performance in Mud. As for the poster… really? You couldn’t line up the damn names? Just put the smaller star on the right if you have to, I don’t understand what’s so hard about this.

“If you see him… run.”

Okay, so if I see Mr. Jones, I should run? Huh, that’s interesting. Up until now, I always thought of him as the guy who when I look at the television I want to see him, staring right back at me. Mr. Jones and me, we look into the future. Stare at the beautiful women. She’s looking at you, I don’t think so, she’s looking at me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s kind of weird to name your horror movie after a famous Counting Crows song. Like, really? You couldn’t have called it “Mr. James,” or “Mr. Jenkins,” or “Mr. Jensen” or something? Why not call it “Mrs. Robinson” or “Mr. Brownstone,” or “Mister Mr.”


The LEGO Movie has spoiled everyone on what a toy tie-in/cartoon reboot movie can be, but I have faith that Mr. Peabody and Sherman and Dreamworks can come along and remind us why they’re terrible.

Gee, Emma Watson, your hair looks pretty dry for apocalyptic flood conditions. Also, great facial expression, very evocative.

I’m glad they put his name right there, or else I’d have no idea who this guy was. I was just going to go with “Squinty.”

I have no idea what this movie is about, but based on it being from the producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious, I’m predicting at least two sequels. Anyone want to bet me?

Last week, I incorrectly misidentified Pompeii as a Roland Emmerich movie (I heard that from Laremy, so it’s all his fault), who I mentioned makes bad movies that aren’t even bad enough to be interesting, they’re just boring bad. Lazy bad. Disasters of mediocrity. Luckily, Pompeii is actually a Paul WS Anderson, whose movies are precisely bad enough to be interesting. His Three Musketeers movie had floating battleships cannon fighting, so I’m excited to see what he can bring to the hot-guy-runs-from-volcano genre. I mean, other than Kiefer Sutherland in that outfit, which is already pretty great.

This is actually kind of a cool poster design (if sort of boneheaded, in an Affliction shirt kind of way). Though the idea of The Purge getting a sequel really makes you wonder: Exactly how bad does a horror movie have to be for it not to get a sequel?

I’m not sure who this poster is for. I assume the movie is aimed at little kids. But do little kids care about love? Do they care about movie posters, two months out? It’s for sorority girls, I guess.

Ah, perfect, mismatched names AND an inexplicably diagonal horizon line. Not to mention a creatively (un)capitalized title. Great job, poster designer, you’ve created the perfect storm of pissing me off.

Also, usually the excuse for mismatched names and faces is that the actors are very particular about whose name goes first and whatnot. You mean to tell me Devon Bostick gets billed ahead of Dean Norris?

Hmm, all I can glean from this is that Melissa McCarthy is in it, and she plays some kind of blue collar worker (so the saying goes, if you have your name on your chest, you’re working class. If you have your name on your desk, you’re middle class. And if you have your name on the outside of the building, you’re rich). Gee, I wonder if this Tammy character will be brash and wacky.

I like to think of these movies as the black man finally having his revenge. “Oh, you want to depict us as clownish comedy relief and die-first cowards in all your movies? Fine, in our movies, every white guy has to be Turtle from Entourage.”

Touché, black folks, touché.


13 Sins?!? That is an unlucky number of sins! Now it’s time to pay the puppet master – THE DEVIL!

Where is that mirror pointing that it’s reflecting the same skyline as the windshield? Does this car even have a roof? Also, how come the one guy gets to have a hand? So many questions.

It’s nice to see that at least the Vampire Academy posters have been accurate, in that they’re just as much of a disaster as the actual film, which was so bad that the distributor canceled midnight screenings to make sure no one would review it. Now that people have seen it, it’s tracking nine percent on RottenTomatoes. And the poster? I would say this poster is exactly nine-percent-on-rotten-tomatoes good.

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