This Week In Posters: Bradley Cooper, Bill Murray, And Inherent Vice

The composition on this American Sniper poster is so good (the top half sort of reminds me of Gone Girl) that I barely even recognized the American flag fluttering in the foreground cliché. It takes up a third of the frame and is somehow still subtler than when Michael Bay does it.


“Okay, so it’s about a creepy doll– wait, where are you going? BUT OURS IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT!”


I can’t understand why Big Hero 6 looks so damned cool while Inside Out‘s last teaser was possibly the most underwhelming thing I’ve ever seen come out of Pixar. The big puffy guy here looks like a cross between the Michelin Man, the droids from Oblivion, and the button-eyed people from Coraline. Which is to say, awesome.


Please tell me James Franco is playing Sancho Panza.

Okay, so what’s your guess on what this movie’s about? I’m guessing adorable indie drama about a delightful girl with autism/cochlear implants/agoraphobia, but who makes up for it with her caaaraaaazy imagination! Okay, you ready? To the Googles!

Left with a relationship broken and a dream unfulfilled, Justine opens her world to the unexpected and finds strength in the beat of her heart.

Justine hasn’t played her guitar since stage fright forced her to give up her dream of becoming a musician. She tucked her heart deep inside her chest and ignored what it was trying to tell her: that in order to be strong, it needs to beat. Now, accustomed to avoiding challenge and excitement, Justine is stuck. She lives in the unchanged house of her late grandmother, works at an unfulfilling job and continues to sleep with her ex boyfriend, Ben, a painter who refuses to leave his studio. When Ben puts an end to their late night trysts, Justine is forced to reclaim her guitar. Nursing a broken heart, Justine starts to play and write music again. She steps into the world of the unexpected and rediscovers her strong and vital heartbeat.

Aw, I was close. “She tucked her heart deep inside her chest, which was a departure for Justine as up until that point she had been wearing it as a hat. People would stare, blood would drip into her soy chai, but at the time it seemed like small sacrifice for being able to live boldly.”


The Way He Looks. The Way He Makes Me Feel. He Really Turns Me On. He Knocks Me Offa My Feet. Anyway, cool-looking poster, but it doesn’t give me the faintest clue what it’s about. Eh, I’m not googling it. I’m just going to assume gay stuff.

Yes. Yes to everything about this. I absolutely would’ve put Joaquin Phoenix in his hippie detective outfit front and center in this poster, but somehow this is even better. I would hang this on my wall, if it wasn’t already covered in inspirational cat posters.

As compelling as Matthew McConaughey’s heart-to-hearts with My Cocaine are, I think they made the right call putting most of the posters on whatever alien planet they go to. It’s like whooooaaa, what’s gonna happen on that planet, maaan, far out!

“Put down the candle, motherf*cker.”

Aaaand Johnny Depp’s transformation into a human Dreamworks Face is complete.

Have you seen the trailer for this yet? I think it’s between this and This Is Where I Leave You for the worst trailer of the year so far. You know it’s a bad sign when your entire marketing plan consists of “Mustaches, lol!”

Ugghhhh. This just reminds me of every chick on Tinder having at least one photobooth picture of herself with a mustache prop. That, the tiger picture, and the one of them surrounded by grateful third world children. I hate San Francisco.


Are her eyebrows also mustaches?

The tattoo parlor… OF DEATH! I’d like if there was a horror movie scream and then a cut to a guy with a tattoo of his girlfriend’s name. OH GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME, YOU MONSTER!

Well this certainly looks like a movie coming out in January or February. At least they listed the names and faces in corresponding order.

Everyone has a halo. Because “Saint,” get it?

They really didn’t need to add anything to this picture. Just Bill Murray in a lounge chair sells it.

So the costumes in this look amazing, but there’s something needy about the screaming yellow text. COME SEE THIS! IT’S GOING TO BE SOOOO WACKY!

I like the creative halo thing, but it also makes the ridiculous smoke halos above Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy just look that much dumber and more half-assed by comparison.

Has Chris O’Dowd played a priest before? He was born to play “humorous priest.”

Oh man, this is so awesome. Things I always complain about:

1. Inexplicably diagonal posters

2. Bad silhouette designs

3. Numberals incorporated into the title

4. Someone holding a gun for some reason

But when you put them all together, it becomes art. I can’t think of a better poster for a movie called “Tak3n.”

EQUATIONS IN THE NIGHT SKY! EQUATIONS EVERYWHERE, MATH! MATH! MATH!

This is getting nothing but rave reviews, but are you surprised? No one wants to be the first to make fun of a weepy love story about a beloved physicist with the tragic motor nerve disease. I can already tell I’m going to have a really hard time taking this film seriously. I can never get over the absurdity of the fact that imitating the disabled gets you sent to the principal’s office as a child, but as an adult it gets you sent to the academy podium. When let’s be honest, they aren’t that different.

Let’s see… windmills… Istanbul… a puffy Australian guy… war scene… I’m going to guess… Gallipoli? To the Googles!

“After the Battle of Gallipoli, in 1919, an Australian farmer Connor (Russell Crowe) travels to Turkey to find his three missing sons.”

DAMN I’M GOOD.

I was trying to figure out why this name sounded awkward and off, and part of the reason may be because it used to be called “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.”

…formerly known as We Gotta Get Out of This Place, a gritty Texas crime thriller that marks the debut of brothers Zeke & Simon Hawkins. The film premiered at TIFF 2013 and picked up the Audience Award at AFI, hitting theaters this fall. Compared to this year’s acclaimed thriller Cold in July, the plot follows three Texas teens (played by Jeremy Allen White, Logan Huffman and Mackenzie Davis) who get caught up in organized crime trying to escape their dead-end existence in a cotton-mill. [FirstShowing]

I can’t find anything about why they changed the name, but the poster isn’t very good. You can almost always do better than “someone has a gun for some reason.”

Until next week, keep your names mismatched and your horizon lines diagonal.

×