This Week In Posters: ‘Rings,’ The Totally Necessary Ouija Sequel, And ‘La La Land’

This week in This Week in Posters begins with this lovely Spanish poster for Bastille Day, in which the Eiffel Tower (but never any other Paris landmarks!) seems to be under attack by some kind of superimposed fireball. Ay dios mio! Also, is “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” is some kind of play on words in Spanish? Becomes I’m not entirely sure what that has to do with a terror attack on Paris. Are the terrorists mad that they abolished capital punishment?

Richard Madden from “Juego De Tronos” (Robb Stark) looks like he’s in the middle of a modeling shoot. You think that’s part of the plot? That he has to drop everything and cancel his catalogue debut to save Paris? “The terrorists are here, shut down that wind machine! And someone help me blot all this baby oil!”

My God, how many of these are there? I assume Tyler Perry employs a person to pump out parody posters from the first day of shooting until release. That seems like a fun job. All you have to do is replace someone in the original with Madea. The punchline is the same every time. “Haha, get it? It’s Madea.”

I want to sit next to someone during a Madea movie and every time Tyler Perry shows up in drag lean over and whisper “That’s Madea.”

I like this juxtaposition of determined, thoughtful Mark Wahlberg next to the Deepwater Horizon accident. You can practically hear him thinking “If I woulda been there, it nevah woulda happened.”

“Come at me, oil spill! Pow, right in the kissah!”

Oh hey, it’s a film about my boudoir.

I kid, but seriously, when did “girl with hair covering her face” become the international symbol for scary movie?

Aw, who’s a good poster. Are you a good poster? You’re a good poster, yes you are. What a good poster you are, that’s a good poster.

Well isn’t this a creepy poster. It proves you don’t have to get too fancy. It’s just a new twist on “I’m being torn apart!” but this version just so happens to be way better than a guy staring into a cracked mirror.

All we want is for Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone to look cool together. That is the collective id. This poster cleverly scratches that itch. Though it’s always weird when the poster takes care to mention some song no one’s heard yet. “This movie features a song? Get right out of town!”

Up there with “featuring this song you’ve never heard of!” is “grainy picture of a guy I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to recognize.” GRR, INTERNAL CONFLICT.

For the record, IMDb says Old Stone is “A psychological thriller about a taxi driver battling bureaucracy and legal manipulation in China.”

That actually sounds interesting. Put that in the poster. Because my first thought when I looked at this one was “Is that Idris Elba?” and I don’t think that was what they were going for.

Boom, it’s the old “sexy leg window” poster cliché! The thigh gap. This trope feels more “classic” than “overused and played out” to me, for some reason. Plus it tells you that the movie is going to have a sexy lady.

The Matchbreaker.” My guess is that these two have been arranged to be married, and this lady is “breaking” the “match.” This just based on the facial expressions. My powers of intuition are unmatched.

When an idealistic romantic gets fired from his day job, he is offered a “one-time gig” to break up a girl’s relationship for her disapproving parents. [IMDb]

Okay I was slightly off. This sounds more like a reverse Good Luck Chuck kind of a situaish.

This is clearly a dramedy about a chaperone. If it was just a straight-up comedy there wouldn’t be all that sky space up there at the top. It’d just be all about the goofy expressions. But with all of that atmosphere up there, you just know there’s going to be some introspection.

I feel like there’s a symbolic statement to be made here about why they’re both wearing red, but I’m not pretentious enough to make it. You think they did the red, white, and blue thing on purpose? Because, uh… America? I honestly don’t know. Anyway, the movie is about a blind guy who’s kind of a dick, and as Photoshopped as this looks, the face mush is a pretty good way to communicate dickishness.

Can you believe there’s going to be another Ouija board movie? Who would’ve thought a board with letters on it was enough content for multiple motion pictures? Certainly not me. I guess these horror movies just write themselves. A little girl with a big, scary shadow? Sure, why not.

That tagline though. “When you talk to the other side, you never know who will be listening.”

That’s a perfect opening! I can’t believe they didn’t utilize that better. Like so:

Oh look, it’s the ghost of a diver or something. This demonic possession gets a 6.5 from the Ukrainian judge.

No pupils, mouths sewn shut, creepy little girls with giant shadows… you could really just catalogue horror tropes and smush them together and you’d have an Ouija movie.

Oh, and speaking of totally necessary horror sequels, here’s Rings, once again doing the stringy-dark-hair-covering-the-face thing. I wonder if that’s just a money-saving measure to keep from having to spend the FX money on whiting out the pupils and sewing shut the mouth. Discuss.

Evil is reborn… As a sexy back tattoo, OOH WAH-AH AH AH!

“One first date would change history.”

Now, I like Obama as much as the next guy, but am I the only one who finds it super weird that we’re making fan-fiction movies about the president now? This is… no. No thank you. Though I would watch a two-hour film directed by Werner Herzog about a now-retired George W. Bush morosely painting dogs.

Just look at these brightly dressed sassy broads. With fabulous hats. Man, this is a great poster. You know how I’m always complaining about the “inexplicably diagonal horizon line” trend? This poster creates the same dynamic sense of movement and diagonal, forward tilt just with the clever placement of the names, title, and subjects (I love how they’re bleeding into the border). No tilting necessary!

Jesus Christ, are there any horror movies that actually stay dead?

Vince Mancini is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. A graduate of Columbia’s non-fiction MFA program, his work has appeared on FilmDrunk, the UPROXX network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.

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