This week in This Week In Posters, we begin with Annihilation, which didn’t need to say much after “from the director of ‘Ex Machina.'” You had me at from the director of Ex Machina. That being said… I don’t know what I’m looking at here. Is she inside a tear drop? Does the story take place in a snow globe? Am I watching it from a peephole? And why doesn’t Natalie Portman look like Natalie Portman? Also that title font is way too thin to try to put a texture on. FEH, I SAY! (Yes I will see this movie).
Sweet Jesus, this is like the visual equivalent of one of George W. Bush’s mangled idioms. It’s the “fool me once… you won’t get fooled again” of movie posters.
So there’s… a desert, with a tank, above a New York skyline… made of cash? And they put the names right above the wrong faces just to be obnoxious. Is it about… invading a boardroom? War profiteering? I’m going with war profiteering.
Oh, the English title is “Backstabbing for Beginners.” According to Google Translate, “Dobbeltspil” means “double game” in Hungarian.
As much as I love to piss and moan about pointlessly diagonal posters, this diagonal actually works. Mostly because they didn’t just take a normal image and tilt it sideways. In this it looks like a choice. An artistic choice is almost always better when it seems like a choice and not a mistake.
Finally, a movie about a giant portal!
What’s black, white, and red all over? Eh, this poster is fine, I guess. I just don’t think I can do a “white dad out for revenge” movie in 2018. I feel like such a triggered snowflake for saying so, but… no.
Every Doy? Come on, man, you can’t just stick a sparkler in there and call it the letter A. I actually had to look this up to see if it was a Nicholas Sparks movie, but nope, it’s from the guy who wrote Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I should’ve known. A Nicholas Sparks movie would never shown the characters kissing. That’d spoil the ending. Nicholas Sparks characters just yearn. Yearn and yearn and yearn until they can’t yearn anymore, usually while staring at a hunk of Spanish moss and taking a year off from their ping-pong scholarship to New York.
Oops, I just noticed the tagline: “Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.”
Sheesh, way to spoil the different body/different life thing.
Here we have a big figure with no face and a bunch of other heads too small to recognize. At least it has the tagline to tell me that it’s about drag. I was going to guess that but it felt presumptuous.
Why is everyone watching this guy spray paint on top of a pile of skulls? Did he kill those people? He has that “I’m so naughty” look on his face, but in a room where there are just corpses lying around I don’t think people would be too concerned about the vandalism. We don’t care about the spray paint, son, we’re murder police. Or is this a Nightmare on Elm Street reference that I’m not getting? Anyway, you’re going to have to work harder than this to make me want to see a movie about fans of a movie. “Fans” are the worst group of people in America.
Do I have to keep reviewing the Sherlock Gnomes posters? I can skip these from here on out, yeah? This looks even lazier than most kids movies, which is really saying something.
Hoo boy, good thing I hadn’t declared that Backstabbing for Beginners posters the week’s worst before seeing this one. What is it with the failed comedy ensembles and using that weird blurry Christmas light background? That and super soft focus just make it look cheap. And they came so close to the faces and names matching up but just had to ruin it.
IMDb says: “Explores themes of female empowerment through sex, work, and friendship.”
Aw, dammit. For a second I thought it explored female empowerment through sex work and friendship, but the commas ruined everything.
Diagonal blurs make the poster look fast! They’re going to need that kind of trickery if half the cast is former combat sports heroes over 50.
I should just give up on the faces matching up with names thing, shouldn’t I. Also, did this movie ever come out? For a film from a guy who’s won a lot of awards starring a bunch of award winners it sure was quiet.
I’m never a huge fan of imagery inside the text, but I have to admit “like a twisted remake of Home Alone on bath salts” is one of the all-time great pull quotes.
Nostalgia! Nostalgia for… smuggling things into prison? That’s what I think of when I see cutouts in books, people smuggling things into prison. Or out of prison. “Nostalgia: You have to cram it up your butt now.”
And here’s a new one for Peter Rabbit, about the rabbit causin’ some hijinks. It’s not great, but at least it doesn’t look like a porno anymore.
Praise God, they lined up the names with the actors. Imagine this with the names swapped and you can understand how annoying those other ones are.
Apparently Red Sparrow is about a ballerina Russian spy. You can tell she’s a spy because of the bangs. Bangs are visual shorthand for “undercover.”
It’s about a blind wrestler, get it? These A Shot in the Dark posters are straightforward and I like that. I appreciate that A Shot in the Dark understands that there’s no value in independent movies playing coy. You don’t get credit for keeping a secret if no one cares to find out.
I still don’t really know what the slenderman is. Do I have to Google it now? Or does that unleash the demon? No thanks, man.
Is there a silhouette inside the question mark whispering in her ear? No? Well, that would’ve been cool.
Yo, what’s with that body? It looks like Ethan Hawke plays a vigilante rock star. He’s going to sing some gypsy rock about LSD and drive the ladies into a frenzy before he kills bad guys.
The film is called “24 Hours To Live,” I probably should’ve mentioned that. I guess it’s like Crank? Didn’t they already make this movie?