Shake off that chicken wing hangover, everyone, because it’s time for This Week In Posters, the only movie-poster-based feature on the Internet. We start this week with Ava’s Possessions, a movie I hadn’t heard of before today (part of the beauty of This Week In Posters, to be sure). It’s billing itself as “The Hangover, but with a lot more demons.”
Wait, so you mean it’s a standard comedy vehicle spiced up with some horror-movie tropes? Is this the first time this has been attempted? Somebody find out for me. Anyway, I think I’m good on zombie movies from now until forever, but that’s just me.
This is one of this week’s stranger posters, for Best and Most Beautiful Things, which apparently comes Friends‘ executive producer Kevin S. Bright. Ahh, is this what he’s been working on for the last 15 years? Anyway, I’m intrigued. As for what it’s about, I’m getting… a blind girl… with a quirky fashion sense? And nice legs? A manic pixie blind girl, if you will? Let’s IMDb it, it’s earned that much:
In a celebration of outcasts, a precocious young blind woman vanishes into quirky obsessions and isolation. With humor and bold curiosity, she chases love and freedom in the most unexpected of places: a provocative fringe community.
Well, the poster was accurate, I’ll give it that. It sounds like an English version of Blind, which you should definitely watch if you ever have a chance.
Does anyone’s face look better in ultra high contrast than Kurt Russell’s? He should keep that giant cowboy beard forever.
I like this poster. It gets those diagonals poster designers love in there in a way that makes sense, and you get just enough sense of what it might be about that it’s intriguing. Is it about a leper colony? IMDb says:
A young woman’s desperate search for her abducted boyfriend that draws her into the infamous Colonia Dignidad, a sect nobody ever escaped from.
Well, maybe, maybe not. Could they be Scientologists? I guess we’ll have to find out.
This poster looks like it was really easy to design. Luckily, after Nightcrawler, I don’t need much more than “Jake Gyllenhaal plays a creep” to be intrigued.
A successful investment banker struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash.
And it comes from the director of Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, which seems like something you’d want to mention on the poster.
The Divergent series posters seem like they’re designed to recruit tween girls into 50 Shades Of Grey fandom, don’t they? I’m not sure there has ever existed a more dull-looking franchise.
Ooh, a movie about Eva Hesse? It’s about time. I hear she put the “art” in “center part.” I’m kidding, I know nothing about her. But you’d think a movie about an artist could do better than a plain beige background.
I don’t know what it is about Miles Teller’s face, but I don’t think I’ve ever not chuckled at a still image of him. Anyway, I look forward to seeing how hard life is for these perfectly put-together great-looking white folks.
Goat is based on a fraternity memoir, and the poster has gone with the same color scheme as the book cover. (Yeah, man, I read, no big.) By the way, how bummed would you be if you wrote a best-selling memoir, and then for the movie version, some producer decided to use it as the guinea pig for Nick Jonas’ acting experiment? It’s understandable that the Disney Channel purity ring squad wants to reinvent themselves, but can’t they do it on their own time? In conclusion, GET OFF MY LAWN.
(Thanks to whoever sent me that Skinner meme on Twitter, I can’t remember who it was.)
This poster shouldn’t work. The font is cheesy, it has the dreaded inexplicably canted angle, and worst of all, they didn’t even use my review for the pull quotes. (It’s like I don’t even have feelings or something.) But that pose (which also doesn’t entirely make sense) is odd in a way that I can’t stop looking at it. It looks like a riff on the London Calling cover but with a machete, which is pretty perfect.
Does anyone know what the hell this background is supposed to be? It looks like the characters are stuck inside the carb of a bong. That’s what it’s called, right? I’m not cool enough to know all the “weed” lingo. “Greetings, hepcats. Who wants to smoke some drugs? My ma and pop don’t approve, but I hear they’re the bee’s knees.”
All I can see in this is that there’s a giant space butthole about to poop on Earth. Once you see that, it’s all you can see.
I saw the trailer for the new Bourne movie during the Super Bowl. From what I can gather, the former amnesiac super spy now travels the world competing in underground MMA fights. Which makes sense for where the franchise would be after four or five movies. (How many are there? I refuse to look this up.) It’s a little sad that Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass are participating again. Didn’t they have better things to do? It makes them seem like the Tenenbaums, moving back into mom and dad’s house as a last-ditch attempt get their mojo back.
A few weeks ago, someone in the comments section explained the giant orangutan in The Jungle Book looks so big because he’s not actually an orangutan at all, but a gigantopithecus, “an extinct genus of Ape that actually inhabited the part of the world in which the film takes place.” This was a change made specifically for the movie, presumably based on the idea that “Wouldn’t it be cool if the orangutan was really big?”
I can’t argue with that logic. And in this poster, he looks a little like the ape Colonel Kurtz. “You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.” (* eats banana in one bite, washes it down with own pee *)
I’m pretty sure they swapped Winstone and Carlyle’s names in this specifically to piss me off.
The diagonal in this one is actually slightly intriguing. Between the title and the fact that it’s the guy being dipped, am I being made to infer that he’s dead? To IMDb!
A girl in a small town forms an unlikely bond with a recently-paralyzed man she’s taking care of.
Ooh, I was close. That’s some subtle poster work there. This looks like Murderball if the ball was a black tie affair.
Adolescence is tough, but James Franco understands you.
This might be this week’s most baffling poster. Up top you’ve got the True Detective-esque antler image, followed by the splay-footed running guy charging down the street in his ill-fitting suit. (Why are the sleeves so long??) And then the title, Monday At 11:01 AM, which is odd all on its own. It all adds up to me having no clue what this is supposed to be about.
The film is a suspense thriller about Michael, who brings his girlfriend Jenny to a beautiful yet strange mountain town where everyone seems familiar.
“The mountain town” part explains the position of the antler guy, but that’s about it. I guess being mysterious is part of the draw. Not necessarily a bad thing, but jeez, get this guy a tailor, am I right?
This looks like they based each character on the public’s perception of each actor’s persona and stuck them in a movie together. Which isn’t a bad thing, who doesn’t like Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick?
This looks a lot like Independence Day 2, only this time, two space buttholes! The space buttholes must be causing a gravitational anomaly that made the guy tilt diagonally like that. That’s the only explanation for it.
Is it just me or do British and Irish people only sing in front of bricks?
A tour de force! Agyness Deyn will SHAWL. YOU. OVER! Are you ready for a tale of multi-generational yearning! You better be! Prepare to yearn your f*cking balls off.
I think I sort of recognize… one of those names? Also, I enjoy the pull quote about “taxing audacity.” Is that a good thing? If you’re ever wondering if a pull quote is a good thing, try applying it to a person. “Oh, Steve? He’s so taxingly audacious, that guy.”
Hmm, I don’t think I want to hang out with Steve.
Triple 9 is supposedly a John Hillcoat thriller, and the new poster looks like three Deadpools exploding out of the sewer like Ninja Turtles. This marketing plan seems… confused.
I don’t know, man, I have a hard time taking Michael Moore’s political points seriously with him looking like he dug up a dead guy and stole his clothes. Come on, man, did you not know you were going to be in a poster that day?
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.