This week’s This Week in Posters begins with The Handmaiden, from Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook. This is one hell of an unsettling poster, the theme of which seems to be “A man’s touch always comes with nefarious intentions.” (If only we could demonstrate it with our actual hands in real life.)
I also like the idea that it’s called The Handmaiden because she has a hand on her head. I hope that’s there for the entire movie. Also, strong eyebrows on the guy on the left.
If the goal of this poster was to make me Google whether Billy Bob Thornton is returning for this one, success (he is!). In the process, I also found out Doug Ellin from Entourage co-wrote the screenplay. And that, kids, demonstrates the law of unintended consequences.
Haha, he’s peeing on the money.
And here we have the first small teaser poster for Transformers: The Last Knight. The title is written in a joke font, which seems fitting for something that looks like a joke movie. Is this about… a robot knight slaying robot dinosaurs on a space planet? I don’t remember that from the cartoons.
Here’s a pretty cool poster for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which not only has a cool cell-splitting design, they even lined up the names with the corresponding faces! Also, they made the font for the tagline super small, like they knew it was so badass that making people search for it would make it even creepier. Like you’re just banging around the kitchen looking for a tea cozy and you open an unassuming drawer and then BOOM, it’s the Babadook. You just got surprise Babadooked. That’s what this tagline is like. Which is a good thing, I’m saying.
I was staring at the face on the left, thinking how perfectly it expressed my feelings on seeing Miles Teller in Italian-face…
…for a full two minutes before I even realized it was Aaron Eckhart. Mama Mia, that’s a spicy-a bald pate.
Anyway, I can’t wait to watch dorky NYU grad Miles Teller play Vinny Da Guinea from down da way. It’s blue collar dress up day! I like to imagine him staring at himself in the mirror of his trailer every morning, whispering “Bravado... Bravado!”
Imagined Future Scene
“Heah, Vinny, I found these undaweahs unda da car seat, some cheap hoo-ah brand. You can give ’em back to ya friggin goomad before I cut off ya friggin bawls.”
“Ay, Tina, oh! (*grabs crotch*) Relax, wouldja? Maddon’, I neva seen dose friggin undaweahs in my life, maybe dey fell outta da gabba gool!”
This poster for Chicken People illustrates the age-old truism that if your movie is about a beauty contest for handsome chicken, there’s no point beating around the bush. Also, if I remember correctly, red and yellow are the two colors most closely associated with hunger and I’m definitely thinking about chicken for lunch now.
I just noticed that if you scroll slowly down your screen on this Don’t Breathe poster, the top of it sort of looks like a weird dick.
Or maybe I just have weird dicks on the brain. Either way.
Hoo boy, being a white savior sure makes your face dirty! I’m pretty sure Legendary thought they’d get Zhang Yimou to direct and give it to their Asian division and everyone would be totally cool with Matt Damon starring in a film called The Great Wall. And then they released this poster, which is 92% Matt Damon’s face and 8% “I dunno, maybe explosions or something? I think the Chinese invented gunpowder, right?” and it ruined everything. Zhang Yimou was your defense and you didn’t even put his name on the poster? Sheesh.
Ah, yes, Ithaca, that mythical land of, uh… milk men on bikes. JK, I have no idea what this is about. I like this guy’s face though:
It’s like he just caught you watching some disturbing porn, and he wants to be angry at you, but realizes he likes it and now he’s in the midst of an existential crisis. Is that the plot of this? I’d watch that.
Per IMDb:
Fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley is determined to be the best and fastest bicycle telegraph messenger anyone has ever seen. His older brother has gone to war, leaving Homer to look after his widowed mother, his older sister and his 4-year-old brother, Ulysses. And so it is that as spring turns to summer, 1942, Homer Macauley delivers messages of love, hope, pain… and death… to the good people of Ithaca. And Homer Macauley will grapple with one message that will change him forever. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan’s 1943 novel, The Human Comedy, ITHACA is a coming-of-age story about the exuberance of youth, the abruptness of change, the sweetness of life, the sting of death, and the sheer goodness that lives in each and every one of us.
Oh, I see, the bicycle is symbolic.
At first I was like, “Oh, cool silhouette poster for a generic thriller,” and then upon closer inspection…
Is this some kind of pixelated Dark Man situaish? I’m at a loss here.
A fast-paced, high concept thriller following a 20 something layabout, who over the course of a day, is forced to make his way across an increasingly strange and sinister London, in order to save his kidnapped girlfriend. [IMDb]
Huh.
Oh Lord: Look at this thing. It’s like the designer wanted one of those inexplicably diagonal horizon lines and then couldn’t even commit to it. Not to mention it appears to be about a dystopian future where the Disney Channel has raised a generation of vest-wearing mega-bland milk babies. Oh God, run for your lives, he’s got a hoodie! Every single one of them has some kind of wrist or hand accessory. Those are de rigeur in sullen over-styled child actor land.
Synopsis:
Six children genetically cross-bred with avian DNA, complete with wings, take flight around the country to discover their origins.
Oh man. And here I thought the wings were a metaphor. This is going to be awesome.
Credit where credit is due, “He’s putting his life on paws” is a wonderful tagline. Which means that the poster designer/marketing copywriter clearly took his job more seriously than the screenwriter who came up with “Mr. Fuzzypants.” It feels like this concept was dictated by an inarticulate studio exec — “And… and… then he turns into a cat! And the cat’s name is… I don’t know! Something cute! ‘Mr. Fuzzypants’ or something!” — who was hoping a screenwriter could do something with his “brilliant” idea. But instead the screenwriter was like “The faster I can get this moronic drivel down on paper the faster I can work on my semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a prickly law school dropout with a heart of gold.”
I’m honestly impressed with M. Night Shyamalan. Not even four disastrous, increasingly terrible flops in a row — Lady In The Water (24%), The Happening (18% on RottenTomatoes), The Last Airbender (6%), After Earth (11%) — which tarnished his name to the point that an audience would jeer at the “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan” title screen in Devil (I witnessed this personally) can keep them from releasing a teaser poster that does nothing but remind you that this is an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I mean, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth are all once-in-a-lifetime terrible, and this guy knocked them out back to back to back. You have to admire the man’s balls. And, for what it’s worth, people seemed to like The Visit.
Question for the peanut gallery: does Captain Kirk have incredibly broad shoulders or just a very tiny head? Looks like Sulu and Chekov are asking themselves the same thing.
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.