Category: Photoshop

“Hey, movies have sound now! We should make one!”

“Do you know how?”

“No, but neither does anyone else, so I’m technically the best at it!”

Pretty happy with the fake poster.

It must be hard to make a parody of a generic light romantic comedy since even the real ones are right on the edge of self-parody. This one works when it pushes into absurdity and takes rom-com cliches to their extremes, but the large number of times where the characters just explicitly describe those cliches fall pretty flat.

Here’s a fake poster for you, inspired by verb tenses:

It must have been wild to be one of the half-dozen fans of The Monkees’ TV show who managed to find a showing of this movie, went in expecting a long-form version of the show, and getting this wild experimental film. It doesn’t always work, but that’s why they call them experiments.

Fun fact: This movie uses footage from TV and movies including the film The Black Cat, which I recently watched! EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.

Sometimes it’s hard to pick a source for the fake poster, and sometimes I watch a movie called The Monkey a day before I watch a movie starring The Monkees. And yes, Jack Nicholson really was the top-listed writer for Head. Easy Rider was funded by Monkee movie money.

I thought I was going to watch the Oscar nominated animated shorts, but it turns out that theaters don’t honor tickets for a Monday show on a Tuesday. Weird.

So I watched this instead, and it was a heap of fun. I enjoyed playing “Hey, that’s that old guy I know… but young!”

This was the obvious fake poster for a movie about a guy wearing a white suit:

I saw three movies in the last four days. The first had a budget of $200. The second cost $100,000. This one has a reported budget of $180 million (but with all the reshoots it’s probably higher). This is proof that there is no correlation between movie cost and movie quality. Is this movie better than Who Killed Captain Alex? From a purely technical standpoint, sure. Is it nine hundred thousand times better? No. And it’s nowhere near as good as Tangerine, let alone being 1800 times better.

This movie seems to exist to tie up dangling threads that most viewers will either have forgotten or never seen. Do you remember the Celestial Island created when the Eternals stopped a cosmic egg at the center of the Earth from fully developing? Or when Hulk blood dripped into a guy’s head? Or even when the Falcon became Captain America after having an adventure with Bucky? I man, I do, but I’m enough of a nerd to have read the original comics. (Side question for nerds: Why do they call it Celestial Island? Did someone tell them that the big creature was called a Celestial?)

Also fun: the movie is built like a mystery, but what should have been a big reveal at the end of the film is spoiled by every single piece of advertising. Good job, marketing team! Harrison Ford applauds your out of the box thinking.

Poster Time!

My original plan was to make this into a romance like The Notebook, but then the original of this popped up and it was too simple to resist.

Silents Synced takes silent films and pairs them with more current music. It’s not a new idea: Giorgio Moroder did it 40 years ago with Metropolis. The main difference is that Moroder made new songs just for the movie. These use existing songs that have little or nothing to do with the films. They also include special effects that draw attention toward themselves and away from the movies. The audience applauded at the end, so I guess this works for people, but I’d rather watch a clean print with music created to enhance the story instead of just playing in the background. A modern score created and performed specifically for the film by a group like R.E.M. sounds pretty darn cool. Until that happens, I’d say watch the originals. You can find them for free all over the place.

Since the movie is about a guy who wants to be a detective, I used the poster for a movie about a different detective as inspiration for this poster. I barely had to change the story description.

I’m about to make some silly nit-picky complaints, but this is a good movie with strong performances from everyone in the family, and it’s worth investing two and three quarter hours to watch. Soheila Golestani is particularly strong as a woman trying to do the right thing while protecting her family.

That being said, here comes the nitpicking! There’s a bit of mild spoiling below:

If Anton Chekhov watched the first scene he’d jump up and yell “Hey! I know at least one thing that’s going to happen at the end!”

The ages of the actors playing the kids are a little hinky. There’s a moment where the mother says one of the daughters is going through puberty, and I thought “wait- how old is she supposed to be/” I looked up the actress afterward, and she’s 32. She doesn’t look ancient, but she sure doesn’t look like a kid. Then again, this movie was shot in secret and everyone had to flee the country after it was done to avoid getting arrested, so I guess they were lucky to find good actress of any age willing to live in exile to tell this story.

Also: is it bad that a chase scene in this very serious movie reminded me of Scooby Doo?

You know what this movie needs? A silly poster!

If you can figure out the poster I’m copying, you can probably figure out why I picked it. Or you could save some effort and just read the alt text.