This feels like a different movie every time I see it. I don’t mean “Golly, I just figured out a new interpretation”; I mean like they keep shooting other scenes and sneaking them into the film.
Also: Alamo Drafthouse played a clip of Lynch before the film where he said that no one else interpreted the film the way he did, which means all non-Lynch interpretations are equally valid. Personally, I think it’s the origin of Pencilhead from Mystery Men.
Doug Jones’ finest role. Way better than when he was Fishboy.
I had a hard time finding a tangentially related poster to parody for this. The end result doesn’t look much like the original, and the original is hardly iconic. I’d be surprised if you can figure it out without looking at the alternate text.
This movie is a Jack Quaid Charm Delivery Device. Also: I look forward to the upcoming “Is this a Christmas movie?” arguments.
My fake poster is an argument for pro-Christmas. The only reason I wish this was already on video is that I’d be able to get better source images.
A New Leaf
Part two of my Unplanned Walter Matthau Film Festival. It’s a little jarring to go from Matthau as a schubbly transit cop in a gritty suspense story to Matthau as a high society fop in an arch farce.
…and this movie is on video, but I still couldn’t get decent images. Maybe I just like making excuses for the declining quality of these posters.
Remember when movies were allowed to have a guy like Walter Matthau be the star of the show?
As soon as the music starts you know you’re in for a good time.
Héctor Elizondo? Did Garry Marshall direct this?
Features some classic 1974 racism, sexism, and homophobia!
I thought the mayor was a caricature of Ed Koch, but he didn’t become mayor of New York until 1978.
For today’s poster, I spent far too much time making the movie logo. Then I couldn’t find decent images of Matthau or Robert Shaw that would work for the central image. My “solution” makes it look like this stars Elizondo and Jerry Stiller, with a special appearance by Walter Matthau as the moon. Works for me!
Seriously, far too much time drawing the letters for this one. Also: I hope Héctor Elizondo likes his new very long legs (even though he’s also missing a foot).
If science fiction has taught me anything, it’s that if you’re planning to use multiple clones of the same person as your workforce, and you can’t have more than one clone of any person at a time, you really need strict protocols to confirm a death before whipping up a new one.
This movie won’t have many surprises for people familiar with sci-fi cliches, but that’s not very important when the tropes are used well. Pattinson does an impressive of making two characters who look and dress exactly the same very distinct. I don’t think there was ever a time when I was unsure of which Mickey I was looking at.
Today’s fake poster is a case of “good idea, weak execution.” That’s what you get when I’m whipping up a silly Photoshop project after ten on a school night.
Nearly 30 years ago, Fox Mulder gave the most accurate review of this movie:
I can’t argue with that.
“Great album. Deeply flawed movie, though.” You’re spot on, Spooky Mulder!
When I make fake posters, I usually put the real poster down first for layout, then build completely new elements and get rid of the original- but this time I giggled when I saw the way everything looked together and let part of it stay.
“Prince Rogers Nelson, get your motorcycle out of the living room!”
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.
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.
