Posted on July 14, 2009 by Darren
I’m a sucker for great cinema. I’m an even greater sucker for ways of paying tribute to great cinema. Turner Classic Movies have launched their Summer Under the Stars season (where stars like Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier get a whole day dedicated to their classics over the month of August) with a variety of teaser posters which treat these movies as if they were brand spanking new. I have my own favourites of the collection after the jump, but it got me thinking about other great ways of advertising films. Not particular films, but cinema in general or classics. As an amazing experience.
I’ve come up with some great examples that I’ve been taken with lately.
If they showed these ads in cinemas, I'd be happy...
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Filed under: Movies, Television | Tagged: advertising, adverts, cinema, film advertisements, films, great films, high definition, montages, Movies, posters, sky, sky digital, sky hd, tcm, turner classic movies | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 13, 2009 by Darren
I’ve finally gotten to see all the five Best Picture nominees for the 81st Academy Awards. I’m honestly disappointed it took me so long, but that’s what happens when a flood of prestige movies hit the cinemas over three weeks in January and the Academy doesn’t even pick the good ones. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the contenders, in retrospect. The previous year’s awards featured a fantastic line-up – Juno, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood – that hit just about every demographic and represented the awards at their best. This year, we got a closed shop.
The statuettes are actually quite creepy when you get to looking at them...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 2009 oscars, 81st academy awards, academy awards, AMPAS, best picture, films, frost/nixon, milk, Movies, Oscars, slumdog millionaire, the curious case of benjamin button, The Dark Knight, the reader | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 10, 2009 by Darren
We knew it was coming. A solid reason to hold out for Christmas – Warner Brothers has announced the motherlode of Watchmen DVD’s. The Ultimate Edition we’ve known to be coming for a while has been confirmed and – despite Zach Snyder’s protest that it would be a bare-bones set – it looks to be massive. Five disks, all inclusive. To quote the great Keanu Reeves: Woah…
Those paying for The Director's Cut must seem quite blue right now...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: absolute edition, blu ray, dc comics, directors cut, DVD, films, Movies, ultimate edition, watchmen, watchmen: ultimate edition, zack snyder | 2 Comments »
Posted on July 9, 2009 by Darren
… aka, I love you even more, Roger Ebert!
That man really hates Transformers 2 – in case you didn’t read his response to those critics of critics. Or maybe it was the announcement of a Viewfinder and an Asteroids movie within the same week that led him to publish a list of his most-anticipated toyetic movies in the years to come. It is awesome and totally worth a look at the link. Anyway, one of his ideas was so fiendishly brilliant I couldn’t resist doing a draft mock-up of the poster…
I give you Marbles: The Movie, with Ebert plot summary below…
Alternative Tagline: "Get some balls"
Marbles! Secret of the Universe! Nicolas Cage plays an astrophysicist at MIT who intercepts the feed from the Hubble Space Telescope and determines that the stars in the sky are in fact giant, brilliantly-glowing marbles. Enhancing the digital information, he discovers a giant thumb and forefinger in the abyss beyond space. They hold an aggie.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: asteroids, films, games, marbles: the movie, Movies, nicholas cage, poster, roger ebert, toyetic, toys, transformers 2, view master, view master movie, viewfinder | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 8, 2009 by Darren
Ah, the musical. The genre of choice for middleaged women everywhere. One of those glamourous shallow callbacks to the golden era of Hollywood. I was intrigued when Tim Burton announced his next project was a musical – an adaptation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. I was familiar with the myth of the man, but not the musical. I ended up being served a treat almost as fiendishly decadent as Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies: a little flaky and suspicious in places, and a lot more filling than it should be. Magical, macabre, magnificent. It’s isn’t classic Burton, but it’s certainly vintage.
Get ready for a close shave...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: films, helena honham carter, johnny depp, Movies, musical, musicals, non-review review, reviews, sacha baron cohen, stephen sondheim, sweeney todd, tim burton, victorian london | 2 Comments »
Posted on July 8, 2009 by Darren
I used to love going to the cinema and watching the trailers. Teasing me with movies I hadn’t heard of yet, showing me my first look at movies I was anticipating all summer or perhaps reaffirming my faith in a movie I’d written off. It doesn’t matter that the trailers always lie (Sweeney Todd is a musical? Not according to the trailer) or they spoil too much (not sure if it’s possible to spoil a historical biopic, but Public Enemies had a trailer which ran until Dillinger escaped in Indiana, which is at least two-thirds the run time), but I loved ’em. And if one of those trailers stunk, I didn’t mind, because there were five or six more waiting for me. I don’t mind having twenty minutes of advertisements before a movie (as happened when I saw The Hangover), but I do mind if these ads are focused on selling my things I don’t really want or care about.
I want to see more of this...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: advertising, adverts, cinema trips, cinemas, film trailers, films, Movies, products, rant, Television, trailers | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 7, 2009 by Darren
There’s nothing like a little bit of political correctness gone crazy to get the blood flowing. I’m amazed it’s taken me this long to find a story that piqued my interest enough that I would cover it. Ask and you shall receive and all that. Last week’s hubbub over the trailer for Warner Brothers’ film Orphan is exactly what irritates me about our current PC-focused state of mind. For those who don’t know, Orphan sees an adopted little girl proceeding to wreak havoc on a small suburban family. The trailer was released last week and prompted a huge outcry from various interest groups for including the line, “It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.” Because apparently every line spoken in movies must be the unadulterated truth, right? No characters would ever make a subjective statement about their own incorrect world view, would they?
Creepy children never go out of fashion...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: adoption, age restrictions, censorship, complaints, controversy, film classification, film ratings, films, interest groups, Movies, orphan, orphan movie, pc, political correctness, R, restricted, Warner Brothers, world gone mad | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 7, 2009 by Darren
This could go really well, or really badly. On one hand, I’m all about horror films that aren’t about psycho killers stalking and slashing scantily clad teenage girls. On the other hand, it takes a lot of restraint to do psychological horror well. Either way, the Stanford Prison Experiment looks set to terrify more than just first year psychology students, with the similarly-themed The Experiment in the works.
Would you let this guy lock you up for a psychological experiment?
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Abu Ghraib, adrian brody, das experiment, elijah wood, films, forest whitaker, horror, Movies, philip zimbardo, psychological experiment, psychological thriller, psychology, stanford, stanford prison expiremnt, the experiment, true stories, zimbardo | Leave a comment »
Posted on July 3, 2009 by Darren
An Asteroids movie is coming. Yes, it’s like all your 1980’s Christmases are coming at once. The Atari classic about a two-dimensional triangle which blasts two-dimensional representations of asteroids is getting the deluxe movie treatment. And we’re as excited as anyone else! Which is not very excited at all. I would love to have been at that pitch meeting.
“So, what’s the plot about?”
“A two-dimensional triangle which blasts two-dimensional representations of asteroids.”
“Oh…”
“And in some modern versions, the triangle is different colours.”
“Sold!”
I wish I were making this up...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: asteroids, asteroids game, asteroids movie, films, matthew lopez, minesweeper, Movies, super mario brothers, universal studios, videogame adaptations, videogame movies | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 2, 2009 by Darren
I have to admit, I’m a little excited about Predators. It seems that I’m really more excited about next year’s cinematic treats – Green Lantern, Predators, Inception, even Iron Man 2 – than I am about what lies ahead for this year, well outside this month’s releases. Avatar is going to be groundbreakingly jaw dropping, but it’s not really interesting to think about it. It’s boringly amazing, if that is possible. Predators, on the other hand, is great fun to speculate about. Sure, it’s a rake of horror monsters from the past few decades being revitalised – like Freddie Kruger who has a three-picture deal and the Weinstein Company returning to its roots with a remake of An American Werewolf in London – but Predators is the only one of the remakes of more modern schlock that seems to have a chance of not sucking. I love Jackie Earle Haley, but even I can tell that a Nightmare on Elm Street reboot is a bad idea. I’m sure he could prove me wrong on that count, but I’m not expecting to him to. And I think that quirky genre-bending flicks are hard to emulate the second-time around, so I’m nervouse about remaking Landis’ low budget classic. So, Predators is the most hopeful of the bunch.
The thing's got dreadlocks... geddit? Dread... locks... no?
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 2010 releases, action movies, aliens, blockbusters, films, Fox, Movies, Neil Marshall, Nimrod Antal, predator, predators, robert rodriguez | 2 Comments »
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