In Contention

Tag: movie posters

  • A little love for ‘I Am Love’

    I know the film has a lot of devotees on this site — I’m not wholly with them, though for the second year running, I do think Tilda Swinton merits a lot more Best Actress consideration than she’s getting — so you may be pleased to know that florid Italian melodrama “I Am Love” has at least (however indirectly) taken one bit of minor silverware.

    I wasn’t aware that the inaugural Screen International UK Marketing & Distribution Awards took place two weeks ago, but so they did, with “I Am Love” (and marketing team AllCity) deservedly scooping Poster of the Year honors for the arresting hot-pink design featured to the right (and in full after the cut). As it happens, we singled out the film’s poster portfolio for praise earlier this year; nice to know we weren’t alone in our admiration. Hey, it’s something.

    Among the posters it beat is another of my favorite 2010 one-sheets recently featured on these pages: the witty crow-and-bomb design for “Four Lions.” Chris Morris’s controversial (and, yes, funny) UK terrorism satire did, however, take the award for Trailer of the Year. You can check that out, too, after the cut.

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  • International ‘Black Swan’ teaser posters

    Okay, now we’re talking. By now, you should be quite familiar with the US one-sheet for Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” — an attractively demure (and unexpectedly snow-white) design that coyly masks the sexy, shadowy craziness served up by the erotic ballet thriller. Now, however, a set of four international teaser posters have landed via Empire — and they certainly aren’t hiding the crazy. Love the alternately Expressionist and Art Deco flourishes and the stark, uniform color palette (though if they were really channeling the film, that red would be replaced with blush-pink). My favorite among the quartet previewed above — check ’em all out after the cut.

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  • I am Tilda

    Has any actor in recent years put an Oscar to quite such good use as Tilda Swinton? I admit I wasn’t quite behind her win two years ago for “Michael Clayton,” but I’ve enjoyed watching how, after two decades as a kind of alien fringe goddess, she’s recently morphed into a movie star of sorts — still reassuringly batty in her decisions but now capable of propelling a foreign-language arthouse curio like “I Am Love” to healthy box-office returns in the UK. (The film hits US theaters in June.)

    It’s interesting, then, to see an array of lustrous poster designs for the film all playing on the “Tilda Swinton, movie star” meme, placing her front, center and glammed-up to the hilt. Take this unused concept from UK designers All City:

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  • 1/19 Oscarweb Round-up

    Robert Downey Jr. at the 2010 Golden Glone Awards• Searching for meaning in Robert Downey Jr’s Stark-esque Globes beard.  Perhaps too much meaning. [CHUD]

    • Roger Ebert dives back into the enigma of Michael Haneke’s “Cache.” [Chicago Sun-Times]

    • Stretching to compare “Avatar” to “Slumdog Millionaire” because of it’s “out of the blue” success. [24 Frames]

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  • Sight for sore eyes

    Three weeks into the new decade, the flood of lists rounding up the last one seems to have abated, but I enjoyed Stale Popcorn’s countdown of the decade’s best film posters, whose #1 coincides with that of a similar list on The Auteurs last month. (They have an interesting interview with designer Akiko Stehrenberger here.) The same poster is one I’m starting to see crop up on the walls of assorted designer/cineaste locales — plainly a modern classic, even if the film is plainly not.

    Funny Games

  • What’s on your wall?

    The powers that be have conspired to put me in a decorating frame of mind this week. First Kris contemplated adding a “Double Indemnity” poster to his home gallery. Then I came across this Empire blogger asking the pertinent question: “What do your movie posters say about you?” And finally, this afternoon I happened to pass a private London gallery displaying in its window a luscious framed print of my all-time favorite film still (minus that pesky web watermark):

    Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas

    If you need to be told that that’s Nastassja Kinski in “Paris, Texas,” then you need to see the film, fast.

    Anyway, I have to have it. I’m finding myself over-familiar with the film posters I have, but too broke for the ones I want. I’m beginning to play with framed stills as an alternative, and I think Ms. Kinski would sit very nicely on my mantelpiece. (I also like the idea of her in a movie-versus-music face-off with Macy Gray, who presently occupies the opposite wall in a similarly mistrustful pose. I am a man of eccentric tastes.)

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  • Two sugars

    As you know, we really love Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar” here at InContention. The film opens today here in the UK, and I sincerely hope discerning Brit audiences can get past the unfamiliar baseball angle and see this for the lovely, universal character piece it is.

    Anyway, I thought I’d share this beautiful poster art from AllCity Design, easily the best in the game when it comes to UK release one-sheets. I love that they include rejected designs on their website — this one didn’t make the cut (the design they went with is pictured after the jump), but the elegance of its palette and composition caught my eye.

    Sugar

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  • More Polish posters

    After this week’s post about Polish movie posters, I received an email from a reader pointing me to MrPoster.com, which he described as “are the world’s largest resource for Polish original vintage movie posters. Over 8,000 different posters are avaialable to the public. Their gallery is in Santa Fe, New Mexico and can be reached through this website.”

    They definitely have a lot of posters, but not all the titles are in English, so you have to play a guessing game here and there.  Here’s a collective of some of my favorites (clockwise from top left: “Blues Brothers,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Children of a Lesser God,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Winchester ’73” and “Cabaret,”):

    MrPoster.com