Ranking Woody Allen Posters + Midnight in Paris Meets Van Gogh

The poster for Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris, has been released at Yahoo and I liked it. It's nothing groundbreaking or particularly ingenious, but I think it's nice and shows at least some artistic thought that was sorely lacking in this department for Allen's films lately.


The poster it obviously reminded me of most of all was Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, another Parisian-set film that featured a poster on the banks of the Seine. This one is obviously better than that one from 1997 since it's not just a movie still with floating block heads chillin' in the sky above. As for this poster, it ranks as one of the better Allen designs as of late, but let's take a look at his entire career for this list of the best Woody Allen movie posters, shall we?

20. Mighty Aphrodite
19. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
18. Hannah and Her Sisters


17. Alice
16. Husbands & Wives
15. Another Woman


14. September
13. Scoop
12. Everyone Says I Love You


11. New York Stories
10. Celebrity
9. Radio Days


8. Hollywood Ending
7. Deconstructing Harry
6. Sleeper


5. Shadows and Fog

Such great composition. Gives a perfect reflection of the kind of film it's selling and does so with a great central image.

4. New York Stories

The only film on this list with two entries is this Allen/Scorsese/Coppola omnibus film from 1989. As you'll see with our #2 entry as well, many foreign Woody Allen posters are far better than their domestic American versions. Why that is, I'm not too sure, although I did like the American one for New York Stories as well (up at #11), just not as much as this delightful Asian design. Of course, both come from a time when the director was as much the star as the actors and cinemagoers new what film directors looked like enough to put them on the poster! You would never see that today, would you?

3. Small Time Crooks

In my Top 50 Posters of the Decade countdown last year I wrote: "Fun visual gag alongside that attention-grabbing silhouette and a silly, but delightful, tagline. Considering the efforts that have gone into some Woody Allen films this past decade ... I think we can safely call this one a winner." And that still stands.

2. Anything Else

Yet another Asian design - Asian posters to me are what Polish/Czech posters are to most others, apparently - and whatta design it is! Love the use of an old New York map, the oddball drawing style and that apple. It all "adds up to something wonderful and almost whimsical (but not in the annoying indie way)." I ranked it as the 12th best poster of the decade.

1. Manhattan

I shouldn't like this poster as much as I do. Not only does it use a movie still, but it lumps it up in the top third of the design and fills the rest with nothing but white space and text. And yet...

And yet... if you're going to do this sort of design concept, this is how you should do it! Picking an instantly iconic slice of imagery for one thing helps and then roughening the edges of it so it doesn't merely look like you put it there and forgot it existed. And, hey look at that! A typeface that is relevant and romantic and dreamy. Can I say that that's my favourite film poster font of all time? Because I think it is. It's just so perfect in every way.

So, dear readers, do you agree? Disagree? What would you say is your favourite Woody Allen poster and where does Midnight in Paris rank?

Black & White Friday: Gypsy 83

Perhaps a strange film to use for this series, but I'll explain way. Todd Stephen's 2001 film is an absolute stunner due to the power of its cast and the vision that is presented on screen. It's hardly the most radical of films and follows a very routine small-town-freaks-head-to-the-big-city-and-meet-crazy-characters-along-the-way plot (it's a sub-genre, okay!), but there's something so touching about the leads Sara Rue and Kett Turton together and the way the film feels truly independent and like it's set out to be its own magical beast. It never wants to settle for being the same old, despite it's familiar material. I appreciate that above mere ho-hum dialogue.


I decided to use it for the series, however, because spread through the movie are these black and white intervals filmed on an old handheld camera owned by the character of "Clive". It was this shot above that really made me wonder what the entire film might have looked like if filmed this way like an ultra-cheap underground movie made in the late '70s/early '80s in New York City by artists who live in apartments with no running water and who work in dead-end jobs Monday to Friday just to finance their art projects.


This seems like something underground filmmakers would do - set social "freaks" and "perverts" loose in a cemetery. Don't you think?


This looks more like a shot from a Divinyls video from 1990.


One thing that intrigued me about this movie what what year it was set. I know it was set in 2001 (the year it was released), but there are many moments like this that made me think it was set in the 1990s (this set looks just like a Curve video or somethin') and the 1980s (since the two lead characters look like they never left). But going with our theme of underground cinema, this does sorta look like the sorta "it's-a-set-but-not-a-set" those filmmakers may have come up with.


Karen Black terrifies me. Not just in this movie, but in general.



We all know the sort of underground indie films of the period were not shy about sex, particularly that that was deemed immoral or lewd, so I think some gay sex is more than expected. Of course, in Gypsy 83 the gay seduction is played so fantasy-like that it's one of the few moments that actually feels false, but it's still played so genuinely that I couldn't help but grin.


This was perhaps my favourite scene of the movie, as Clive puts on a show to The Cure's ace "Doing the Unstuck". The black and white feels quite appropriate.


I feel like this shot almost looks like a John Waters movie. No, Sara Rue doesn't look like Divine, but he is obviously drawn to less traditional images of beauty, isn't he? And the horrified expressions on their face just top that off.


This is a wonderful shot as they pass through the tunnel from New Jersey into Manhattan. The roughness of the photography and the high contrast of the whites and blacks do evoke those films from the underground movement that were shot on the fly and did whatever they needed to get a shot even if it wasn't perfect. It's a shot that feels so authentic.


Fittingly, I am finishing on a shot of New York City, this film's spiritual home. This whole idea of underground NYC cinema has been taken from the little of it that I gleaned from Celine Danhier's documentary Black City. Films that used New York in its most street-level natural form. I wish director Todd Stephens had spent a little less time on the road and little more time in New York City since I can only imagine what sort of images, dripping with nostalgia, he could have put up. Budgetary constraints, I imagine, stopped that from happening, but it's still nice to imagine.

Review: Me and Orson Welles

The career of cult director Richard Linklater has been a varied and often wonderful thing to behold. From the high school comedy of Dazed and Confused to the Parisian romance of Before Sunset and the animated science fiction of A Scanner Darkly, Linklater has scuttled from genre to genre with ease. Now he takes a detour back to 1930s New York to tell the tale of Orson Welles’ famed Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s an at times ambitious, but frustratingly limited, film that gets by on the energy of its cast.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag
I don't have anything extra to say about this movie, really, other than what's in the review. B-

Review: New York, I Love You

New York, I Love Your
Dir. Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Joshua Marsden, Mira Nair, Brett Ratner, Randall Balsmeyer, Shekhar Kapur & Natalie Portman
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 103mins

One city, ten directors and a cast of familiar faces await audiences of New York, I Love You. This follow-up to Paris je t’aime, a surprise box office hit that saw famous directors craft odes to the city of love, will leave many disappointed. This so-called love letter to the Big Apple is a fizzer that doesn’t even come close to approaching the joie de vivre of its Parisian ancestor.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag

I am a New York "tragic", it's true. I have been twice - plan to go again in the next few years, hopefully/maybe - and I love movies to be set in New York. A movie such as The Exploding Girl can be so much better than it has any right to be simply by being set in NYC and allowing me to drown myself in the images and sounds. Barely any of the vignettes in New York, I Love You give that feeling of being surrounded by life like actually being in New York does. My favourite was the Maggie Q/Ethan Hawke sequence, which felt like a "New York Moment" more than, say, Natalie Portman's awful Jewish wedding piece.

One thing I mention in the review is the lack of any queer substance whatsoever. Watching the movie and I felt as if they were going out of their way to feature as many cultures and yet somehow gay people got left out. And in a film about the gay capital of the world (to be token and cliched). I also find it hilarious that the producers cut Scarlett Johansson's piece because it "didn’t jive with the rest of the shorts." I definitely think this film could have used more pieces that played outside of the box like it sounds ScarJo's did. Ah well. C-