Well Played Poster: 13 Assassins,

This is a good movie poster. Take a look.


I sometimes feel I'm too harsh on drawn movie posters since everybody else seems to fall over themselves to hail them the greatest thing of all time (case in point: The Savages), but when so many of them are just copying the work of Drew Struzan or Saul Bass and expecting me to fawn, I've decided to just admit I'm not that keen on them and carry on having people think I'm mad.

And then something like this poster for Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins (十三人の刺客) comes along and I fall in love with it. I'm sure it's ripped off from something - aren't they all - but at least it doesn't feel tired and done to death.

Well Played, Poster: I Saw the Devil

Longtime readers of Stale Popcorn will know that there's nothing I like more than a good horror movie poster. I consider Halloween to be the best movie poster of all time (with Rosemary's Baby right behind it in the rankings), but I so frequently find they disappoint with uninspired imagery and a distinct lack of design/purpose/personality/etc. The recent onslaught of "grindhouse" inspired posters has been a momentary boon to horror designers, since the use of faded colours, scrappy edges, divisional fold marks and hand-drawn/artistic concepts have added life to a genre that was more or less reproducing the same idea over and over again.


It's nice then to spot a horror movie poster that has gone off on its own direction, away from the hip, very in grindhouse aesthetic as well as away from the traditional ho-hum designs. Such is the case with this poster for I Saw the Devil. It looks clean and polished, while also utilising the "empty space" look the way it should be done. There's something to be said for a poster that doesn't give everything away and that's exactly what this poster does, and does it in an organic way. Love the way the car headlights are used to illuminate just enough to get our tongues figuratively wagging. The blood in the snow, the mysterious shadowed man holding a hammer and the tagline that makes me wonder "Lives inside what? The man? The world? THE CAR? Oh gawd, does evil live inside the yellow van?!?"

Well Played, Poster: Love and Other Drugs

Romantic comedies these days tend to have very similar posters. It's generally either a full body shot of the two leads standing side by side looking pretty or it's some boring production still of the two leads looking lovey-dovey at each other as if to say "don't give us your money because this is how it ends." Now comes the poster for Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs, ostensibly a romantic comedy although it's aiming for a bit more high brow cred. The poster, however, is a rarity since it actually tries to sell the romance and the comedy. The last romcom to do that, as far as I can recall, was The Ugly Truth, which says a lot (because the movie was shit).


I like how I get a chuckle out of this poster as well as the feeling that, ya know, I actually want to see these two meet cute, fall in love, suffer adversity, pull through and live happily ever after. I can just tell these two actors have chemistry, they don't just look like they have been forced together by unimaginative casting agents and focus polling groups. And, ya know, SEX SELLS and when your movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway? Yeah, you might as well sell what you got.

I also appreciate that there's no stripes, empty white space, movie stills or bad Photoshop. Thank you. Now we wait for a) the film (which looks good) and b) the outtakes from this shoot (which, surely, look like sex).

Well Played, Poster: Let Me In

Many people expressed enthusiasm for the first Comic-Con poster for Matt Reeves' Let Me In - that'd be this one - but I felt it looked waaay too much like a book cover from The Twilight Saga. Do a Google Images search of "twilight saga book covers" and then look at the Let Me In poster and you will see what I mean. Red on black has obvious been done plenty of times before and long before The Twilight Saga, but I don't think it's a reach to guess that the makers of Let Me In were trying to play a little bit to the vampire fans that have made those books and films so successful.

The second Comic-Con poster, however, is one I can truly get behind. I am sure you have already seen it, but here at Stale Popcorn we don't throw pop culture away like so many places do. We like to savour and, occasionally, let things mull in the mind before typing our opinions out.


I think the only thing that could have improved this design is if the blood droplets were towards the top towards the neck of the snow angel, but who am I to throw suggestions like that out there? Otherwise, it's all very good. The use of ominous shadowing around the edges and the juxtaposition between the angelic image in the snow and the blood.

That title still sounds silly though.

Well Played, Poster: Carlos

Following Cédric Succivalli on Twitter pays dividends. Not only do you get up-to-date and breaking news on the Cannes Film Festival, but also links to things such as this poster for Olivier Assayas' Carlos from D*Hollywood.

Now, Carlos is actually a TV miniseries, but will be screening at Cannes in its entire 5.5hr version. I had no idea what Carlos was about - Assayas is a filmmaker that drifts in and out of my orbit, I imagine if more of his films were available on DVD then he might enter it permanently - but after looking at this poster I figured "something to do with terrorism." Turns out I was right. Good job, poster!

It's a corker, isn't it?


If you want to be cruel you could say it apes the poster for Terminator Salvation (although I'm sure that was ripping off something else that I can't recall), but I appreciate that a film such as Carlos can do it (and better).