Best Movie Posters
by Jackrabbit Slim
By way of Jeff Wells, here's the link to Premiere's 25 greatest movie posters of all time:
Premiere's 25 greatest movie posters of all time
Some good choices there, but I would add a few:
Premiere's 25 greatest movie posters of all time
Some good choices there, but I would add a few:
|Link|2:43 PM
20 Comments:
My personal fave is the US poster for The Insider, which as you can see from the link is being sold by MovieGoods for $200. Good thing I got one when I had the chance...
Also, Fargo was pretty solid.
I know it's extremely tainted now, but viewed in 1998 this poster portents an amazing plot that could have been the greatest origin story of a generation:
Ep 1
Count, I was just thinking of the same one. I'll choose something else.
It's too bad that there are some good posters that aren't because, even though they're good, and they're classic, everyone and their brother has had them up on the bedroom wall as teenager/college student/geek, or know someone who does. So excellent posters like this, this and this one aren't up for election, because they're so commonplace they've become comical.
I generally tend to prefer posters that give hints of the larger story or theme of the film, without barraging you over the head with it. Chinatown's or Lawrence of Arabia, or this one of the (otherwise boring) Scandal (bad picture of it, to boot), come to mind. The Alien poster is also one. Even if I dig some that are just plain awesome in their spectacle.
Some people have talked about the poster for Lord of War, but tend to forget that The Truman Show did it before and better.
Two recent very good one were this one, and this one.
My absolute favorite (except for perhaps the one from Lawrence of Arabia) has to be the one of Thief of Bagdad.
+ "some posters that aren't eligible because"
Hmmm, scratch 'eligible', take 'tainted' instead.
I miss the edit button.
What, no Robert Peak? At least they got three Saul Bass posters, though I might have picked another one, like The Shining (wow, damn hard to find an isolated scan of that one), over The Man With the Golden Arm. And I was never that partial to that particular 2001 poster, as much as I love the film. I love all that Robert McCall pre-production artwork, and I think the one that greeted me at a theater the first time I saw it was the "eye" one.
I don't think I'd ever seen that Rosemary's Baby one. Or the Downhill Racer. (I've seen other posters for both those films before.) And they seem to favor the pulpy posters.
And, Brian, I only remember the "B" version of The Insider. Nor do I recall the, uh, cross-stitch version of Fargo. Huh.
And call me weird, but I've somehow always been partial to this one.
Meanwhile, while I'm composing this, about four other comments have been made....
The Star Wars series did have a lot of great posters, even the '97 re-releases. Nick--that Matrix poster is another one I don't recall. I just remember the "grid" one. Love that Chinatown one, too, but not so much the Lawrence of Arabia one.
I think the Fargo and Insider posters were the only actual theatrical posters for those films, at least domestically.
Could be wrong, though, as that Matrix psoter Nick pointed out is clearly a US theatrical release poster. I never saw that one, even though I was working at a theater at the time.
I like the Ep. 1 poster, too, but every time I see it now I think not about how crappy the movie was, but about the Simpsons spoof of it, which I can't find online right now.
Another recent one I really liked - Out of Sight.
I think I'm pretty sure I saw that Insider "B" poster (and at first I didn't realize there was more than one "B") at a theater, after it got awards nominations etc., though it may just be that the video one stuck with me.
Now that I look at the Fargo posters, I'm thinking that I probably did see that cross-stitch one, but it just didn't stick with me. My memory is of the same poster, but not cross-stitch, with lots of white. And the font from the UK poster and video version seems to have stuck with me.
When Count Olaf was confessing earlier how he liked Return of the Jedi so much, I threw in that I preferred Star Wars over The Empire Strikes Back, and his rejoinder was that I don't take as much flak for that as he does, well--my confession is that The Phantom Menace is my third-favorite of the entire series. My only problem with it was the actor playing the kid. I even liked Jar-Jar Binks! But I never liked that teaser poster very much....
The 'Attack of the 50 foot woman' poster deserves special mention as it was remade as a TV movie in the 1990s. It's probably the only ever case of a poster leading to a remake.
That 'Downhill Skier' one I hadn't seen before and its a beauty.
I'm sorry if I'm being in some way sour here, but isn't the Downhill Skier poster awfully derivative of the Rosemary's Baby from the year before? Still looks good, but I don't know about original.
And, I can't believe I forgot, the greatest movie posters of all time were made by the Polish. All those posters Premiere listed are American. Prompted me to write my first email to Wells in over two years.
And, rhetorical question perhaps, does this count as grindhouse?
Sorry, you have to remove everything after .jpg on the grindhouse link to see it properly.
Or just click this link
http://www.ukquad.com/annie%20hall%20manhattan%20uk%20quad.jpg
Speaking of Grindhouse, I love the poster and trailer for the film(s). I will be in Las Vegas its opening weekend, and that seems an appropriate place to see it. I am so looking forward to it that I'm sure I'll be let down (I've never been much of a Rodriguez fan, to start with).
The Pulp Fiction poster is classic, as is the Fargo poster. It would seem that Veronica Lake increases your odds of appearing on the list, and rightly so.
I will be waiting an extra week for Grindhouse. I promised a friend that I'd go with him, and he's not free that weekend. It's going to be quite vexing, because the coworker who occupies the desk next to mine will be seeing it opening night. I don't know if I can be hardcore and make him refrain from talking about it for a week.
Just a minor gripe: that long URL link in the post is clobbering the sidebar in Firefox, and now it's gotten down into the comments, argh. Meanwhile in IE, that link wraps nicely so it doesn't clobber the sidebar, but I notice that IE lets the Blogger topbar clobber the top of the frame around the "Gone Elsewhere" title....
I'll delete the link. For some reason, I can't put in hyperlinks. I click on the link button but it doesn't give me the coding.
From ew.com, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have picked their favorites.
Those are some really cool choices, though. The Eagle's Nest post is a very cool poster. I remember walking past it as a kid in the videostore and just dreaming away. Mom never let us rent it. Course the film couldn't compare once I actually saw it, several years later. Grown way too epic in my mind.
Nick, do you know much about Thriller: They Call Her One-Eye, which is described as a "Swedish revenge" flick? It's available on Netflix, so I've added it to my queue.
It's an exploitation film, pure and simple. Only the exploitation here is done by and to Swedes. Or, more specifically, by men towards women, one woman in particular.
The director, whose last film hadn't made enough money, went out with the explicit purpose of making the most outrageous exploitation-action-porno he could, in order to make as much money as possible.
I mean, if you're expecting a very good film, don't. But it's actually got some stuff going for it. It is exploitation, but it is of the highest order, going really balls out, but with a sense of what it's doing and what it's about, and some things are well done (some are really silly and awkward, though), even artful. There's this scene in the beginning that still makes my stomach cringe when I think about it. Kind of dig the ending, too.
And if you're hoping for good porn, helloooo seventies. Chunky bellies and hair everywhere. Plus those scenes are pretty disturbing to sit through.
If I were you I'd go in expecting a B-movie from the seventies with some odd, but somewhat good and even original, things.
I can understand why Tarantino likes it, though. For a connoisseur of exploitation and B-movies this must be like the holy grail.
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