Deleted Scenes 12.11.08: A Few of My Favorite Things - The Posters (Part Two)
Posted by Robert Sullivan on 12.11.2008
A feature so nice, I brought it back twi...well, this would be the first time. Come on in.
Hey, everybody. I'm Rob, this is Deleted Scenes, and I thank you for your continuing patronage. The party just isn't as much fun without you people. Due to the positive E-Mails and requests, and even a positive comment left on the bottom of the last edition of this, I decided to bring back my own personal look through my favorite choice movie posters over the years. And away we go...
In 20 years, women are infertile. No children. No future. No hope. But all that can change in a heartbeat.
As you might be able to tell from my past selections, I'm a big fan of black. Especially when sharply contrasted, which this poster does to brilliant effect. I'm also a huge sucker for a great tagline, and yes, this one's got a good one as well. And speaking of continuing features, if I do another writeup of Slow Starters, Children of Men would definitely be on there. Viewing it for the first time during its Oscar qualifying run up in Boston, I was thrown a bit cold by it. The ending, in particular, struck me as jarring and wrong. This was before repeated viewings brought home to me just who in the story was really important. Might've seemed obvious to others, but alas, I'm slow and such.
good times never seemed so good
Although the evil Nation of Red Soxia has hijacked the song, I still very much like that tagline. The cast shot immediately tells you what kind of film Beautiful Girls is going to be, and it's a film I find I can view repeatedly. Whereas Children of Men is a Slow Starter, Beautiful Girls is one of those movies that just feels like home when you're feeling like garbage on a rainy day. Plus Timothy Hutton's hair is really boss in it, that always helps. Add in Natalie Portman as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who actually makes the whole "dude, she's 13" thing seem not so bad, and you've got a movie that really should've been a bigger success when it was released. Portman would've gotten an Oscar nomination if Beautiful Girls had been released in the days of Miramax as Oscar behemoth, but alas, that started one year later.
For the victims, there's no such thing as salvation.
A brilliant documentary that got massively dicked over for the Academy Award its year of release, Deliver Us from Evil concerns a charming pedophile priest with a warm Irish brogue that will eventually chill your soul. This poster isn't exactly one I'd hang up in your apartment next to the one-sheet for The Shawshank Redemption, but it does a great job at using sparse imagery to immediately communicate the subject matter of its product.
You can erase someone from your mind. Getting them out of your heart is another story.
Beyond the story reasons, issues of casting, and general unbelievability that I've listed repeatedly as reasons why I don't dig on Knocked Up, a minor issue is Seth Rogen putting the one-sheet for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into his baby's bedroom. That's fucking genius. Genius, and touching, and totally sweet...and incredibly frustrating that it was used in such an aggravating film. Hey, though, let's not proceed down that alley once more.
Identity is a secret. Identity is a mystery. Identity is a killer.
Striking and resolute, this was a case of a poster setting the bar too high for some people's liking. A movie that split the audience, Identity was one I personally enjoyed very much. Yes, there's the Cusack factor, but I genuinely did appreciate the rampant mindfuckery going on in the picture. Looking back, the poster provides a big, big...and some would say much too big...hint as to what's going on in the film, but I found it to be okay. After all, it wasn't too stunning a twist anyway.
A far too little seen film that should've earned character actor Raymond J. Barry an Oscar nomination, Interview with the Assassin is a film that knocks you off your bearings and keeps you there. How apt, then, that the marketing geniuses come up with this little beauty - an instant classic for its massive "What the fuck is this?" factor. If only they went all the way with it and decided to go totally Blair Witch in promoting the film. True, eventually someone would figure out that Barry's been in 850 films, but it would've been amusing when it lasted. Would've kept the film in theaters longer as well.
