Like a glove

Alternative poster design for the movie Gravity by helloMuller, commissioned by ShortList Magazine. Best of the bunch, in my opinion.

Dead and Buried and printed

I like this print a lot. It's inspired by Dead and Buried, which is a pretty fun '80s horror movie, so check that out too.

The print was designed by Jay Shaw for his "Don't Go Out Tonight" show (I guess, I mean I just randomly came across it on the Mondo site). He has a lot of other nice designs on his site, as well. Go view.

Looks Refn good

Drive has some things going for it that will require a viewing.

1) The film is about a criminal underworld driver which, as we all know, is the best job in the criminal underworld. Or at least the most entertaining. I guess "boss" would be better.

2) It's directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who's done some good stuff, including Bronson and the awesome Pusher trilogy. He's not averse to getting weird, as well, which might account for this visual.

3) Hooded-out Hendricks.

4) A synth/80s-style soundtrack in the mode of Michael Mann and Tangerine Dream.

5) Albert Brooks in Scorpio mode.

Peep the trailer.

Orange On the Aisle: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Perhaps the presence of the word "sleeps" in the title should have been a danger flashing sign.

Then again, as a mega-fan of the Oliver Stone's original Wall Street, no danger flashing signs — even those as strong as the overwhelmingly negative reviews and presence of Shia LeBeouf — were likely to keep me from checking out the return of Gekko.

The problem, or one of many, was the return of Gekko that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was supposed to be didn't have much Gekko in it.

Maybe Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox got more screen time in Wall Street than Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko did, but there certainly was a lot more Gekko in the original than in the sequel. And when there was, he wasn't reconnecting with a daughter who blamed him for not being there (because he was in prison, the selfish bastard), which somehow contributed to her brother/his son committing suicide.

Oh yeah, sorry. If you were hoping for the return of the fruit-tossing brat Rudy from the original, no dice. Guess those French lessons didn't pan out.

Douglas was good returning to Gekko, his most iconic film role, but the material he got to work with just didn't come close to matching up. He was barely in this movie though, so it didn't much matter.

The stuff we did get was mostly pretty lame. Josh Brolin is solid as the fill-in Gekko character Bretton James, and when the movie focuses on the back-room financial warring and deal-making, it's entertaining enough at times. But there's just way too little of that and way too much crybaby relationship stuff with LeBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon and even Douglas a bit.

And, much like a corrupt CEO's million-dollar bonus (or golden parachute), none of the emotional conflict feels earned in this movie. Most of Money Never Sleeps is just boring as hell.

Stone wants to warn us about an impending economic apocalypse should the cycle of Wall Street chicanery, no federal oversight and huge bailouts continue. And a movie more focused on that might have been better, but this isn't that movie. Sleep on it.

— 1.5 out of 5 giant '80s mobile phones

NOTES:
* Charlie "cocaine suitcase" Sheen makes a cameo as original Wall Street hero Bud Fox, and it is pathetically lame. I, for one, will choose to believe it never happened. Bud Fox deserves better.

* The writer of this post on the trailer was severely bummed after finally seeing the movie. The only good news is I think I have a leftover free OnDemand movie coupon to use, so this one will be on Comcast.

Watch and wait

Even if this Blade Runner replicant continues to freak me out, I dig the If we don't, remember me tumblr blog, which posts cinemagraphs of little moments in films.

Some of the animations are pretty subtle, and some take a few seconds, so keep watching. And yes, some are a little freaky.

IWDRM has a Twitter page too.

Fakin' the Criterion funk

Fake Criterions — fairly self-explanatory.

Most of these are really good, and I'm wondering if some were inspired by artwork on existing Criterions or not as some feel familiar. So, I guess some explanation would be helpful.

So as to avoid confusion, this one's not a fake.


UPDATE: More fake Criterion case art can be found as part of the Dec. 10 "Photoshop Phriday" at Something Awful, including the outstanding example below by HMC.

Better off bad

I'm fairly certain Tron: Legacy is going to be pretty cool anyway, but I wish the sequel would have Jeff Bridges' Flynn be a bad guy as implied in the original Comic-Con teaser posted above.

That's the implication I took from it, anyway. Having seen the subsequent trailers and TV spots that lay out more of the overall story, the teaser views as simply ambiguous. I had taken it as implying the bearded Flynn was now some corrupted/master controller who had his avatar riding around killing trouble makers.

Seems more interesting than the straight forward story it looks like we're going to get. Maybe my idea will be similar to the background on how we end up at the start of Legacy. We'll see.

I guess Bridges does end up playing a baddie though, even if it's a CGI'd version of his younger face (at least, that's what I think they did).

I no ah've seen et before

I was reading this article and someone in the comments pointed out this teaser for Trainspotting. Hadn't seen it previously, but I like it.

I can feeeel it

That new cop show Detroit 1-8-7 premiered last night. I have no interest in watching it, but it does provide a good excuse to hearken back to the golden age of West Coast gangsta rap, and another more significant premier. Dr. Dre introduces Snoop Dogg to the world on "Deep Cover," off the soundtrack to the Laurence Fishburne/Jeff Goldblum film.

I seem to recall the edited/MTV version of this song had Snoop saying "nickel-plated .22," which I actually prefer to the four-syllable phrase we get in the original version here. Seems like "nickel-plated" would be the more clever phrase to come up with. But who am I to deny Snoop his cuss words? Few have used them better.

Friggin' birds

Graphic artist Laz Marquez did some nice redesigned Hitchcock movie posters, with this one for The Birds being the standout for me. [via BuzzFeed]

Put that cookie down ... NOW

Sit back and enjoy the brilliance.

The sequel has become reality

While "Return of the Bud Fox" in the title might have psyched me up a bit more, psyched levels are high for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. If you know how many times I've watched Wall Street than this makes sense to you.

NOTE 1: Videogum takes issue with the "greed is good" mention in the trailer. But, this being a Hollywood sequel, it was inevitable, no? What they should have mentioned was the awesome mobile phone sight gag. That killed and you know it.

NOTE 2: Eli Wallach is in the movie. Hell yeah.

NOTE 3: The short-haired actress is Carey Mulligan of An Education fame. I just watched her in an excellent, spooky ass episode of the current Doctor Who series from Season 3 titled "Blink." Even if you're not into Doctor Who, this is a damn good hour of TV.

NOTE 4: Bud Fox, aka Charlie Sheen, is in the movie according to IMDB. It may well be a cameo, but even so, that gets a double hell yeah.

Now why don't YOU get the hell out of MY office!

Orange On the Aisle: 1941

Sometimes you read an article or an online discussion that makes mention of a movie, and it sparks a curiosity to check it out. Sometimes, it's best to ignore that curiosity.

Steven Spielberg's 1941 was such a movie for me. It came up in some random AV Club conversation (I think) and, as 1941 infrequently airs on cable, I wanted to watch it for the first time in probably 20 years to see how it held up, and if it deserved all the derision it receives.

In short — yes, 1941 deserves the derision. And then some.

My vague recollections of the movie were even vaguer than I realized, as John Belushi running around being John Belushi was really the only bit I accurately remembered. My impression of the film from back in the day was that it wasn't good, but not as horrible as most said. Rather, I remembered it as a giant mess.

Well, it's a giant mess, yes, and a pretty horrible movie too. Even worse, at about 2 hours and 20 minutes long, it's grating and often boring as Spielberg spends an inordinate amount of time on really lame subplots.

Supposedly, Spielberg admitted to not really knowing what to do with the movie, and so threw as much as he could think of at the wall. The resultant product seems to bear that out. It's like five bad movies formed up like one idiotic Voltron — if Voltron was designed by a team of geriatrics, 9-year-old kids and horny high schoolers who each stuck their favorite stuff into the movie.

I should note here that the movie watching experience was in no way enhanced by the quality of the movie offered on the "Collector's Edition" DVD — a quality best described as shit (technical term). The picture quality was so bad that I had to pause the movie a half hour in to research what the deal was. The thinking is that this was a copy from the laser disc version of the movie, and a bad one at that. It's presented in a non-anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen, but it shows up small on your screen for some reason. Blowing it up might not help anything though, as the film looks really bad at times — sometimes grainy, sometimes overexposed. If you burned a DVD from an old VHS copy of a movie, I imagine it would look something like this. This review takes the DVD to task pretty well.

Anyway, there actually was some good to be had in 1941:
— Spielberg's direction was pretty fun (when he wasn't relying on some obvious airplane model shots) and even reminded me of the Cohen brothers in terms of camera movement. And there were a few stunts that actually looked pretty scary for the stunt men, who took some real slams for bits that took up 3 seconds of screen time.
— Slim Pickens is never not awesome.
—No one gets good writing here, but Treat Williams at least gives it a game effort early on ... before his character basically spends the last two-thirds of the movie trying to rape the ostensible female lead. Hilarious!
— Dan Aykroyd, after his character gets bonked on the head, proceeds to look absolutely insane and act like he's on drugs (and in 1979, he may have been).
— A ventriloquist's dummy appears without warning at one point and remains without any explanation. When it talks it looks funny. I'm serious.
— The main players are listed in the end credits along with a clip from the movie, and almost all of them feature the actor screaming. This amused me for some reason.

And that's about it. There are a ton of great actors and performers in this — John Candy, Warren Oates, Toshiro Mifune, Ned Beatty, Nancy Allen, Tim Matheson, Joe Flaherty had a line that made me laugh — and so there are some funny moments (although Candy, Mifune and several others are either completely wasted or given terrible material). It's just that no one involved and none of the funny moments in any way justify sitting through 2 hours-plus of this movie.

Not even Belushi, who early on in 1941 appears to modern eyes to be doing a John Belushi parody, only this movie came out in 1979, so that's not possible. That said, by the time he reappears near the end of the movie he's actually a breath of fresh air, as the preceding hour-plus has been so exhaustively bad.

— 1.5 out of 5 Wendie Jo Sperbers

NOTE: If for some reason you want to watch this mess, the version at Crackle.com looks much better than this cruddy DVD's transfer.

F'n A

Trailer for The A-Team movie. Two words: hell yes.

More words: Faceman shooting a plane from atop a parachuting tank.

Stay frosty

Shoveling isn't the only thing to fear with a snowstorm this close to Christmas. Jack Frost watches, believing his wandering spirit can once again take on corporeal form should the right human host be found. But there is no salvation of the flesh — there's only the snow, now occupied by the spirit of his latest victim.

Gaze not into his dead eyes, or else share his hopeless fate.

Having unknowingly released Jack Frost into our world, Michael Keaton may be the only one able to vanquish him — Ash style. But I haven't seen Keaton since Out of Sight, so ... stay frosty.

(Pic via fellow NTF poster Legendary Classic.)

Adios amigo

Patrick Swayze, R.I.P.

Wolverines!

John Hughes, R.I.P.

It's being reported that wirter/director John Hughes died yesterday of a heart attack. Weird, since I was talking to someone tonight who just took an overnight job at Target. She hadn't seen Career Opportunities, and so didn't get my Jennifer Connelly in a white tank top reference.

Hughes probably did better movies — Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off come to mind — but I always liked Career Opportunities, which he wrote, for its weirdness and desperation. And, uh, Jennifer Connelly.

Hughes, RIP. Connelly, FTW.

Make it work people

BIll Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam.

Wild in the streets

Girl Skateboards has released a skateboard series featuring characters from company co-founder Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Pretty cool.

Ashro Boy

How rad is this Ashley Wood variant cover to the first (?) issue of IDW's Astro Boy Movie Prequel miniseries?

I guess I saw the old-school Astro Boy cartoon a couple times, but I don't really care about the upcoming Astro Boy movie. This painted piece, however, would make a great litho. I like it with the dead space at the top, too.