Author: Ga2so

  • Streaming Slightly Older Movie Adventures: MacGruber (2010)

    Stylized image of MacGruber on a colorful fake LEGO background for some reason.
    MacGruber & Vicki in MacGruber

    Would Ethan Hunt ever put celery in his butt as a distraction? I think not!

    Today’s source poster is about as unrelated to this movie as it could be.

    A poster for MacGruber mimicking the poster for High Fidelity.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie (no) Pass Adventures: Caught by the Tides

    Tao Zhao smiling in Caught by the Tides. She is rendered in simplified shapes of orange, red, green, and black.
    Tao Zhao, arms above head, wearing sunglasses, looking to the right. Part of her face and arms are visible.

    I imagine Jia Zhangke in 2014 watching Boyhood and thinking “I like the idea of a movie shot over decades with the same actors. I’d like to do it with my favorite actress (who is also my wife), but I want to start with her twenty years ago. Maybe I’ll recycle old footage of her I shot for other movies. And I’ll throw in some random experimental videos I shot along the way.” No one should be able to make that work, but Jia somehow pulls it off.

    Today’s poster is about getting caught. I didn’t have the right pictures of the cast to make it work, but I decided they were blurry enough to fake with substitutes. Please pretend they look vaguely like the real characters.

    A poster for Caught by the Tides mimicking the poster for Catch Me If You Can.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Streaming Movie Adventures: Mission Impossible: Fallout

    An impressionistic rendering of Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt hanging onto the side of a cliff.
    The top half of an image of Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle toward the camera.

    I’m not sure why the Mission: Impossible movies don’t do much for me. Yeah, they’re preposterous and predictable, but so is pretty much every superhero movie and I generally like those. I don’t know if it’s the direction or the stars, but they just feel soulless.

    For today’s fake poster I went with the opposite of Impossible: Easy.

    A poster for Mission impossible: Fallout mimicking the poster for Easy Rider
    …or is the opposite of impossible “unavoidable?” Whatever… close enough.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Sister Midnight

    Uma (Radhike Apte) looking into the camera while holding her hair up with her right hand. She is rendered in shades of blue. The background is shades of deep orange and red.
    The faces of two people (Radhika Apte and Subhash Chandra) in an elevator in Sister Midnight.

    I went into this movie knowing almost nothing about it, and I’m glad I did. Afterward I remembered seeing a promotional picture and thinking it wasn’t for me, and I’m glad I forgot about that as well. It had a lot of clever and unexpected turns. Plus, I learned you can make food that pleases men by cutting it into big dumb chunks!

    Rejected ideas for today’s poster included Sister Act, Midnight Run and Midnight Express. I ended up going with an antonym. If someone was paying me to make these I would have spent more time getting the colors right, but at least I matched the fonts!

    A poster for Sister Midnight mimicking the poster for O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    Fediverse reactions

  • Retro Movie Adventures: Hellzapoppin (1941)

    Chic Johnson and Ole Olsen mugging in a scene from Hellzapoppin. They are rendered in shades of red, orange and yellow. The background is unidentifiable blue and purple shapes.
    Martha Raye standing in front of a target, mouth wide open, surrounded by arrows.

    Great- now I’ve got a crush on 1941 Martha Raye. Thanks, Hellzapoppin.

    I love that they realized the stage show of Hellzapoppin would never work as a movie, so they didn’t even bother to try and make a direct translation of the show. It’s 84 minutes packed with topical (at the time) jokes, music, and special effects strung together by a plot that Olsen & Johnson are actively mocking.

    Hellzapoppin isn’t streaming anywhere, but there’s a really good restoration on YouTube.

    Today’s fake poster was inspired by the “poppin” part of “Hellzapoppin,” and features a secret link to They Might Be Giants.

    A poster for Hellzapoppin mimicking the poster for Mary Poppins.

  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Jaws (1975)

    Roy Scheider tosses his chum at a shark.
    Roy Scheider hangs onto the mast of a sinking boat and fights a shark.

    I think this Spielberg guy is a pretty good director.

    Today’s fake poster is based on Spielberg’s second-greatest film.

    A poster for Jaws mimicking the poster for Hook.
    Of course, the greatest is 1941.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Double Feature Streaming & Movie Pass Adventures: The Lego Movie (2014) and Final Destination Bloodlines

    A cropped version of the skull from the poster for Final Destination Bloodlines altered to look like Lego pieces.

    The Lego Movie

    part of the face of Vitruvius from The Lego Movie, eyes glowing, with other Lego figures partially visible behind him.

    I had never watched this, even though I’d heard tons of great reviews for it. But this was the last week of school and I needed something to entertain my students while I cleaned and finished grading, so I put this on. Even with sort-of knowing most of the story, it’s still pretty great.

    This fake poster is based on the real poster for the other movie I watched today.

    A poster for The Lego Movie mimicking the poster for Final Destination Bloodlines

    Final Destination Bloodlines

    Two women screaming in Final Destination Bloodlines.

    After work I had a little time to kill (ha!) before going to a retirement party, and Final Destination Bloodlines fit the extra time nicely. I’ve never watched any of this series, but I knew the basic concept. Does this movie make any sense? No. Did I laugh a lot? Oh, yeah. It does the same “violence so extreme and silly that it becomes a live action cartoon” thing as The Monkey.

    My first plan was to copy The Lego Movie’s poster for this movie’s fake poster, but that thing is really complex, so I did a quick Lego effect on the featured image instead. You probably won’t have any trouble figuring out the actual source poster.

    A poster for Final Destination Bloodlines mimicking the poster for Barbie.
    Fediverse reactions

  • Retro Movie Adventures: Cooley High (1975)

    Sherman Smith, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, and Glynn Turman freaking out while riding in a car in Cooley High.
    Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and Glynn Turman as Cochise and Preach in Cooley High.

    Why wasn’t Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs ten times as active as an actor? I wouldn’t have minded if we got less Boom Boom Washington if it meant more big movie roles.

    It was good to see a pre-SNL Garrett Morris in a more serious role. Another guy who should have had a much larger career.

    Oh, and Robert Townsend is in this (uncredited) for about ten seconds!

    My first thought for today’s fake poster was a riff on Vanilla Ice’s “Cool As Ice,” but copying the title design would have meant writing it like this:

    COOL
    EY
    HIGH

    and that looked dumb. Then I thought about using a different high school movie like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but that seemed too similar. So I went with a movie that takes place in the same city, but in a different decade.

    A poster for Cooley High mimicking the poster for Chicago.
    Posters that use the “the name on the left is lower than the name on the right so everybody can claim they got top billing” thing crack me up.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Friendship

    The chests of Tim Robinson (wearing a puffy brown jacket and holding up awhite styrofoam cup with a red straw) and Paul Rudd ( wearing a blue and red jacket and holding up a large mushroom) in the movie Friendship.
    A large, charmingly smiling, blue-hued face of Paul Rudd looms behind a small, awkwardly smiling, red and yellow hued Tim Robinson (who is sitting, leaning forward, with his hands in his lap).

    If you’re looking for a movie where your date curls up against you to try and hide from the film, skip horror movies and see this! Then enjoy 100 minutes of cringing.

    Holy cow, this was painful to watch but irresistible- and much better than the last Paul Rudd A24 movie I saw.

    Today’s poster was easy to the point of plagiarism (“let’s copy the look of one poster with images from the real one”) but too perfect to deny.

    A poster for Friendship mimicking the poster for I Love You, Man.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: The Accountant 2

    Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2
    Altered image of Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2. A profile picture, high contrast, in four colors (red, blue, green, and yellow). The background is dark purple screenprint-style dots on a lighter purple field.

    When I watched the original Accountant movie earlier this week I wasn’t surprised that Affleck’s character has Hollywood Magic Autism that makes him a super genius who sometimes does unexpected things. The sequel beats that by giving him a squad of kids who also have super-autism that they can use to control any device connected to the internet to help Affleck’s character solve a mystery- or murder people, if that’s the job.

    It’s not very good.

    Today’s poster would work better if I had better Ralph Steadman-style custom Photoshop brushes.

    A poster for The Accountant 2 mimicking the poster for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
    Fediverse reactions
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