Basel Adra records his life protesting as the Israeli army slowly but intently – even gleefully – destroys his village in Palestine. The soldiers destroy schools and homes, drive people to live in caves, and murder and cripple the people of his village, all without any sign of care or remorse. A stunning document of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on each other.
See it if you can – it’s struggling to find distribution, despite near-universal praise.
I made a (slightly) alternate version of the poster, but this is not a movie that should be parodied.
I’m sure every scene in this played out as Hitchcock intended when it was released in 1958, but every time I’ve watched it the audience howls at the some of the nutty things Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson says and does, including trying to solve every problem with brandy and forcing the woman he loves (after dating her for a few days) to completely change her appearance to look like the dead woman he loved before her. It’s a bonkers film, but it’s very watchable.
Also: I’m much more familiar with San Francisco now, so it was fun to be able to recognize locations.
Really dumb fake poster for this one (unlike my previous 100% brilliant creations). Whatever. I was never going to top the original Saul Bass poster.
Now I’m off to rub olive oil on my rubber plant leaves.
I saw three movies in the last four days. The first had a budget of $200. The second cost $100,000. This one has a reported budget of $180 million (but with all the reshoots it’s probably higher). This is proof that there is no correlation between movie cost and movie quality. Is this movie better than Who Killed Captain Alex? From a purely technical standpoint, sure. Is it nine hundred thousand times better? No. And it’s nowhere near as good as Tangerine, let alone being 1800 times better.
This movie seems to exist to tie up dangling threads that most viewers will either have forgotten or never seen. Do you remember the Celestial Island created when the Eternals stopped a cosmic egg at the center of the Earth from fully developing? Or when Hulk blood dripped into a guy’s head? Or even when the Falcon became Captain America after having an adventure with Bucky? I man, I do, but I’m enough of a nerd to have read the original comics. (Side question for nerds: Why do they call it Celestial Island? Did someone tell them that the big creature was called a Celestial?)
Also fun: the movie is built like a mystery, but what should have been a big reveal at the end of the film is spoiled by every single piece of advertising. Good job, marketing team! Harrison Ford applauds your out of the box thinking.
Poster Time!
My original plan was to make this into a romance like The Notebook, but then the original of this popped up and it was too simple to resist.
This movie had a budget 500 times the size of the last one I saw: A hundred grand! A fortune!
Sean Baker sure is good at making movies that jump into conflicting emotions without losing track of the story.
I live less than ten miles from where this was shot. I’ve walked those exact blocks many times. I can’t tell you how many times I drove past the doughnut shop at the center of this movie and made a joke about it being Donut Time.
Side note: RIP Donut Time. I believe I might have actually been inside once. I hope your current life as Danny Trejo’s doughnut shop is going well.
Today’s poster parody felt like the obvious choice.
On the one hand, this movie is terrible. On the other, it’s also excellent.
Shot for about 200 bucks by a bunch of people in a village in Uganda, it’s a faithful adaptation of a big budget action blockbuster that also gleefully mocks everything about the genre, including itself. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie that came preloaded with its own heckler audio track. My favorite bit of low budget ingenuity/ glorious nonsense is the bad guy with the giant tommy-gun that’s made out of a chunk of wood with a pan attached to the bottom who has a bandolier of bullets made from sharpened twigs.
I don’t know that I need to see it again, but I’m glad I saw it once. If you watch it, heed the words of the narrator: expect the unexpectable!
The fake poster was a bit of a challenge since there is not one single decent quality frame in the film, but I embraced the spirit of the film and made do with what was available. The reference poster is for a fairly recent film that had a famous director and won some big awards, but the poster wasn’t a standout. Reference movie title in the alt text.
It’s hard to talk about this movie without giving away the different take it has on how to capture a ghost story, so I’m not going to try. Spoilers for that below. I won’t spoil any of the actual story, but if you want to be surprised by Soderbergh’s latest way of Soderberghing, now is the time to look away.
All good? Cool.
Soderbergh’s approach is to tell a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost. Every scene is a single shot from the ghost’s perspective. For the most part it works. The movie really only breaks when things happen that are beyond things that would happen in the real world; shaking tables are a lot more believable than floating objects.
As for the actual story: It’s pretty predictable- especially since there are a couple of important plot points that were extremely telegraphed- but the cast is watchable enough to let that slide.
Today’s fake poster is only the slightest of genre shifts. I could easily see a similar poster being actually used. This version, however, wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance.
Not every movie has to be The Brutalist. Sometimes the right movie is a low stakes comedy where crazy situations happen but you’re not worried because you know it’s going to work out for the right people; a movie where people repeatedly get into bad situations, and when they try to get out of them they fall into something worse until everything falls apart- which somehow is exactly what needs to happen to fix everything.
Does this movie really make sense? No. Is it lighthearted fun with charming leads? Absolutely.
And is it bad that it’s only February and I’m stretching to find reasonable posters to parody? Maybe.
When the trailers for this first started showing up I said “I would have to hear a LOT of good reviews before I’d see that.” Then I heard a lot of movie folks say they like it, and that there was at least one scene- the “Rock DJ” number- that needs to be seen in a real theater to be appreciated. So I went.
It’s not very good.
Vera Drew’s Letterboxd review explains perfectly why they went with a CGI chimp instead of a person: “How else are they going make the most unlikeable character in bio pic history someone you wanna watch for two hours?” He’s a jerk through 99 percent of the film, and his big transition to slightly less of a jerk starts with him blaming his problems on getting fame as a teenager. It’s also pretty funny that he spends most of the movie wanting to make his own music, but the big standout song is from a band he seems to hate, and the redemption song at the end of the movie is a version of “My Way.”
Lazy joke poster below.
I went through the trouble of finding the Planet of the Apes font, but wasn’t even enthused enough to add the credit block from the original poster.
I should have watched this in a theater, and I should have done it decades ago. There was no way it could have lived up to what I’d heard about it while I was watching it at home with headphones on and distractions everywhere. Even so, it was inspiring and heartbreaking to watch.
No one is going to get the reference for this poster. I’ll save everyone some grief and put it in the alt tags.
Silents Synced takes silent films and pairs them with more current music. It’s not a new idea: Giorgio Moroder did it 40 years ago with Metropolis. The main difference is that Moroder made new songs just for the movie. These use existing songs that have little or nothing to do with the films. They also include special effects that draw attention toward themselves and away from the movies. The audience applauded at the end, so I guess this works for people, but I’d rather watch a clean print with music created to enhance the story instead of just playing in the background. A modern score created and performed specifically for the film by a group like R.E.M. sounds pretty darn cool. Until that happens, I’d say watch the originals. You can find them for free all over the place.
Since the movie is about a guy who wants to be a detective, I used the poster for a movie about a different detective as inspiration for this poster. I barely had to change the story description.
