What a pleasure to get all the way to the end of the year and find a favorite movie. Dark and hilarious, with creative choices I’ve never seen before but instantly understood.
I wrote roughly one billion words about the last movie I saw. Part of that is because bad movies are easier to write about, but it’s also because I don’t want to spoil this movie.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t make a silly fake poster based on a Charlton Heston zombie virus movie!
What if Marty Supreme was about a woman in the 1980s punk scene, and she had no apparent talent?
I used the poster for this movie for yesterday’s movie, so it seems fair to yesterday’s movie for today’s poster.
This is Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent movie, and it is weird and unintentionally hilarious. A student forms an underground atheist society at her school, which is apparently a crime.
When the student body president brings a mob to disrupt a society meeting, a girl is killed. Then they go to prison (well, prison-like reform school), where they find love and she finds religion.
The Godless Society has an excellent graphic department. Check this out:
One of the best things about watching this was Marie Prevost (6201 Hollywood Boulevard). I watched a different, terrible movie with her earlier in the year, and it was refreshing to see her in a role that justified her having a Walk of Fame star.
Lina Basquette (1529 Vine Street) is the Godless Girl, who was loosely based on a real person. Basquette had quite a life. She had been married to Sam Warner (co-founder of Warner Bros.), and the rest of the family was upset because the Warners were Jewish and Basquette was Roman Catholic. When Sam died, Lina was pressured by Harry Warner to give up custody of her daughter so the child would be raised Jewish. The custody battle effectively blacklisted Basquette for a time. In the late 1930s she was flown to Germany meet with a German film studio and several Nazis, including Hitler. She claimed she kicked Hitler in the crotch when he hit on her, and that Hitler didn’t stop pestering her until she told him her grandfather was Jewish.
And now, the fake poster. It’s hard to find fun movies with “God” or “Godless” in the title, so I went with “Girl.”
Don’t go in expecting The Seventh Seal and you’ll have a good time. But be warned: the second half gets darker and weirder than you might expect. That’s what happens when you’re dealing with a mostly true story.
I’ve never seen the source movie for today’s fake poster, but I’m planning to watch it right after I post this.
It’s kind of amazing to watch a movie and genuinely have no idea how it will end. This movie is nearly three hours long, and it felt like a tight 90 minute thriller. Bonus points t the people who made the trailer; it totally gets the feel of this film without spoiling it.
Also: this movie made me realize that I absolutely would fall for someone disguising themselves with a wig or a mustache.
There are surprisingly few decent resolution images available for this movie, so I picked a minimalist source poster and did some creative interpretation.
Challenges I had watching this movie:
1. The opening credits are shown over an egg getting fertilized, which is exactly what happens at the start of Look Who’s Talking.
2. The protagonist is named Marty Mauser, which made me think of a comic book detective named Mike Mauser.
3. Everyone in this movie is a jerk.
I liked the movie- a lot- but I don’t think I need to watch it again any time soon.
Oh, but I found a good poster to copy for this one!
Support your local librarians- they’re a good chance they’re being targeted for stopping censorship.
And while you’re at it, support independent movie theaters! I saw this at The New Parkway Theater in Oakland, and it’s a completely different experience than seeing a movie at home or in a big chain theater. Go!
It was hard to come up with a poster for this. Documentaries don’t have have the same structure as fiction films, so it’s hard to find a poster where the details line up. I ended up cheating a bit and using a teaser poster that doesn’t have any credits:
The end of my three part “Stuck in a Hotel in San Francisco” mini movie festival. I hadn’t watched this because I was afraid it would be a depressing retread of the first film, but it actually has new jokes. The band is older. They’re not partying, they’re just rehearsing and reconnecting. It’s not as laugh out loud funny as the first movie, but it’s warm and comfortable, which is probably the best kind of Rob Reiner film to watch right now.
Today’s poster is okay- a remake of a poster for a more famous sequel- but it’s personally significant: this is my 250th poster this year. If each poster took an hour (and many of them took more time than that) I’ve spent more than ten full days making these things!
I’ve seen Elf many times, but I’ve never seen it as a complete movie. The first time I watched it was at an early preview screening before most of the effects were completed, so I didn’t know about the animated characters until years later. I’ve watched chunks of it out of order. This time I watched half of it one day and half the next as part of my Stuck in my Hotel Room Movie Party.
Boy, Buddy is annoying. He’s loud, he has no self control, and he’s constantly destroying things. If I were James Caan I’d probably send him to the mail room, too.
Got a pretty good fake poster out of this one. I didn’t even realize the original poster used Christmas colors until I was laying out the text!
Has a hard time getting started, but it gets there.
Also: Jacobi Jupe deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
I almost didn’t do this fake poster because I didn’t want to recreate the title type. Then I learned it’s a barely altered font and decided to go for it. Then I realized halfway in that there’s a ton of custom shading and I ended up doing more work than I expected. But I think it’s funny, so it’s worth it.
