Someone's taken Negative Space 201! Over at the Italian Spirit blog My City Screams (via IMPA), they've posted 20 poster designs made by students of the European Institude of Design. With the exception of maybe this creepy, Escher-esque drawing, they're universally better than anything the studio came up with. It's just a shame this talent was wasted on something that, by early accounts, is not very good--but I'm also slightly glad because I'm bitter these college kids are clearly so much more creative than me. They're designing clever, inspired posters while I'm sitting here for half an hour trying to work in a "school spirit" pun. And I bet they go to better parties too.
"Guys, I've got this great idea for a poster. OK, so it's a poster, right? But also, it has all these other posters within that poster. Posters within a poster. The sheer audacity will shock everyone into seeing the movie. It's just so many posters, how could you not?"
It's true. Meta posters of the stars' faces are the new standard posters of the stars' faces.
Final Poster for 'The Spirit' [Cinematical]
No one seems too convinced by the last few trailers for The Spirit, so Lionsgate has pushed out one more quickie to remind everyone that the film comes out CHRISTMAS DAY. If your gifts aren't enough of a let down for the family, pack the kids in the Aerostar and take them to The Spirit, show them the true meaning of Christmas (disappointment). I particularly like the rockin' version of "Carol of the Bells" in this. It makes me feel like I'm watching a ridiculous, noir-based Home Alone sequel.
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Good idea getting in for a close-up. After the last few trailers, the less you show of this thing the better.
In case you haven't given up entirely on Frank Miller's The Spirit adaptation, here's the latest trailer. I swear, every time I start to get any hope this could not be horrible, I get punched in the face with another flagrantly, obnoxiously Frank Miller-esque line ("Get me a tie--and make sure it's RED"? Oh, brother), or catch a glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson, his face streaked with mascara and sideburns, in front of an explosion of fire and redness, and realize, no, this will probably be bad. Never forget the comic booklet convention footage.
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New character posters for The Spirit have taken a novel approach to showing the opposition of the film's hero and villain. For the first poster, we get a bullet-riddled Spirit as seen from the perspective his arch-nemesis, The Octopus. So naturally, for the second, we see The Octopus, this time from the viewpoint of... an unseen third-party observer whose view is being obscured by The Spirit's flapping tie? Yes:
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Though I've still never picked it up, I always hear how Will Eisner's The Spirit is a groundbreaking, must-read comic series for anyone at all interested in the medium. That information directly contradicts what I'm seeing in this fight scene that was shown at Comic Con, which paints The Spirit as a slapstick comedy with more getting-hit-with-objects-for-comedic-reactions than Home Alone. Also, it takes place in a sewage nebula? Just watch it.
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Lionsgate had a pretty good idea. Instead of continuing to overlay text on cheeks and add accompanying audio, how about letting some art school kids have at it? So they did, and here's the first from the Art Institute of California-San Diego. I wonder how many attempts it took to get a design that didn't have "sort of an anti-war thing, man, because I'm totally getting into political shit."
It looks like it's of questionable origins, so hurry up and watch this trailer to The Spirit before it's replaced by a take-down notice. My first thought was, "This is like if Frank Miller directed the intro to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis." My next thought was, "Why was your first thought of a show that went off the air almost two decades before your were born?" I have no idea. Subliminal Nick at Nite?
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There are two new The Spirit posters! One features the Spirit swiping my famous sexual maneuver (that maneuver being pretending a girl's lip is a button, then going into extreme detail about how my pressing the button sets her mouth to blowjob mode); the other shows Lorelei, the Spirit character most like a cast member of Cats.
But the real story isn't in the images, it's that Yahoo has taken a giant leap in movie poster technology: they've added speech! Moving the mouse over the posters cues an audio file of each actress reading her respective sexually-charged face tattoo. Think of it as the antithesis of Guess Who?, because these faces actually do talk (fuck you again, Milton Bradley).
The degradation of forcing Scarlett Johansson to repeatedly insist I get on my knees was entertaining for about 30 seconds, at which point my focus shifted to finding the dirtiest thing I could make them say by quickly moving the mouse from face to face ("Keep the come on your knees"). Maybe someone else can figure out something better to do with this function.
Oh, and I guess this isn't really safe for work, just because it's going to take too much explaining to clarify why a woman's sultry voice is giving you dominatrix commands.
Talking 'The Spirit' Poster Things [Yahoo!]
