Final IMAX Poster for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Brings Fantastic Realism to the Masses

The final IMAX poster for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is a pop kitschy take-off on the works of Fantastic Realism sculptor Kris Kuksi.

Kuksi is know for his sculptures that meld old, classical forms with new, modern references that art critic Joshua Liner called ““a study in timelessness and intricacies, reminiscent of lost civilizations, deities and ruins – perfectly preserved.”

The piece above melds images of the sacred and profane, warrior and priest, imperfect monsters and perfectly sculpted men to create a mind-blowing phantasmagoria of heaven above, earth in the middle and hell below.

Kuksi reclaims old materials (toys, machine parts, tossed off salvage and every day trash placed on the curbside) and reconstructs them into things totally new and not resembling the original at all.

He fills his pieces with a sense of forms lost and unsettling futures to come– a warning about trusting fundamentalist societies and religions that have a dictatorial and totalitarian bent.

The Hunger Games Imax tribute balances off Capitol symbols (on the right of the poster)  with the resistance faction Phoenix symbols (on the left), with Katniss the synthesizing angel spreading her wings (forming the middle).  The rest is pretty deep stuff for a movie poster and I leave you dear reader to explore that for yourself. 

Smile, You Son of a Bitch! An Art Tribute Opens at The hero Complex Gallery in LA

 This week is a big week for people who love Art Movie Posters.  

Bad Dad’s a tribute to the films of Wes Anderson is getting its fourth incarnation over at Spoke Art gallery in San Francisco. 

Down in LA The Hero Complex Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Jaws inspired art titled Smile, You Son of a Bitch!  They are the famous last words uttered to Bruce the Shark by Sheriff Brody before he shoots the oxygen canister that blows that bad boy to slow motion smithereens.   

It takes place for three days only, November 1-3, at the Hero Complex Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Proceeds go to PangeaSeed, an activism group which raises awareness for the preservation and conservation of sharks.

Enjoy the picture show!    

A Preview of the 4th Annual Spoke Art Bad Dad Exhibition Dedicated to Wes Anderson Films

 

 Over 100 artists from around the world have once again created brand new art inspired by the growing oeuvre of writer/director Wes Anderson. This year, the show opens with a costume party on November 1 and 2 followed by a triple feature of three Anderson films: Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums and his most recent release, Moonrise Kingdom, on November 3.

Bad Dads will be on display at Spoke Art, 816 Sutter Street San Francisco CA from November 1-23. The opening party is from 6-10 p.m. Nov. 1-2 and the screenings will be Nov. 3 at the Castro Theater. Any unsold works will go online at 3 p.m PST November 4 at spoke-art.com.

 

    

The Expendables 3 Drops a Promo Poster as Pricipal Shooting Wraps

The Expendables 3  wrapped up principal photography the other day and celebrated by dropping a promo poster. 

Never Send a Boy to Do a Man’s has me anticipating that the women are going to make their mark with the newly titled Expendabelles.  Cameron Diaz, Milla Jovovich and Meryl Streep are being courted by Ari Lerner  for the big mission.  If Meryl Streep gets a best actress nomination for her role it will be proof that the Oscars are rigged.  

The men’s latest mission has has Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross and his Expendables crew squaring off against Ross’ old partner Conrad Stonebanks, played by Mel Gibson.  Returning for the sequel are Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, and Harrison Ford joining the all-star cast along with Kellan Lutz, MMA star Ronda Rousey, welterweight boxing champion Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell. 

The Expendables 3 will open sometime Summer 2014.

 

Muppets Most Wanted First Poster Has All the Gang and Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell and Tina Fey

The first poster for Muppets: Most Wanted features the gang,  the three starring humans (Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell and Tina Fey) and two Kermits.   The one on the right hand corner doing the Dr Evil imitation is K’s evil doppelganger Constantine, the criminal mastermind whose plot to steal an enormous diamond sets the international crime caper story in motion. Ricky Gervais co-stars as Constantine’s villainous sidekick, Dominic, while Ty Burrell plays a mustachioed Interpol agent and Tina Fey is on board as a Russian prison guard.

Cameos for the new film are supposed to include Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, Salma Hayek, Ray Liotta, Frank Langella, Christoph Waltz, Danny Trejo and Tom Hiddleston.  Even though Disney owns Marvel, don’t expect to see Hiddleston in a Loki costume.   But this being a Muppet movie expect anything.

James Bobin, who helmed the 2011 ‘Muppets’ film, is returning to direct the follow-up and co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Stoller.

“Muppets Most Wanted” “takes the world by farce” on March 21, 2014. 

 

Tom Whalen and Dark Hall Mansion to Release a 10 Print Folio of Universal Classic Monsters

Graphic poster artist Tom Whalen and Dark Hall Mansion have teamed up to bring a special Halloween treat for fans of Universal Monsters. 

Tom Whalen has crafted together an amazing set of 10 prints in both a standard series and a “Silver Screen” variant series covered in silver metallic inks.  Each set comes with 8 individual 18”x24” prints, each featuring one of your favorite Universal Monsters, and also a special 2 print diptych.  All the prints come shipped inside of a beautiful custom folio box.  The standard set will run you $350 shipped in the US and $450 for the variants.

Dark Hall Mansion has decided to offer up these awesome folio sets via a lottery system.  You have from NOW until next Tuesday afternoon at 5 PM PST to e-mail Dark Hall at  info@darkhallmansion.com with the words “WHALEN STANDARD” OR “WHALEN VARIANT” in the subject line for a chance to win your right to purchase either ONE “Universal Classic Monsters” 10-Print Standard Edition Folio or ONE “Universal Classic Monsters” 10-Print Variant Edition Folio.

Dark Hall’s facebook page  will continuously be revealing all the different prints up until the sale date.

X Men of Days of Future Past First Trailer: It Takes Two Generations of X-Men to Do the Job

Bryan Singer couldn’t decide whether he wanted to make a sequel or a prequel to X-Men, so he decided to merge the two and make a pre-sequel.  

X-Men Days of Future Past,  according to Brian Singer in an interview, has 70% of its plot occur in the past and the rest in the future filled with cryptic conversations mumbled in hush tones about the need for all mutants to come together to fight a common enemy determined to destroy them all.   The threat, a dwarf (Peter Dinklage, who else)  with giant robot creation on his mind.  The threat is so dire that they must time travel Wolverine’s (who else but Hugh Jackman) consciousness back to the 1970’s to make things all groovy with the warring younger versions of Professor X (James McAvoy playing the Patrick Stewart to be) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender before he started looking like Gandalf, just kidding) so they can stop this mutant robot-apocalypse while it is just buggy source code.  

The special effects aren’t quite finished yet so the trailer is pretty character heavy.  And it is essentially the same one shown at Comic-Con earlier this year.  

 New X-Men include Bishop (Omar Sy who got his training by pushing wheelchair bound Francoise Cluzet around in The Intouchables), Sunspot (Adan Canto), Warpath (Booboo Stewart who should be getting a lot of his first name marks) and Blink (Bingbing Fan, she with the perfect X name). 

The returning players include the purple reincarnation of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mystique, yum yum), a former latex Cat Woman (Halle Berry as Storm), a former baby mama and notable mind diver (Ellen Page as Shadowcat) and a zombie and giant slayer (Nicholas Hoult as Beast).

The X-Men: Days of Future Past opens everywhere May 23, 2014.  

 

12 Years a Slave: Steve McQueen’s Masterpiece of Dark and Light of the Human Heart

The Director, Steve McQueen, loves to revel in tableaux vivants.  12 Years a Slave, based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrup a freeman kidnapped into slavery in  ante-bellum  Louisiana for the years of the title, is McQueen’s masterpiece.

Everything is shackled to a true story told with an unflinching reality about one man’s perseverance and triumph from brutality and slavery.  McQueen’s greatest tableaux vivant has Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor giving the performance of a lifetime) lynched, his feet barely touching the earth, straining for hours to stay erect and alive, all while normal plantation life continues on in the background unmindful of his situation.  The movie screen has never seen anything so raw and honest.  12 Years a Slave is the hard but necessary watch every one must absorb into their psyche to keep the memory of evil from morphing into nostalgic racial revisionism.  

Ejiofor is McQueen’s mirror that shows how slavery debases and twists everything it touches.  McQueen doesn’t strive to make Ejiofor a martyr, just a survivor, a reflection of the millions brutalized.  Ejiofor’s performance displays a fierce intelligence and resolve that McQueen contrasts with Ejiofor’s soft angelic facial features to make him the perfect emotional ground for this story of refinement debased and soul triumphant. 

One of the neater details has McQueen foreshadowing the end of plantation slavery by showing the main house in its whitewash shabbiness— the wanton disrepair of its chips, rot and facade in need of new varnish and repainting, unmindful of the encroach of locusts, moths, spiders and nature itself trying to claim it back.

Contrast 12 Years a Slave with last year’s pop revisionist Western, Django Unchained that also pretends to stare in the darkness of the peculiar institution and it is obvious what a fraud that Tarantino movie is.  Every scene in Slave pulsates with a sense of terror and a scourging of the heart while Unchained hipster facade revises nothing but genre conventions. 

12 Years a Slave gets an A from me.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Immigrant First Cast Sheets and Trailer Are Cloaked in A Golden Style

James Gray’s The Immigrant got a screening at the 51st NY Film Festival.  In the film, Marion Cottilard plays a Polish immigrant who is exploited by a pimp played by Joaquin Phoenix. 

The Immigrant is Gray’s attempt to honor his grandparents by showing the immigrant experience in all its complexity rather than the patriotic “I Love America” experience so common on screens.   Gray’s grandmother came from Poland where she was the victim of pogroms and witnessed the beheading of her mother by Cossacks.   Gray’s grandfather has a little founder memories of the “old country”.  Both make cameos in The Immigrant reenacting some of their experiences as well.  

Marion Cotillard plays her first American lead role in the movie.  Cotillard  learned Polish as part of her research for the role.  She forms the middle part of the love triangle between Phoenix’s pimp and the kindness and security offered by a struggling magician and fellow immigrant played by Jeremy Renner.  

The four posters come from The Immigrants French Facebook page. 

Mr Peabody’s First Posters and Trailer Get a Chance to Set the Historical Record Straight

So now we finally know who wrote Shakespeare’s plays!  A time traveling dog from a 1960’s animated series that had a flying squirrel and an upright talking moose as its stars.

Mr Peabody of the 50’s-60’s Peabody’s Improbable History was not only the smartest dog on the planet but the smartest creature that ever lived.   Smart Enough to have a pet boy named Sherman who could drive him through historic time zones observing, disturbing and re-correcting history in their Wabac Machine while teaching lessons about science, math, literature and comedy writing to new generations of scientists, mathematicians,  writers and comedians.  Without Mr. Peabody’s inspiration there would be no trips to the moon, no Gravity’s Rainbow, no double helix discovery, no Golden Age of sit-com and definitely no Woody Allen movies, the closest humanity has come to a Mr Peabody in looks and occasionally in brain power.   Think about it. . .but then again don’t.

A Mr Peabody and Sherman film has been brewing in the minds of Dreamworks since 2007.  Robert Downey Jr was originally picked to voice Mr Peabody but probably dropped out when his Iron Man obligations came into conflict with his desire for radical historical correction.   Saving history from both the onslaught of evil ideas and good intentions gone awry always takes a back seat to saving the world from criminal masterminds.   So Ty Burrell the gentle mannered, confused, high-toned Dad from Modern Family steps in to fill the historic voice void.  Not quite perfect voice casting but neither is this a perfect world.   Playing Sherman is Max Charles, the young Peter Parker in the last Spiderman, creating the historical and comedic possibility that the pet may be smarter than the dog.   This is starring to look more like a historical misstep than a defining cinematic moment with every passing second. But then try to explain to me why dog spelled backwards is God?

Rob Minkoff, who directed half of The Lion King, is there behind the scenes, pulling the strings to make sure this historic spectacle gets some sure footing. According to IMDB.com historical characters guaranteed to appear include Leonardo da Vinci (Stanley Tucci) and his Mona Lisa (Lake Bell), Sigmund Freud (Mel Brooks), and King Tut (Zach Gallison).

Mr Peabody opens March 7, 2014.