Art comparison

The truth is out there...

Whish you were here - if it wasn't for the weather.

















There's not much variety in dance movies is there?
But then again, what more are we looking for than a soft body to hold?

Art comparison

Not to say anything, just a peek at how my mind works.

















I am bound up in an 80's frame of mind, just saying, not that I really hoped Dylan Dog to be. (Yeah, right!)

















I could give you the whole bull about water symbolism here (not really, never understood that part) but for me the formula is simply called "Sex sells", and boy does it sure work.
(Speaking of which, have some Kylie)

What's on their wall...

Book of Eli has it's moments, times where it fills us with hope to see and hear that not all our cultural accomplishments will be lost in the ashes of the apocalypse. Ennio Morricone's timeless theme for C'era una volta il west will be under the survivors, and Johnny Cash will at least in oral tradition continue to be Live at Folsom, not to forget this fine piece of art.




And admist all of the distruction in this battered world we spy on the wall of one of Eli's temoprary resting places a discolored and torn-up poster for the movie A boy and his dog.

Goes to show that God has after all some sense of humour.

The other Nightmares

Welcome to my nightmare...

That's about all I really remember from Nightmare 6, the fact that Alice Cooper did a cameo.
That, and that it was the only one in the series that made me consider demanding my money back.





Part 7, the style breaker, new aproach to the story, new look to the poster art, I didn't like either of the changes but enjoyed to see Heather Langenkamp back in a Nightmare movie.
Makes me wonder what our chances might be to see her in the remake?









Heck! I actually forgot that a new and improved Tongue Phone appeared in that part.
Really love that one.







I like the trailer for the remake, I think it can really work, even though I find this floating victim to be a somewhat lame idea.
Other than that it makes a solid impression.
And you'd be really hard pressed to come up with something worse than Freddy's Dead. :)

Seeing the posters though, in the art department they can't hold a candle to the original so far.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 + 5

Nightmare 4: The Dream Master
This now is my personal favoured of the Nightmare sequels.
For a simple reason so: It’s been directed by Renny Harlin who formerly directed Prison for Charles Band’s Empire International.
Also it features one of my fave lines in the series:
“I bet you're the only male in this school suffering from penis envy.”

If that made you cringe, though I bet that Freud would have loved to analyse this series, then the bland way in which works like Alice in Wonderland or Kafka’s The Transformation are quoted will leave you crying. I’m not positively sure if Alice’s travel through the movie screen into a drab black & white dream world is meant as a nod to Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy escapes her drab reality into a Technicolor dream world, but I’m not ruling out that possibility.
My love for the movie aside, even I find it difficult to overlook the fact how different Lisa Wilcox looks from her double in the required 80’s montage sequence, I mean c’mon, how hard would it have been to find a remotely matching wig?

Nomen est omen: Alice prepares the way through the looking-glass.

Nightmare 5: The Dream Child
Not much to say about this entry, while not as strong as the fourth it was still a solidly entertaining take, with a note worthy nod to a-ha's classic 80's hit Take on me.

What else was there?
Freddy's lair, finalizes the connection between Krueger and Jareth from Labyrinth.

Shared interior designer, Jareth's and Freddy's lair.

Lost in Translation

In an ’66 movie article the author claims that „movies speak a universal language“ and later goes to prove the truth of this statement with “a picture of a house shows a house in every language.”
So far so true, pictures need no translation. The video release tagline for the made for TV movie Shooter comes to mind in that context:
“If a pictures says a thousand words, then this movie tells it all”

Movies can and do speak a unmistakeable language, that can’t be denied, and watching a opening sequence like the one for the movie The Believers is bound to convince us that movies do indeed need no dialogue* to tell their story:





Ricardo Delgado's brilliant Graphic Novel Age of Reptiles comes to mind, too. Without a single bit of dialogue he manages to tell a compeling story of revenge in a aeons before any human being on earth.

But is there really are a universal language at work or is it just a basic understanding that can be communicated in this way, just as limited by its own unique boundaries as every other language is?.

Language as we use it might be a clumsy instrument, a hindrance even at times, as Suzanne Vega points out so well in her song:
These words are too solid
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone

but in spite of all its short comings it’s still our best means available to communicate complex ideas in a fast and simple manner.



* Really, the complete opening sequence would work just as well without the dialogue that follows shortly after the shown snippet.
As an aside: this opening always reminds me of a short story King wrote a few years earlier called Morning Deliveries, which got published with others in Skeleton Crew.

What's on their wall...

Any movie opening with a Bonnie Tyler song, already has won me over, and while Urban Legend may not have to offer anything new to the genre it features a perfect mix of likeable characters to root for and unpleasant ones you enjoy to see getting disposed of.
Round that off with a killer to love, and presto, entertainment!
The first time we meet Loretta Devine as campus cop she’s watching a clip from the movie Coffy with Pam Grier and over her shoulder we can spy the poster to the movie Foxy Brown. It begs the question, would a male campus cop have had the poster for Shaft on his wall?


















In the same movie in Parker’s dorm room, we get a glance at a poster for the adult movie Control, starring Lene Hefner, in case anybody’s interested. He strikes me as a bit old to pin porn on his wall but it certainly explains something about his behaviour at the campus party.

Deck the halls with boughs of gory

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

It's Christmas and that means we have to give the requisite acknowledging nod to Silent Night, Deadly Night, although I remember that movie as being remarkable only for two things:
It proves that there's nothing to boost a movie's renown like a angry mob.
It stars Linnea Quigley.

There might have been more to it, but I'll be damned if I could remember ... I really should use the festive days to revisit it.
I do like the poster art, which with its plain, somewhat cheesy looking, cardboard feel actually manages to nicely sum up a further quality of the movie: it was shot on a budget.
Back in the 80's that meant no stupid CG effects, oh how I wish we could go back...

Silent Night, Deadly Night has also become such a many used tagline that it long since stopped to be funny, and yet we still find it in as late as 2006 on the German poster for the remake of Black Christmas; I guess we can't really expect much originality from a remake, though, and it beats the silliness of the original tag:
If this picture doesn't make your skin crawl...it's on TOO TIGHT.
Oh my...



















Nostalgic Christmas wishes from the Corner.

Family Man

At the very latest since It’s a wonderful life, Hollywood has regularly played with the idea of allowing the lead character to see what would have happened if he hadn’t either taken the road he did or in case of the aforementioned not even existed.

I tend to like that type of movie, and The Family Man promised to be all that. I love Téa Leoni’s part … I love Téa Leoni, period. As an avid Fleetwood Mac listener, I liked the movie title the moment I first heard/saw it.
I also, as unpopular as it may be to admit, liked Nicholas Cage in 8mm.
I do adore that poster, this picture of Nicholas wistfully looking through a store window at the one thing he really wants, a family live.
It’s heartbreaking, it touches on something deep within me.
It shouts Christmas movie at the top of it’s lungs.

Maybe with all that my expectations where set too high to begin with:
As Hollywood convention has it fame and fortune man Nicholas meets an Angel that is willing to fulfil him a wish, and so Nick finds himself gone over night from unhappy, leading a empty life, Bank Broker (or some such) to unhappy, overstressed, family father. Because, you see, our Nick never stopped to wonder what his life could have been had he married his love: Téa Leoni.
And honestly people, who wouldn’t want to wake up married to Téa, even if we ended up with the one from Spanglish?
Our Nick, however, finds out that this Nick is unhappy over never having it made to fame and fortune, and now feels trapped in his marriage. This wouldn’t be Hollywood if he didn’t find out that family life is indeed not one of the minor circles of hell, usually at least, even though he sure begins to think so. But here already the script starts to falter, because married Nick isn’t a pleasant person and beyond being unhappy over the course his life took this Nick is also about to cheat on his wife. So suddenly we should sympathize with a Nick that finds this new life so constraining that he’d rather cheat on sweet, adorable Téa who’s the heart and soul of the family?
Nah, not likely going to happen.
So Nick naturally changes his habits and he does learn something:
He realizes that there’s more needed for a partnership than just love, it takes hard work and dedication, and a willingness to compromise.
Soon as he learned that lesson he finds himself back in his old, empty live.
And here’s the catch, this being a Christmas movie it can’t end thus, so the writer lets Nick meet perchance a older Téa that unhindered by marriage or children made her own way to fame and fortune and we are expected to rejoice for them because now they can become a smug yuppie couple…

My blood was boiling when I saw this long anticipated movie in perfect expectation of a Christmas romance. Instead I got a wooden acting Nicholas Cage that I found to be hardly loveable (even before he wanted to cheat on Téa) in a movie that runs out of actual story about half way through, and to add insult to injury there’s this Hollywood bloke, probably living thousands of miles away, that dares to tell me that I wasted my live on my family, and they theirs on me, and that on Christmas of all days.
I’m actually still furious about this movie.
And yet, I still love that poster beyond reason and would fall for the same trap again if they where to show it now, I just can’t make out for whom they made that movie*? Probably those millions of rich, unmarried yuppies that flock to the cinemas each Christmas?

Given, if you look at the poster it actually shows one of those typical staged Christmas pictures that no one wants to look at anymore after a while, and that should probably tip us off to what Family Man really is about. And if it wasn’t for that forced happy end that lets Nicholas both eat his cake and keep it, telling us others that we are doing something wrong, I could probably live with that.
As usual the Japanese offer a beautiful, more subtle alternative approach. Not as fitting to the typical American style of storytelling, but a perfect picture to illustrate the nature of a loving relationship.


*Apart from easily swayed fools like me, that is.

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood sure changed a lot over the course of time, these days it's the Big Bad Wolf that has to take care!
Yes, in some cases it even seems that Little Red is in truth the Big Bad Wolf our parents tried to warn us from.
"Hey Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good..."































































Big Bad Wolves (A 13 min. Short Satire)
Rotkaeppchen (Fairy Tale, Realmovie)
Hoodwinked (Animation, Comedy)
The Company of Wolves (Fantasy, Horror)
Brothers Grimm (Fantasy)
Cry Wolf (Thriller)
Hard Candy (Thriller)
Red (Online Teaser Poster, Thriller?)
Rotkappchen (Online Teaser Poster, Thriller?)
SL8N8 (DVD cover, Horror)










I love, love, love, this poster.
The powerful imagery of blood and snow, death and innocence, gets perfectly enhanced by Amanda Seyfried ("...what big eyes you have, the kind of eyes that drive wolves mad...") posing in a red cape pooling out into a puddle of blood.

Music of it all

Every now and then, we'll encounter a movie poster that makes us instantly think of that song (and no that happens not only with La Bamba or Great Balls of Fire).

Now who's gonna dare to argue with the Moody Blues as going along best with this highly erotic poster for Emanuelle II?







David Bowie's song must have been what John Carpenter had on his mind when he came up with his movie.
A true classic, both the movie and the song, although I prefer to watch the movie over listening to the song.
Karen Allen has beat David Bowie hands down for me.







For Nekromantik we have two artists competing for doing the honours:
The Böhse Onkelz probably are the ones that earn this place, but for those that like their music a bit more cultured we still want to offer Alice Cooper as an alternative.










I'm never quite sure if it was Bruce Springsteen's song, that influenced the script to Natural Born Killers or the true crime case Bruce was referring to in his song.
Doesn't matter eitherway, my advice: Listen to Bruce tell the story and skip the movie altogether, 'cept maybe for the last half hour when Robert Downey Jr. gives a performance that almost saves this piece.







Who could better illustrate the innocence of this drawing than the angelic voice of Allison Krauss.

Wish I was there...