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Mike’s Favorite Movie Trailers of 2018
I’m of very mixed opinions on the movie trailer. On the one hand, seeing a good one is really exhilarating. On the other, so many of them now spell out the entire plot of the movie and make you feel as if you’ve seen everything before you’ve watched it. Or they give you enough to where you can figure out all the plot twists and stuff beforehand. At that point, where’s the fun?
But, in the past few years I’ve been in theaters more and more and have seen more and more trailers, and I’m starting to come around on the better ones. Unlike with movie posters, they don’t really exist in perpetuity. They’re there to sell you on a film, and once the film is out, no one particularly remembers the trailer. Sure, the good ones you maybe remember, but you don’t go back and watch them often. How many trailers do you go back and see for movies that came out 5+ years ago? Less than five, I’d guess. And most of the time, it’s not because you remembered, “Oh yeah, that was an awesome trailer.” Mostly it’s to see what the trailer looked like or to show it to a friend to sell them on the movie.
However, each year, there are some cool trailers that come out that are worth noting. So what I do, at the end of every year, is go back and watch several hundred trailers (often multiple trailers for each film), and pick out what I think the best ones were. Usually I’ll have half a dozen in my head that I remember having liked, and then I’ll think of some more along the way. But mostly I’m going back and seeing which ones ended up being the most artfully done.
Here are my favorite movie trailers of 2018: Read the rest of this page »
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Pic of the Day: “What do you mean, get him outta here?” “Take him to the car.” “In case you didn’t notice I’m a motherfucking dwarf, so unless you got a forklift handy, maybe you should lend a hand, hmm?” “That figures. You want all kind of set-asides. Special treatment ’cause you’re handicapped. You’re all the same.” “Special treatment? I’m 3-foot-fucking-tall you asshole! It’s a matter of physics. Draw me a sketch of how I get him to the car, huh?” “Bitch, Bitch, Bitch!” “Sketch it up, you fucking moron. Fucking Leonardo da Vinci.” “What’d you call me, thigh-high?” “I called you a fucking guinea homo from the 15th-fucking-century, you dickhead!” “I could stick you up my ass, small fry.” “Yeah? You sure it ain’t too sore from last night?” “You got some lip on you, midget.” “Yeah? Well these lips were on your wife’s pussy last night. Why don’t you dust that thing off once in a while? Asshole!”
Oscars 2018: BFCA (Critics Choice) Nominations
Critics Choice time.
After the Globes, which pretty much told me this is a wide open race, BFCA is here to give us a little more clarity. They’re generally pretty populist, but do tend to hit a good deal more than not. They feel like they get most of the Best Picture nominees a lot of the time, and they always have six-to-seven acting nominees in a category, which gives us the broad lay of the land.
Usually a fair amount of where the Academy is going is laid out on this table, and it’s just a matter of which ones are gonna end up being extraneous. So I’m interested to see what they’ve done.
Here are your Critics Choice nominees for 2018: Read the rest of this page »
Mike’s Top Ten Movie Posters of 2018
I start this article every year with the same statement: the movie poster is a lost art.
It gets truer each year, and actually becomes more disgusting as time goes on, because now, with the rise of the streaming service, they don’t even bother putting out posters for some movies anymore. And the big mainstream stuff, it’s devolved into character posters and giant collages of all the actors’ faces on them. They’re only interested in selling the IP and the people in the movie rather than selling the movie. They’re either trading off a known property or images from great posters from years back, or they’re putting famous faces into the same collage they use for everything else. If you love a good movie poster as I do, you should be disgusted with the stuff they’re putting out.
A good movie poster should give you everything you need to know about a film in a single image. It should be both eye-catching and thematically relevant. Bonus points if you look at it and immediately want to see the movie more than you did before you saw it.
Offhand, can you immediately name more than five posters you saw this year and went, “Oh wow”? And here I’m trying to come up with 50. So that’s my struggle each year. But in listing as many as I do, you start to learn certain things. One, you’ll realize just how little the big studio films need to bother doing anything creative in their marketing. Two, you’ll learn that certain filmmakers are always the same ones putting care and consideration into their marketing, which always makes them stand out. And three, you’ll see, with me including so many different posters, just how few there really are that are truly fantastic. And four — this one’s more of a pipe dream — hopefully you’ll learn just how easy it is to put any kind of creativity in a poster, and if you end up being someone that is a part of this process at any point, maybe you’ll help change this disturbing trend we’re on.
But anyway, here are my favorite movie posters of 2018. Read the rest of this page »
