This Week In Posters September 11th

A week in posters to never forget! With Killers Of The Flower Moon, The Bikeriders, Quiz Lady, and more.

Greetings, #Content lovers! I don’t want this newsletter to be all This Week In Posters, and I actually have a longer piece that I’ve been working on since last week, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. Hopefully tomorrow or the next day. In the interests of keeping your eager #Content snouts full, here’s some posters in the meantime.

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Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

We begin this week with the TIFF poster (that’s Toronto International Film Festival for the hopelessly uncool) for Boil Alert. Tagline: “If she can save the water maybe she can save herself.”

I’m going to guess this is a First Nations story about climate change and water rights, but I really like that they made “Boil Alert” a double entendre just by flipping the horizon line vertical. She really looks like a boil! Better squeeze her before she gets infected! Between this and Guardians 3, I’m convinced movies could use a lot more zit imagery. Great metaphor, and so satisfying.

And just in time for 9/11, it’s this poster for The Creator, doing a sort of upside down Twin Towers memorial thing. What is this, the 15th poster for this thing? If we judge solely on poster volume, The Creator is going to be great.

It’s kind of sad that in movies, robot kids are the key to saving humanity, and in reality we mostly get AI to write our Star Wars listicles and make horse porn.

In case that last poster for The Creator wasn’t exciting enough, there’s this one: now with more sparks! Sparks mean excitement! I actually can’t even tell if all these are sparks or if some of them are little spaceships pew-pewing each other in the background. Either way, thrilling. My metal is grinding already

Here’s the new poster for The Bikeriders. The trailer for this one dropped the other day:

It stars Austin Butler and Tom Hardy in a movie about a fictional biker gang, directed by Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special, Mud). Austin Butler is the most Australian-looking American dude who ever lived and famously couldn’t stop talking like Elvis, and Tom Hardy tends to communicate only in grunts and shrugs (and he’s one of our finest actors) so the accents promise to be all over the place in this thing. I absolutely cannot wait.

“Jodie Comer” is my porn name.

Here’s the poster for Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie (second Paw Patrol movie, if I remember correctly) featuring the whole Paw Patrol gang. And they seem to be watching… uh… their own movie? The logic feels a little circular here, like a chicken restaurant with a chicken mascot whose ads have the chicken mascot eating the restaurant’s chicken. Too confusing! Not for MY kids!

Here’s the poster for a Saw X blood drive tie in. Memorable imagery and I like the idea, but did they have to make the blood bag guy so sexy? He’s like a red velvet man. Holy jeez I wanna lick him!

Here’s another one, with a lady. How come the dude one gets glistening washboard abs but the lady one’s blood stops above the boobs? Doesn’t seem fair. I blame Joe Biden, he’s doing gender again.

Here’s another poster for Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, the Barbenheimer of awards season, if the movie industry has anything to say about it.

Once again Robert De Niro and Leo DiCaprio are frowning super hard in the poster. I’m not sure why they’ve settled on all the frowning as a selling point. These two dudes are NOT going to eat their broccoli.

Hey, it’s Little Finger! Always good to see Mayor Carcetti in anything, even if I’m not quite getting the connection between “Barber,” the reflection on a window, police lights, and everyone having a secret.

Val Barber, a private investigator, is hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. [IMDB]

Dammit, it’s about a hard-boiled private dick named “Barber,” I should’ve known. That was going to be my next guess.

I just want this to be a movie about a medieval barber, is that so wrong?

I still can’t believe we got a movie about Pat, but not one about Theodoric of York, Steve Martin’s only funny bit.

Here’s a poster for Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, a documentary about the famous musician who became the first star to wear her clothes backwards.

She influenced so many, from the Mack Daddy to the Daddy Mack.

Damn, usually when you see a silhouette-style poster, the silhouette is a lady’s legs or the stars of the film. This time, it’s a GUN framing a lonely fishing boat. As a dad who loves sea shanties and basically only reads books about failed Victorian explorers, this speaks to me. I hate how excited I am for this. Guns AND boats? Where do I sign up??

Here’s the poster for Next Goal Wins, which is premiering in Toronto at TIFF, hence this design. I get what it’s doing, but I don’t know how much you want to remind people Little Miss Sunshine. People really turned on that one, for whatever reason (it was fine!). It did make me believe that Paul Dano was a terrible actor until There Will Be Blood came out, which feels like an achievement in light of Paul Dano turning out to be a pretty good actor.

Anyway, Next Goal Wins! It’s about a Samoan soccer team directed by Taika Waititi. What a journey we all got to go on here.

The Dead Don’t Hurt! What a title. Remember when titles were catchy, slightly mysterious phrases? I love it. The image is basically the same way, and they even got the faces lined up with the names this time (the font formatting is nice too). Take a lunch, whoever designed this poster, you’ve earned it.

Just for that I’m including the synopsis:

Set in the 1860s, the film stars Krieps as the fiercely independent French Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen). [IMDB]

Aw hell yeah, you had me at “fiercely independent.” Better take your bullshit elsewhere cause Vivienne Le Coudy ain’t care.

As a man over 40 I have exactly zero takes on Taylor Swift and I’m frankly kind of suspicious of anyone who does. I will say that I really like that this poster makes it look like she’s farting into the microphone.

Damn, “Weston Razooli” is a hell of a moniker. In his IMDB profile picture he’s wearing a cowboy hat and Muay Thai shorts, which somehow feels right for a guy named Weston Razooli.

Anyway, this definitely looks like a festival movie. Boy, millennials cannot get enough of little kids riding around on BMXes solving mysteries (remember Goonies?! remember ET?!), can they? What Weston Razooli presupposes is, why not mini dirt bikes? Or maybe those are mopeds? Look, I don’t know, I’m not a bike scientist.

Here’s the first poster for Thanksgiving, Eli Roth’s horror movie that he originally made a joke trailer for 13 years ago in Grindhouse. “There will be no leftovers” still sounds like a joke tagline, but hey, it’s a horror movie. The line between joke and real is always a little blurry. Cabin Fever is one of the greatest joke movies of all time, so who knows.

Is the pilgrim also Guy Fawkes?

Say what you will about Saw X, which I’m definitely not going to see, “the tenth chapter cuts through time” with a Mayan rune in the shape of a buzzsaw is pretty inspired.

And here’s another one for Next Goal Wins, which is clearly trying to look as much like Cool Runnings as it possibly can, which I suppose makes sense. Between Jojo Rabbit and the last Thor I’ve gotten pretty sick of Taika Waititi’s shtick in general, but his knack for Islander-based comedy and light family humor have always been what I liked most about him (anyone else see Hunt for the Wilderpeople? Excellent).

So even though this looks like it might be corny, Michael Fassbender going to American Samoa to coach soccer is one of those loglines I can’t resist, like books about a sad British guy dying on his boat.

Here’s another poster for Quiz Lady, starring Sandra Oh and Awkwafina, playing against type as sisters.

I like this one. One sister acts one way, the other sister acts the other way, and this dog’s sayin “ay, whaddya want from me?”

That Julia Garner sure can scowl, can’t she? She looks like she’s planning something. Fills me with anticipation.

US backpackers Hanna and Liv take a job in a remote Australian pub for some extra cash and are confronted with a bunch of unruly locals and a situation that grows rapidly out of their control. [IMDB]

Julia Garner AND Australian rascalry? I’m in.

Just put the damned names over the corresponding person! (Sorry, had to do it). Also, why does Jamie Foxx’s tie look like it was added in post?

Inspired by true events, a lawyer helps a funeral home owner save his family business from a corporate behemoth, exposing a complex web of race, power, and injustice. [IMDB]

Huh, I was getting “wacky comedy” from the poster, but the synopsis doesn’t sound like that. Jamie Foxx’s sleeve saying “GARY” is another fun little Easter Egg. But what does it mean?? Probably his character is named Gary. That’s my expert opinion.

Here’s Peter Dinklage in one of a big batch of character posters from the upcoming Hunger Games spinoff, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. I guess they’re trying to build up some anticipation for him wearing monocle. He’s just holding the monocle. Odds are he’s going to put it on at some point, right? It’s Chekhov’s monocle.

This poster is proving that not even Peter Dinklage in a monocle could make me want to see a Hunger Games spinoff.

I still haven’t watched Dopesick on Hulu or Painkiller on Netflix yet, but maybe Pain Hustlers will be the opioid epidemic work for me?

“Pain Hustlers,” based on a 2018 New York Times Magazine article by Evan Hughes that was expanded into a book last year, traces the lives of a pair of pharmaceutical reps (played by Emily Blunt and Chris Evans) who play a key role in the opioid epidemic that has swallowed the country. [TheWrap]

Based on a book AND has Emily Blunt in it? I think I made the right decision not watching those other ones. Procrastination wins again.

Speaking of Emily Blunt, has anyone else seen The English? They have some pretty good shows that they hide Prime Video sometimes. If they do a few more shows like The English I might forget about the time I tried to watch Mozart in the Jungle.

I think this is the best poster yet for Reptile. No one can resist a cool guy with a gun doing a badass walk. No one! And look at the ground: he’s making snake tracks! Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I think Benicio Del Toro’s character might be the reptile.