Feb 20th, 2008
Cover The Movie
Tinseltown is abuzz. Top designers are working overtime dressing the actresses, and ballots marked with X’s are pouring into the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, all for Sunday’s Academy Awards. Among the categories, Best Picture … Best Original Screenplay … Best Use of Food in a Film …
Oops. They’ve forgotten that last category — again! Don’t they know that a great food scene can be the most powerful part of a movie? Mindful of that, we decided to announce our own awards: The Sauteed Celluloids. Here are our picks from 2007 for Best Food Film:
Kudos to the filmmakers of this animated movie, which follows the culinary aspirations of a rat who manages to triumph in the world’s most demanding food town: Paris.
“Ratatouille” successfully re-creates an authentic restaurant kitchen and hired star chef Thomas Keller to create the most sublime vegetable sculpture ever to grace the silver screen. So, boo to those who think animated films shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture. Bravo and bon appetit!
In which crime doesn’t pay, but the image of a perpetrator’s rose-petal cake is priceless. The elegant trans-Siberian restaurant in the film may serve the most stunning Russian fare in London, with a succession of dishes rivaling any layout in Gourmet magazine — even though the blue-eyed proprietor, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), is really the head of a notorious crime family. This mild-mannered monster is as fastidious at decorating the delicate rose-petal cake for a 100th birthday party as he is masterminding a cover-up of hundreds of bodies.
In one scene, he sweetly offers the naive midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) a spoon of borscht like her papa used to make, but maybe we understand why the duplicitous hero Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) keeps his fork to himself.
Thank goodness this is only a movie. Should a pregnant teen really be eating all that? Few healthful items pass through the lips of Juno (Ellen Page), a pregnant 16-year-old with an otherwise level head on her shoulders. She has decided to deliver the baby into the loving arms of a more age-appropriate, nutritionally knowledgeable mom.
Although the slang-speaking pubescent brags to her best friend that her solicitous stepmom won’t let her eat red M&M’s or stand in front of the microwave, Juno remains, after all, your typical teen, piling cola, fries and chips onto her lunch tray.
“The Bucket List”
Tags: cover, movie
8 Responses to “Cover The Movie”
The covers are small compared to posters so they try to make it so it catches they eye. Granted some of the covers aren’t beautiful but consider the fact that graphic designers and the artists who make these covers do a lot of research in what is most effective. My friend has spent 4 years of college studying this sort of thing.
Thank goodness someone’s noticing. The only company that puts out DVDs with nice covers is Criterion - that’s because they actually care about movies. As an illustrator, I’m sad that there are less posters and DVDs with fine illustration or clever graphic design. Now it’s mostly lame photos of the stars, generally split down the middle or collaged into a jumbled mess. The worst DVD cover in my collection is Solaris. The film was filled with stunning images but the DVD? It’s just a terrible shot of George Clooney with a space helmet bathed in a mess of red reflections, and it’s even out of focus. Talk about lazy-assed marketing. Check out the poster for The Rocketeer, then look at the DVD. Gorgeous 1930’s style art deco illustration (poster), dumbed down to a cut-and-paste 5-minute photo montage(DVD). Yuk.
That Children of Men DVD is appalling.In everyway Universal has done a horrendous job getting that movie out there.It could have won best picture if they got it into the right hands.Tis a shame. Alfonso is one of our greatest working directors.
Although I disagree generally about his comments, the Casino Royale box art really is stunningly atrocious, especially considering the gorgeous poster and pre-release art for the movie. Odd.
None of those come close the MS Paint job on The Matrix Revolutions dvd cover.
This reminds me of all the cool Japanese art work for games compared to the shite that gets put on in the west.Is everyone really that dumb and shallow?
I don’t know if it’s just that I am strange in some way, but when I buy a DVD, I buy it because I want to be able to watch the movie again whenever I want, not because I want it to sit on a shelf and look pretty.But like I said, perhaps I am the odd man out.