Best Posters of January 2012

It’s the end of the month, so it is time to reflect, relax and rewind our way back through the one-sheets, banners, promotional artwork and posters released in the last calendar month, highlighting some of the ones we though were noteworthy.

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One of the first striking posters to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the poster for The Words takes its title very literally, re-crafting star Bradley Cooper using a whole lot of text. A clever idea that has certainly been done before, with Wordles being all the rage these days, but there is an afternoon easily lost inside Cooper’s head. The picture of Cooper’s head, that is, as we have no knowledge of what it would be like to live inside the noggin of People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” 2011. He is aiming to play Satan soon, so let’s just keep a comfortable distance on this one.

West of Memphis is a documentary from Amy Berg, funded by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, investigating the “West Memphis Three” of Jason Baldwin, Jesse Misskelley Jr., and Damien Echols, who were convicted in 1994 of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Jackson and Walsh have been quietly funding this doco for the last 7 years, and the results look remarkable. So does this iconic poster.

Mondo and Sideshow Collectibles have teamed up again to bring a new set of posters from a Disney classic. They will release Martin Ansin’s TRON and TRON: LEGACY poster set. Both posters are glow-in-the-dark and were sold only as a set. We just love Ansin’s art and there is nothing about these posters we don’t like, except for the fact that they aren’t hanging on our walls. The cool retro posters seem like must-owns, but for most of us mere mortals they will be beyond our grasp. Check eBay for inflated prices.

According to the official synopsis, Flake & Flames see the world famous Kool Lifestyle Photographer Dirk “The Pixeleye” Behlau and the acclaimed Pinstriper and Artist, Jesper Bram join forces on an astonishing adventure to make a documentary Film about the Kustom Kulture movement around the globe. It also seems to have resulted in this amazing retro poster, which is a little bit grindhouse, a little bit biker and all completely cool. This one comes from The Dude Designs, who also designed the fabulous Hobo with a Shotgun poster andThe Innkeepers. We suspect this might be an early entry for the best of 2012.

We’ve already seen so many great poster designs for We Need to Talk About Kevin, including the impressive Australian one-sheet, so when this poster quietly dropped during the month, we were most impressed. This one was designed by Mojo, who have been producing a teriffic body of work over the last few years.

A Star Wars poster? Really? A Phantom Menace poster? Surely you must jest. Oh, but we don’t. When Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, it had its share of groovy posters, and most of the new ones have been fairly pants. This one takes advantage of the naturally striking face-mask of Darth Maul, with the simple text taking a note from commercial design. It is a little clumsy, but it kind of works. What we would really like to see, however, is the same poster without the text and must the little Star Wars logo in the corner. It would speak volumes without saying a word.

There is nothing about Prometheus that we aren’t looking forward to, including this international poster for the film. The poster layout is not all that different, but it does reveal more of the top of the giant head glimpsed in the first poster. We just included it here because it’s cool.

The Raven is  a classic case of great poster, crap tagline. “The only man who can stop a serial killer is the man who inspired him”. Really? Then heaven help the police forces of the world if the inspiration for serial killers currently active are fictional or dead. This poster is striking in its simplicity, with the fiery wings that frame star John Cusack, who plays Edgar Allan Poe, simultaneously evoking his classic poem, and the fine line he walks between salvation and damnation. We are looking forward to this film, but if it all goes south, then here’s a fine poster to remember it by.

Last but certainly not least, there were six fabulous posters that Mondo put together for a recent Planet of the Apes promotion, and we couldn’t choose just one. So we chose two. The first is by the awesome Martin Ansin, who gave us his interpretation on the original film. Taking key moments from the film, along with those terrifically detailed Ape faces, it would make a proud addition to any fan’s wall. The second poster, from Ben Edmiston, is a just a bit of fun for the Alamo Drafthouse’s marathon of Apes films. This is should be used a recruitment poster for aspiring film critics.