criterionforum.org

Take look at the top left corner and you can see the edges of the black paint aren't even in a straight line. It seriously looks like they took an existing boxset and painted black all over it and photoshopped a (pixelized) logo over it. I'm actually hoping that this is just a placeholder.

The actual art

I... am speechless.

I like the inside inserts but I honestly can't decipher what's on the cover below the font. Is that a gun?

yoloswegmaster wrote: Tue Oct 29, 2024 2:08 pm I like the inside inserts but I honestly can't decipher what's on the cover below the font. Is that a gun?

It's a shot of John Doe holding a gun in the rain.

yoloswegmaster wrote: Tue Oct 29, 2024 2:08 pm I like the inside inserts but I honestly can't decipher what's on the cover below the font. Is that a gun?

It's a gun and based on this shot from the film:

I think it's an improvement over the original floating heads poster for this film with its jumble of ugly fonts.

I don't mind it either.

I've seen worse, but it feels so... unenventful. Unspecific to the movie.

I suppose that was one way of getting Kevin Spacey onto the cover.

It feels ominous and creepy to me.

Reminds me of this:

It’s so much worse

Do cows appear in Top Secret!?

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 5:20 am Do cows appear in Top Secret!?

Quite memorably

But yeah, that Drugstore Cowboy is a real pooch.

I feel like they started out making a goofy cover for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and then realized “wait, wrong Van Sant cow movie”.

Just when I thought we'd reached the very depths with that Scarface cover, Criterion surpasses itself with . . whatever they were thinking with that Drugstore Cowboy abortion! Truly an all time worst for me. I mean, I know it's replicating Dillon's drug-fuelled fantasia from the film, but the execution is just so sloppy and ill-conceived. And busy! It reminds me of Homer's Homepage (sorry, Mr. X) from the Simpsons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlX4T2SBk ... ZXBhZ2U%3D

what baffles me about that art is the designer who made it has done tons of Criterion covers and they're usually just fine. how he cooked up that atrocity is rough business. I guess I should really be glad Trainspotting didn't end up looking like that!

The cover both references a hallucinatory sequence in the film and (in keeping with the era) does so in the style of late 20th-century photo-collage. It gets the look right, the clue being the use of different print textures (I guess if someone used actual art by Richard Hamilton, Nancy Spero, or Joe Webb for a DVD cover, they would be ridiculed here).

The sequence that inspired the cover starts 50 seconds in:

https://www.google.com/search?q=drugsto ... oQ0dM,st:0

A really exciting tagline... I hope that what I'm not expecting is the same poor encode as on the US release.

That Paramount Scares might be the most horrific part of that whole package ("It's Not What You're Expecting", indeed).

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 5:20 am Do cows appear in Top Secret!?

No floating Grace Zabriskie, no sale :-"

To quote Sam Jackson in the movie, "This is some repugnant sh!t."

Meh.

What's that thing Katie's holding? A beer bottle? A gun?

"That thing" she's holding on to looks like Peter O'Toole.