Alternative Movie Posters Vol 2: Pun intended

Florianne Jimenez

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I would buy the book for a movie fan or a design buff in your life

A PINOY'S TAKE. Dylan Dylanco’s reimagining of the 'Fight Club' poster. Image courtesy of Florianne Jimenez

MANILA, Philippines – One of my favorite thinkers, Pierre Bourdieu, said that our aesthetic choices say a lot about who we are — our class, cultural background.

How we decorate our houses, our cars, our cities and even our own bodies can speak volumes about our identity.

What, then, do we make of the movie poster and the people who display them?

Maybe that person is being retro. I remember a time when it was easy to get movie posters. Tower Records and Music One sold them among the band posters and Anne Geddes prints. If you saw a poster you really liked, you could buy it and take it to a frame shop to get it mounted on plywood, and you would have immortalized your excellent (or perhaps questionable) taste in movies.

For some reason, that practice has ended, and I don’t know where people get movie posters anymore, or whether they still do.

Or perhaps that person is advertising that they’re a movie buff, and they love a particular movie so much that they want to tell people, without speaking, that this movie means something to them. It also demonstrates that they love the experience of watching movies themselves.

After all, movie posters are relics from the cinema, a site which is slowly dying because of the advent of streaming and downloading films from the web.

While I would love to collect the posters of my favorite films, it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a thrill in it these days. At present, movie posters are fairly uninteresting and uncollectible. They all share the same aesthetic: high gloss, stylized text, actors’ names and faces featured prominently. One only needs to go to the nearest cinema and note how unremarkable movie posters are in terms of design.

The opposite of this overly slick aesthetic is what a book like “Alternative Movie Posters Vol. 2” celebrates. The book is the second in a series of the best fan-made movie posters on the Internet.

Designs range from minimalist to over-the-top, but they all have one thing in common: each one was made by a fan who loved the film, understood it and wanted to express their interpretation visually. There are no glossy photographs, beaming Hollywood star smiles, or garish 3D text in any of the posters in this book.

Instead, each poster relies on a visual pun based on the film’s narrative.

Take, for example, Dylan Dylanco’s poster of “Fight Club.” Dylan is the only Filipino artist included in this series, and her work was picked up from her Tumblr account.

At first glance, Dylan’s poster is more gory and raw than the original, and the vector art carries none of its dark realism. Dylan explains that this is intentional, and that perhaps this is a sentiment shared by most movie poster designers.

“I really wanted to make a poster that was very different from the look of the original poster, but still captured the core of the movie. For ‘Fight Club,’ which is one of my favorite films, I wanted to focus on the idea of fights and the human element of punching each other out.”

Even though all these posters are available online, there is something more special about having a collection of them in print form. In print, we tend to have more focus on our subject, whereas reading or viewing things on the Internet doesn’t invite much contemplation.

What I do wish “Alternative Movie Posters” had was, in its physical form, the original, old-fashioned spirit of the movie poster.

The movie poster is large and glossy, and is meant to be displayed. In contrast, the book is small, about the size of a paperback. While the size is economical, and ensures that buyers are getting good print quality, a small softbound book doesn’t carry the same impact as a large, coffee-table book.

It doesn’t invite people to open it up and flip through the pages, which is the best compliment one can give to an art book. I hope the publishers will consider selling a larger, more expensive, print-on-demand version for people who want to show off the book.

I would buy the book for a movie fan or a design buff in your life. A movie fan will enjoy the visual puns embedded in each poster, which reward those who have seen the films.

A design buff will like the range of designs in the book, and might want to flip through the book for a quick burst of inspiration. If you like movies, and if you want to see how other minds see them, this book is a must-have. – Rappler.com

 

For book orders, email Dylan Dylanco at dylandylanco@yahoo.com, or checkout www.alternativemovieposters.com.

You can also read:

Bo Jimenez


Florianne L. Jimenez is a Palanca award-winning non-fiction writer, with a creative interest in the self, places and consciousness. She has a massive to-be-read pile dating back to 2008, which includes such titles as ‘The Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez,’ ‘Book 5 of Y: The Last Man,’ and ‘The Collected Works of TS Spivet: A Novel.’

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