IWTST: Elysium and Upstream Color and Wrong

I want to see these 3 absurd sci-fi films...

Elysium | Neill Blomkamp | 2013 | USA | Format: Redcode RAW/35mm  | 105 min


Upstream Color | Shane Carruth | 2013 | USA | Format: 35mm  | 96 min


Wrong | Quentin Dupieux | 2012 | France/USA | Format: 35mm | 94 min

Stuff I Dig: Weird but Dope Movie Posters

I love movie posters that enhance or comment or go beyond the film it advertises.  In doing so, it becomes a work of art.  Although I had always admired a good movie poster when I saw one, I hadn't noticed the artistic possibilities of the movie poster until I read this article by Michael Atkinson, "POLISH MOVIE POSTERS: One of the Great Secrets of Twentieth-Century Pop Art" in Believer's 2009 Film issue:

Pulp form, thumbnail allusiveness, hyperbole, uncouth syntax—this much we all understand about movie posters, truly a public art form only Papuan tribesmen could claim to be ignorant of. Until we go to Poland. Outside of its fevered circle of cultists, the authentic phenomenon of Polish movie posters remains one of the great secrets of twentieth-century pop art. There are large-format books published here showcasing Italian movie art, Japanese posters, American exploitation graphics (no shortage of these), and, remarkably, amateur posters for Hollywood films made by Ghanaian artists on secondhand flour sacks. But none of the Polish. Nowhere else but in Poland has the very concept of movie-poster design gotten such a radical overhaul, and nowhere else has it so persisted at identifying itself as a freestanding object. The primary philosophical singularity at work in the tradition of Polish movie posters going back at least to the ’50s is this: The poster art need not visually suggest the movie in question in any concrete way whatsoever. In fact, direct visual reference to anything in the film is often shunned. The poster should at most semiconsciously evoke the thematic feeling of the movie (or its title—in many instances, Polish posters seem to be created with abject ignorance of the cinematic work itself). The artists chosen are prized for their intensely idiosyncratic visions, to which the movie-poster form and the marketing exigencies of a particular film must defer, not vice versa.

Some Polish movie posters here and here.

And now here's this fan-made poster on I read about on reddit and the AV Club. 
Simply dope.

Btw, here's a little message from "the guy who created this poster here."

So asides from watching the film a dozen or so times, for this poster I actually watched it three times while making it. I wanted to capture as much detail of every suit as possible, even down to the folds of the handkerchiefs. It truly was an obsession.
You can read more about the process of how I made that poster and the others in my Scorsese series here:
http://ibraheemyoussef.com/blog/?p=615
Edit: I'm also participating next month at the Spoke Art, "SCORSESE: an art show tribute" happening at Bold Hype Gallery in Chelsea, NYC April 19th, with a lot of other great artists, show will be on for one week only. Here is a little more on the show from the Spoke Art FB page:
http://on.fb.me/13RCOrm

JST: Dial M for Murder

Dial M for Murder | Alfred Hitchcock | 1954 | USA | Format: 35mm  | 105 min

A talkie script conveyed with such attentive visual camerawork (what else can you expect from Hitchcock?). A movie that reveals how diabolical plans on paper are always perfect until human error factors in when performed in real life. Also, no character in this movie is completely innocent.  I truly enjoyed Hitchcock's use of an active narrator to tell this story because he didn't actually need to embellish the action of what was essentially a stage play.  The GOD POV to show Tony's plan and the hiding of the key are my favorite moments.

But don't take my word for it... David Bordwell has an eye-opening and insightful analysis of this film which is worth the time of any filmmaker to read in full.
Money quote: 

No viewer will ever forget the far more hideous death that the would-be killer suffers onscreen. After flopping over Margot, apparently dead, he snaps back to life spasmodically, as if jolted by bursts of electricity. His body yanks itself erect, his arms twisting helplessly as he tries to withdraw the knife, before he turns over and hits the floor . The impact drives the knife further into his back. Hitchcock celebrates the moment with an Eisensteinian overlapping cut to a close-up of the scissors. He had a special pit dug, he proudly told a reporter, to make the lens flush with the floor.

So much for just setting up the camera and photographing the people acting. We could point to other alterations from the play, such as the strained drawing-room courtesies that frame the whole story. “Let me get you another drink,” is the film’s first line, as Margot and Mark pull out of a passionate clinch. At the end, nabbed, Tony offers to pour his wife and her lover a drink, and then asks the detective: “I suppose you’re still on duty, Inspector?” There’s also the peculiar mustache motif. The play text and the film dialogue mock Lesgate/ Swann slightly for growing one, but the film adds the mini-gag of self-satisfied Inspector Hubbard calmly combing his own mustache.

Fine as these isolated moments are, Hitchcock’s treatment is more thoroughgoing. He does, as he tells us, use cinematic means “to narrate a story taken from a stage play.” But those means are unusual and instructive.

Jason Scully's 57 Guard-passing BJJ Techniques

5 Things Blockbuster Movies Can Learn from Jurassic Park

And I agree with all of them.