SummerHours Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Like many people, I regularly bemoan the Photoshop-ization of movie posters without any real knowledge to back it up. Sure, I can tell when heads and bodies don't appear to belong together, or when the movie's stars are not in alignment, as though they were taken from two different photographs and smushed against one another. But where is the hard evidence?

A man named Sebo is my hero. He created a blog and invited readers to "look at movie posters and ads with the eye of a graphic designer." Sebo is an "Artistic Director" and graphic artist in Paris, France, and his blog has concrete examples of "duplications and other hidden actions on Photoshop in images." In the example posted above, he found the source image for the "baby with sunglasses" in the poster for The Hangover: the shot of Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, and Bradley Cooper in an elevator. The poster artist cropped out Helms, Cooper, and the elevator, changed the colors -- Galifianakis and the infant are clearly wearing the same t-shirts in both images -- added sunglasses, and voilà!

Sebo has a very keen eye: he found duplications of the sea in the poster for Becoming Jane, the two different images of a romantic couple merged into one in the poster for Downloading Nancy, the three different images combined for the Summer Hours international poster, and the disturbing way that Matthew McConaughey's face was altered for the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past poster, transforming his mug from movie-star handsome into plasticized perversity. It's all fascinating, and will make me start looking even closer at movie posters.

[ Via Twitter, thanks to Wise Kwai, mattriviera, and transmission.]

Deals. Michel Gondry's doc The Thorn in the Heart may not have generated much positive buzz when it premiered at Cannes last week, but it impressed the folks at Oscilloscope Laboratories. They acquired North American rights to the film and are planning a theatrical release, according to indieWIRE. Thorn examines the life of Gondry's aunt, a schoolteacher for more than 30 years in rural France. David Hudson at IFC's The Daily gathered links to the coverage, in which one critic calls Thorn a "glorified home movie" and another predicts that "normal people will simply walk out of it," while others defend it as "a lovely, minor-key ode" and "mildly diverting."

Box Office. Stephen Elliott's Easy Virtue led the way, earning a very tidy $110,443, according to Box Office Mojo, which averages out to $11,044 per screen. Jessica Biel gives her best performance so far as an American race car driver who marries a young British man (Ben Barnes) after a whirlwind romance, and then must deal with his stuffy mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), curiously distanced father (Colin Firth), and flighty sisters. It's a romantic comedy with dramatic depth, light on its feet yet unafraid to stand still and contemplate fate and mortality.

Expanding into 52 theaters in its second week of release, Rian Johnson's con man comedy The Brothers Bloom rode a wave of appreciative reviews to a per-screen average of $7,394, just a little ahead of Olivier Assayas' critically-acclaimed family drama Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche. (We've embedded the lively trailer for the latter title below.) The highly-praised doc Burma VJ opened on one theater with a modest take of $5,554 -- not bad on a crowded weekend.

After the jump: The festival beat goes on in Seattle and at Silverdocs.

Some people may consider the New York Film Festival a simple "Best Of" sort of event, but the fact that it compiles selections from earlier film fests and merely showcases them in a competition-free program is what I love about it. For those of us New Yorkers who can't always make it to the highlands of Utah and Colorado or the exotic seaside locales of Italy and Southern France, it's nice to know that major festival highlights will likely make their way to Lincoln Center in late September, early October.

This year, the lineup for the 46th NYFF is being noted for its inclusion of films that previously screened at Cannes back in May. Even Steven Soderbergh's four-hour Che (aka The Argentine and Guerilla), which played to mixed reactions in France, even while picking up a best actor prize for star Benicio Del Toro, has been given a spot. Also featured are Cannes leftovers Waltz With Bashir, Wendy and Lucy, Grand Prix-winner Gomorrah and Clint Eastwood's Changeling, which stars Angelina Jolie and has the honor of being NYFF's centerpiece film. Opening the festival is the Palm d'Or winner The Class, while the closing film is Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which premieres a few weeks prior at the Venice Film Festival.

Other exciting big name films include Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time: Redux, Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman and Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours. Surprisingly, Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York, which screened at Cannes, is New York appropriate and is scheduled to open in October, is missing from the lineup.

The complete list of NYFF selections, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, can be found after the jump: