Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.5

[andyli]

Wow! Fantastic cover art for The Rules of the Game!! And F&A comes as a pleasant surprise.

[rwaits]

I hated Rules of the Game for the first five seconds of looking at it but now I love it.

[mfunk9786]

[denti alligator]

[referring to 12 Angry Men:] Damn, that's nice!

[rwaits]

Didn't see 12 Angry Men coming at all. That just made my month.

[Saturnome]

New covers are very good so far. I liked the old Rules of the Game, but the new one feels like an old french newspaper cartoon, I like it.

Edit: Uh. Right. Three Colors.

[Tom Hagen]

Now that it's official, that Blue cover art is an atrocity.

[andyli]

That 12th man must be really angry on the blu-ray version.

[domino harvey]

Three Colors = Officially the Worst Cover Art in Criterion History

[mfunk9786]

We need to get a definitive post going atop this thread to avoid throwing the frame off, and avoid "where are the new covers?" posts from people not going back a page to check out swo's post.

[domino harvey]

On the positive tip, 12 Angry Men is the kind of cover they should be doing

[spocker]

Hmm... No criterion field to the left on the Rushmore blue?

[mfunk9786]

Very weird indeed. Wow, I have to agree with everyone else, that Three Colors art is awful awful awful. And it is badly photoshopped on top of everything.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I love that still detail for F&A: three different brooding lines of sight, one comin' at ya.
The RotG looks too much like a New Yorker magazine cover for my taste.
The first angry man has a cauliflower ear. Looks faintly like a paint version of Drew & Josh Friedman caricatures, but it's the most interesting cover. I like it.
Trying to be generous w/ trois couleurs: mediation? The surface of a television screen, the wrinkling surface of a billboard, umm... i give up. Sucks balls.

[ellipsis7]

Terrible new cover - is it a comedy? (I think no)....

[movielocke]

Rules of the Game some of the best criterion cover art ever. So much better than the blue squares.

This is the very first time an eclipse has been released in the month of November or December. that leaves only December as never having had an eclipse release.

[Cinéslob]

I'm rather taken aback by the consensus on here: I find the collected artwork for the Three Colours to be outstanding, whereas the cover for Rules is a true stinker of the most noxious order.

[Tom Amolad]

Terrible new cover - is it a comedy? (I think no)....

I think it is . . . among other things.

[ellipsis7]

Terrible new cover - is it a comedy? (I think no)....

I think it is . . . among other things.

There are undoubtedly comic elements, alongside romantic, political, tragic and banal too, so it seems unreasonable to reflect just one of very many rich strands to this multilayered drama...

[perkizitore]

The boxset cover of Three Colors is ok, but the individual covers are horrible.

[Drucker]

Personally I think the old cover was just amazing. I think the new one will grow on me, and it's not bad...but that old one was hard to beat. One of my favorite films. Can't wait to see Renoir in blu!

[Cronenfly]

That's some swimminghorses-level work on the Three Colors covers.

[DeusEx]

Yeah, the Rules cover nicely captures the cartoonish aesthetic that Renoir was known for.

[Tom Amolad]

Terrible new cover - is it a comedy? (I think no)....

I think it is . . . among other things.

There are undoubtedly comic elements, alongside romantic, political, tragic and banal too, so it seems unreasonable to reflect just one of very many rich strands to this multilayered drama...

Well sure, but I'm not so certain the new cover does that. One of the film does so spectacularly is to convey tragedy through comedy, and vice versa, and I can certainly read this cover as doing something of the same thing.

It's certainly a different approach from the old packaging, which showed a modernist film made up of conventional elements. It was a stunning package, but not the only way of approaching the film -- and probably not the best way to give those unfamiliar with it a sense of what it's like. This one emphasizes the conventional elements from which it is made up, but it doesn't preclude the transformations with which the film invests them.

[scotty2]

Rules cover looks to be by one of the more prolific cover illustrators for The New Yorker, Barry Blitt.