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swo17 wrote:

Where are the 25 other releases that movielocke promised?!

Love Tokyo Drifter.

I'm going to have to see the Suzukis in person before I can make my mind up about them, but the cover for Design for Living is gorgeous, one of the most elegant designs I've seen from Criterion in a while.

I can't look at Design for Living without thinking March looks stoned (which just makes me think everyone else looks stoned by association).

I absolutely love the Design for Living cover as well. Such a great still. I like the Suzuki covers, but I think I actually prefer those original, completely garish cover designs. They were some of the best of Criterion's early DVD covers.

I try to avoid getting hot and bothered about cover art, but the design for Branded to Kill seems unusually bad to me. And the design for Tokyo Drifter is pretty striking which makes it look even worse, side by side. These films were badly in need of upgrades, given how atrocious the previous editions were, but as mediocre as the old cover art for Branded to Kill was, I'd rather they'd left it well enough alone if this is what they came up with to replace it. If they wanted to use the butterfly motif they should have used an actual image from the film, instead of slapping those shitty drawings on top of Shishido's face. It's tonally inappropriate to the film and just plain looks bad.

Feego wrote:I absolutely love the Design for Living cover as well. Such a great still. I like the Suzuki covers, but I think I actually prefer those original, completely garish cover designs. They were some of the best of Criterion's early DVD covers.

I may not buy the Blu, but I'd pay that as a poster.

Normally I hate the three-strip dvd cover design, but in the case of Tokyo Drifter it works well and is appropriate to the film. I quite like the new cover art.

Branded to Kill? Not so much, but I was indifferent to the original cover art, so this doesn't bother me.

The Phantom Carriage
Carlos

The Design for Living cover is gorgeous and I like the Tokyo Drifter cover but I think the Branded to Kill is one of the worst I`ve seen in a long time...

knives wrote:I may not buy the Blu, but I'd pay that as a poster.

Ditto. It arrives at the last minute and has become my favorite cover of the year. It's not my favorite Lubitsch, but I want to see that on my shelf.

The problem with Branded to Kill is that it's not... enough. It captures none of the perversity or pop-art insanity of the film. The artist could at the very least redesign those butterflies (add some patterns to those wings, at least!)

There weren't any patterns in the movie though. It's a perfectly fine cover even if it doesn't capture the movie entirely. I'm not sure if any cover could entirely convey that anyway. Even the original one went covered the bases you're talking about didn't capture some of the stuff that this one does.

The problem is, it doesn't capture ANYTHING. It just defaces an image of the star's face in a way that isn't graphically or conceptually interesting. It's lazy, bad design. The fact that it's difficult to capture the essence of the movie doesn't excuse not trying very hard. The cover takes a motif from the film and decontextualizes it to the point of meaninglessness. Which might be okay if the resulting image were striking, but it's not. It's cluttered and ugly.

I actually think the Branded to Kill cover is the best of the lot. :-"

I think they're all great. Let's just hope that they sort out the aspect ratios for the Suzukis! (where's the fingers crossed emoticon?)

Hopefully the ones for Fighting Elegy & Youth of The Beast will be better.

I like the Branded to Kill cover. It captures something of the in-your-face garishness of the film.

karmajuice wrote:I like the Branded to Kill cover. It captures something of the in-your-face garishness of the film.

I actually think it's one of his more elegantly composed and photographed films. The problem with the butterfly drawings is how crude they are, drawn in that stupid, increasingly common web-cartoonist style which barely passes for clip art. They're obviously just crapped out on a Wacom by someone who can't otherwise handle real pen and ink. I mean, say what you will about the Clowes covers for the Fuller films, but at least they're real fucking drawings done in a manner appropriate to the era the films were made and set in. Why not hire a good Japanese poster artist to design the Suzuki stuff? There are plenty of of such famous designers from that era still alive.

They seem pretty authentic to me.

ooooo.....burn!

Oh snap! I was thinking of the wall of ornate butterflies...

I'm still not convinced one way or the other on the Suzukis, but I do like the use of pink in both- it ties them in visually with the Nikkatsu Noir set, and I enjoy most any use of the color that pulls it away from the weirdly gendered thing that pink is generally associated with.

The Four Feathers
Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom
Harakiri