kevyip1 wrote:(Btw, is "dismembered" the correct word to use here? Doesn't "dismembered" apply only to limbs?)
I don't know if you really want an answer to that, but...saying her face is dismembered would mean that her face isn't attached to her body. That's not the case in these covers. But, I still knew what you meant.
But part of her face is indeed not attached to her body, because it is not visible on the cover due to the designer's penchant to chop it off. Perhaps "decapitated" is more correct, but it only means the entire head being chopped off. There really is no word to describe a partially chopped-off head that we are witnessing here. "Dismembered", on the other hand, pertains to a wholly cut off limb or just a portion being cut off. Whether you lost a whole arm, half an arm, 1/4 of an arm, you are still "dismembered."
There is indeed a term called "partial dismemberment." But it only pertains to a limb that is *almost* severed from the body and is still "hanging on" by a little bit of flesh.
Matt, feel free to dismember this post from the body of this thread if you find it too irrelevant...
Just a weird question that has been buggin me for some time:
Should the cover artwork ALWAYS reflect the age of the actual film or is it OK for Criterion to make modern artwork (like The Sword Of Doom) that will lure some unaware buyers to believe they are buying a new cool movie, but obviously ends up with an old cool movie? I would not have guessed that movie was from 1966! Yes, one should flip the cover and read but my feeling is that many people takes chances when they see a cool cover and there is nothing else "new" in the store they want.
pmunger wrote:I'm not sure but are there that many people who take guess based simply on a cool cover with the usual criterion collection price tag?
Although they say "you can't judge a book by its cover," I read a couple years ago about what a HUGE impact book covers actually have on book sales. People DO judge a book by its cover, and a large percentage of book sales is based on that. I would bet that the same is true of DVD's. If you throw in a great description, which includes words like "landmark film," and it's a part of the "elite" Criterion Collection, I imagine that it all helps their marketing a great deal.
The practice of cropping faces has also been a trend in literary fiction and biography covers over the past few years to the point of cliche. I guess it is about postmodernism's sense of indeterminacy--the impossibility of representation or something. Most troubling is a book on Lincoln featuring a full seated portrait of him cropped right across the face below the eyes. Unsettling in this case and verging on the sadistic.
That looks precisely like one of those lame fan-art covers where some lazy bastard has done nothing more than slap a Criterion banner on the poster. What's that page-turn corner thing on the bottom right?
The thing in the corner indicates that the cover is reversible and that the reverse image is Eric Chase Anderson art. You can bet that the two-disc version has the poster art on a cardboard sleeve and the Anderson art underneath, just like Royal Tenenbaums. You can see larger versions the single and double-disc versions here:
That is godawful. I hated the poster for this film, and it's a shame it's what Buena Vista stuck with. I'll be buying the double disc of this, if anyone wants the cardboard outer shell you can dig through my trashcan for it along with the plastic wrap it's sold in (same place the Royal Tenenbaums cover is). Good riddance. I'm looking forward to seeing the Eric Chase Anderson version.
The cover's certainly not up to the usual Criterion standard. The House of Mouse was probably very much behind the wheel on this one.
It looks like with the single disc they're trying to lure in the casual viewer by zooming in to get images of the cast as large as the poster allows. To hell with the fact you end up with a cramped composition or the yellow Criterion banner becoming indistinct over the sub. I suppose it makes some commercial sense.
Excellent. The cover though is very commercial as stated above and at the buttom of my list. How wonderful life would be if "Groundhog Day" was #301.......!?
They're all up, but they've got some kind of image format problem -- my browser at least (and probably Denti's too, I take it) refuses to show the covers for the individual titles but I can download them and convert them to an apparently working format just fine. So, as a service to mankind, here they all are:
EDIT: Well, they fixed that pretty quickly, didn't they. (Posted images removed)
Last edited by ola t on Thu Feb 24, 2005 4:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Okay! This is what I call cover ART! Yes! Definitely among CC's best covers and this is the kind of thing that makes you grab it from the shelves and marvel at it in complete geekiness drunken reverie! Job well done, guys!
I want this set, but was probably going to hold off just because it's $80. It's sad because it should be on the weight of the films, but damn, after seeing those I REALLY want this set now. They're all awesome covers.
