Real Talk: when I saw these atrocious X-Men First Class posters my first instinct was to look for the Photoshop layers window so I could move those odd feathered heads. Why is that passive white space cutting into Professor X’s eyebrow?  How did this happen?

I’m guessing that this was entirely intentional, and the marketing team is hoping these “go viral” so that everyone with a semblance of design sense blogs about the posters in outrage, bringing some much needed media attention to the movie before it’s released.  This marketing strategy is known as bridging the GAP.

A Star Wars poster designed by Olly Moss for Mondo. It’s pretty great. I’d hang it in my dorm room, at least, if I were in some sort of situation that required me to live in a dorm. But: I’ve been seeing many blogs mention this poster and praising the “unique and clever vision” Moss brings to the design while lamenting the blandness of modern movie posters.

It’s pretty easy to make unique and clever movie posters when the films are thirty years old and contain instantly recognizable images. As beautiful as this is, there’s no way a poster in the same vein would work for an emerging intellectual property. What is this movie about? A robot with two different color eyes? Maybe he’s wearing 3D glasses and has little people living inside his chest? If I hadn’t grown up watching Star Wars I would have no idea. This says nothing about the film other than “we hired a really good illustrator to do the posters.” Don’t blame modern film posters for wanting to attract an audience.

This has been your host Cranky Joe McStressblog bringing you yet another installment of What Really Grinds My Gears. Sorry.

Little known fact: David Lynch was asked to direct Return of the Jedi. This is a fact, because it’s on his IMDB trivia page. I’ve spent a lot of time imagining a Lynchian Star Wars film, so it’s great to hear him actually talk about this. It could have been so good! I’m a firm believer in the awesomeness of Dune.

Richard Marquand does deserve credit for his directorial work on Return of the Jedi, if only because he gave us the second most important line of dialogue in cinematic history.

The first most important line of dialogue in cinematic history also happens to be from a Star Wars film, for what it’s worth.

October 30th, 2009: When I realized that Superman III wasn’t just a bad movie, it was a really bad movie. God bless you, Christopher Reeve, for putting up with this.