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Movie Posters from Africa That Are So Bad, They're Good

https://www.utterlyinteresting.com/post/bizarre-movie-posters-from-africa-that-are-so-bad-they-re-good
209•bookofjoe•2h ago

Comments

alephnerd•2h ago
Ghana, not Africa.

When will Westerners stop treating Africa as a monoculture.

TheCraiggers•1h ago
The article says it's from Ghana in the second sentence and other places throughout. Is that not enough?
zdragnar•1h ago
To be fair, it would be rather odd to use Asia in the title only for the article to refer more oe less exclusively to China or Vietnam.
Barbing•1h ago
Good comparison, thanks, helps put it into perspective.

Either of these better titles or no?

“…from Ghana, Africa…”

“…from Africa’s Ghana…”

(China, Asia & Asia’s China don’t really fit so probably not?)

em500•1h ago
Or how about just “from Ghana”?
cogman10•1h ago
My guess is the editor is banking on people not knowing where Ghana is. Hence the "Africa".

The Asia comparison would work better if instead of talking about China we were talking about Laos.

prmph•13m ago
Really? I don't think that's the real reason why.
mitthrowaway2•1h ago
Definitely not. Ghana, Africa is phrased as though Ghana were a city in the country of Africa.
TheCraiggers•1h ago
True, although Asia is also nearly twice the size of Africa, which might have something to do with that.
ozgrakkurt•1h ago
And Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, it is fair to complain that they don’t just put Ghana in the title. It is not that the title is unacceptable but it is just wrong and weird
exFAT•49m ago
Africa's GDP is also 1/10th of Europe's...
sometimes_all•45m ago
And Canada's population is 1/20th that of Europe, yet we all know where that is.

No need to cherry-pick some random metric and try and justify a point that's not worth justifying.

exFAT•34m ago
Maybe the English-speaking world. I think most people couldn't place Canada on a map. More people than Ghana or any African country, certainly, but that's because it's more famous. GDP is more correlated to this than population or landmass.

I'm not justifying anything. I also think it's more polite to say "Ghana" rather than "Africa". I just don't agree with the arguments.

sometimes_all•22m ago
I am fairly certain that most people in the non-English speaking world will also be able to place Canada on the map - I'd assume the French know exactly where Canada is. But I digress; it's not about placing a country on a map. It's more about we know that Canada is a separate country, and it has an identity distinct from other countries in its continent.

This goes beyond mere politeness; that you used this word is a bit suggestive. Refusing to acknowledge an identity is far more than just a lack of politeness.

f17428d27584•58m ago
Do not use the Mercator for area comparison. You are off by 15 million square kilometers.

Asia is only ~50% larger than Africa.

croes•1h ago
You only see that after the click.

I expected different posters for the same movie from different African countries.

Imagine buying a cook book of European cuisine only listing UK dishes.

Elidrake24•1h ago
I can appreciate where you're coming from in general, but this article isn't that. All Headlines suck, by their nature they have to cater to the lowest common denominator in who they assume their audience is, so we're using the headline to place an unfamiliar country in a continent that is familiar enough, at least in name.
alephnerd•1h ago
That is not an acceptable reason for clickbait.
jchw•1h ago
How exactly is that clickbait? You might not like it, but that doesn't make it clickbait. That's like saying it's clickbait to say Europe in a headline instead of Austria.
croes•1h ago
If you claim to show the art of a continent but only show art from one country it’s misleading.

Like a tour guide for the US and you only list places in Texas.

cogman10•1h ago
It's not clickbait. The article provides exactly what it says.

The only debatable part is that it's not all of Africa. But otherwise it's a very accurate description of the whole article.

Clickbait is "You won't believe the art that came out of this continent!" or "Look at the wild things artists did to attract an audience!".

sometimes_all•1h ago
That's not an excuse.

A sample from the website's About page:

> this site is my attempt at creating something that’s dedicated to discovering the hidden gems of the online realm (whether they be in the form of academic discourse, cutting-edge technology, cultural commentary, or artistic expression) and sharing them with care and consideration.

How is treating a country in the second largest continent in the world - which contains more than 50 countries, most of which have very distinct cultures - as representative of that continent showing care and consideration? Ghana is not an unfamiliar country, and most people, at the very least, know it's in Africa. If I confused Mexico with Canada, or Germany with Albania, I'd be treated as a dimwit, but somehow it's totally fine if I don't know the difference between Ghana and Kenya.

I agree with the parent comment; this "unfamiliar country" business needs to stop.

hiccuphippo•1h ago
A lot of people say America as if it was a country and not a whole continent or two.
ndsipa_pomu•32m ago
And Canadians tend to get upset if you refer to them as an American, though technically they are.
fart-fart-FART•57m ago
are you lost? tumblr is down the hall and to the left.
ALM•39m ago
The original commenters critique is valid, as the discussion illustrates and ultimately vindicates. This comment you have left in response is dismissive, childish, and lacking of any meaningful contribution. Although, I suppose with a username like yours it should be of no surprise this is all you could meet them with. It is nevertheless disappointing to see such low-brow low-effort commentary on HN, and it is ironically your comment that is misplaced rather than the original commenter.
fart-fart-FART•12m ago
words, words, words.

a shit stirrer shows up and now 2/3 of the comments in the thread are offtopic. is that the kind of commentary you seek?

Razengan•7m ago
Wait till you hear about Asian people!
Reubend•2h ago
These are wonderful. They're so full of character. But I must imagine a "screening" on a TV would be a terrible experience to watch. I guess if you had never been to a full movie theater, you'd never know what you were missing out on.
Arubis•1h ago
It’s a much more communal experience. Less screen, sure, but a lot more audience participation
decremental•49m ago
We're all familiar with African audience participation at the movies.
rstarast•10m ago
Elaborate? I'm not
wingerlang•1h ago
I grew up with VHS tapes on CRT screens. It was totally fine, I watched more movies back then than I do today.
inglor_cz•1h ago
In Czechoslovakia ~ 1988, video players were rather expensive and complicated to acquire, so we as kids watched movies from cassettes together as well, at the homes of the few who were rich enough to afford them.

One of those parents was a truck driver who was able to cross the Iron Curtain and always smuggled something interesting back.

edge17•58m ago
Yea, also often the movies were cams from people that recorded in the theater so you can see the audience walking around etc.

Quality hardly matters when the real treasure was getting the movie in the first place.

duxup•1h ago
Tons of life in these.
edge17•55m ago
My best movie experiences were probably watching hard to acquire bootlegs in the pre-digital age. The barriers were just so much higher, half the excitement was just getting a crappy copy.
ggambetta•48m ago
I had Star Wars in VHS, with the most ridiculously awful Spanish subtitles you can imagine. I wish I still had it, or had some pictures at least :_)
xeromal•2h ago
The robinhood one is fantastic.
NoboruWataya•1h ago
That and the Terminator 1 one[0] are genuinely great IMO.

[0] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d5cc5f_5c451a5882264776a4...

xeromal•1h ago
Yeah that one hooked me as well
daveguy•1h ago
The Robinhood one is a direct copy of one of the original movie posters. The others are a lot more interesting, imo.
mrec•1h ago
How could they leave out the classic Paddington one?

https://deadly-prey-gallery.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/files/D18...

fullshark•1h ago
I smiled at this, then immediately wondered if it was a knowing parody, then immediately wondered if was AI generated and got sad.
donatj•1h ago
I had the exact same human experience.
dfxm12•53m ago
Look up deadly prey gallery, the website hosting the picture. They commission some OG artists & some new artists to make new posters specifically in this style. It's legit. This one is signed by Nana Agyq.
sota_pop•1h ago
All of the ones with Arnold are actually good.
gorbachev•1h ago
I was just about to comment the same. The Terminator 1 poster is really good!
voidfunc•1h ago
Yea that would be awesome framed and on my living room wall.
fainpul•17m ago
Umm, scroll further down until you come to "Terminator 2" :)
gjm11•1h ago
The text claims "Always at least one exploding head" and the number of exploding heads in the 20 posters shown is zero. It lists a number of "favourites from the genre" not one of which is actually shown. The text, as you might surmise from the previous two points, has the definite scent of LLMs about it.

The net effect of this is that, while I can look at the pictures and admire them (if that's the word) I have no idea whether I can trust anything in the actual text, since any given claim might just be an LLM confabulation.

(Which is too bad, since on the face of it it seems quite interesting, and probably many of the things the LLM has generated are in fact true.)

Less of this, please.

latexr•1h ago
And six of the seven links in the “sources” are dead. For an article published last year. I searched them in the Internet Archive and didn’t find a single match. And we’re talking CNN, BBC, The Guardian, amongst others.
malfist•1h ago
This is really disappointing. Did any of these things actually exist?
latexr•1h ago
> Did any of these things actually exist?

The single live link suggests that they do.

https://deadlypreygallery.com

zahlman•1h ago
Agreed, and "definite scent" is underselling it. I didn't even attempt any deep analysis; I just skimmed a bit and found this bit and noped right out:

> The posters were typically painted on used flour sacks, sewn together and primed for colour. These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse.

> And the designs? Let’s just say they didn’t rely too heavily on accuracy.

LLM writing tropes that are so bad, they're good.

mock-possum•46m ago
Yeah it’s sadly obvious this is llm-generated
low_tech_love•7m ago
The worst part of this is how it has this kind of buzzfeed-like style of semi-tongue-in-cheek-but-still-politically-correct aesthetics. Is this what regression to the mean is in the future of AI writing? Are we doomed to read buzzfeed everywhere now?
Mistletoe•1h ago
A shop near me sells these and they are amazing. Lots more on the instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/losone_african_arts/

RRWagner•1h ago
No comments here about the odd non-standard "say yes to say no" sliders for data collection and selling? I've only seen this a few times in privacy settings windows but enough times that I'm now wary of just assuming that gray means opt-out.
latexr•1h ago
Not sure what you’re seeing, but I’ve seen that particular window several times (and no sliders). Very easy to “Disagree” or “Reject All”.

Anyway, those are usually avoided in comments unless they are particularly egregious, because as per the guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ChrisMarshallNY•1h ago
Looks like MOBA needs to add a new wing: https://museumofbadart.org
softfalcon•1h ago
The Kevin Costner Robin Hood one is really well done though
5-•57m ago
bonus: soviet star wars posters: https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-poste...

(the bbc seem to have lost the body of their original article)

newobj•46m ago
if they're so bad they're good ... they're actually just good. probably because they capture something increasingly rare: the human and personal touch of an artist who's not straight jacketed by "safe mode" marketing, editorial norms, analytics, blah blah blah
gitremote•10m ago
Yes, they're amazingly good given they didn't have copies of the original posters, Internet access to get reference images, or even VCRs at home to play the movies themselves.

The clickbait title is about "Africa" and "bad", but it's specifically about Ghana and awesome.

prmph•22m ago
Why not just say movie posters from Ghana? What is connection between these and the concept of African, I wonder?

Anyway, I'm Ghanaian, and you can AMA. There's a lot of such art, many on walls of the erstwhile movie houses. Most of them are very realistic and collectible, but I guess only the garish ones command attention and so are easier to make into a story.

As a kid I once watched an artist paint one of these on a wall in a few hours, was very cool.

sigwinch•5m ago
There are some Ghanaian movies trending right now on streaming. And part of the marketing is that Ghana produces way more per capita than Nigeria.
kelvinjps10•22m ago
The jursssick one looks sick https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d5cc5f_1dadcd401b9e43c083...
scuff3d•21m ago
The Sister Act one is the greatest thing I've ever seen
JKCalhoun•16m ago
Is some ways, that poster for "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is more violent than the actual film.
low_tech_love•12m ago
Amazing images, shitty lazy meaningless AI text.
fart-fart-FART•8m ago
the matrix has fallen.

billions must die.

29athrowaway•8m ago
Looks like the US box art for Mega Man 1.

I like this movie poster art. I think it conceptually reflects what you will see in the movie. It also looks genuine and authentic.

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