Sometimes I really wish David Bordwell’s blog permitted comments. Mostly it’s better that it doesn’t, but the man’s last post has made me want to discuss the art of movie titles for a whole week now. And it didn’t help that coinciding in time with Bordwell’s post was another one of those sidebars in Entertainment Weekly pointing out some new movies with misleading titles. Yes, Lakeview Terrace does sound like a period romance, as do many other badly titled films (Elizabethtown and Wicker Park come to mind). This weekend also sees two new movies employing the method of borrowing song titles, which are typically not appropriate (Ghost Town seems more like a horror western hybrid, while My Best Friend’s Girl actually fits its plot).
Well, fortunately for me (and hopefully you), I can bring the discussion over to SpoutBlog, though not quite as in depth as Bordwell. I’ll be more than happy to have a conversation in the comments section regarding the more general topic of movie titling, but for now I’ll kick things off with a list of what I find to be the most interesting movie titles of the past decade. It’s been a time when studios and filmmakers have been very loose with ill-fitting and overlong titles, as well as some that are too plainly literal (Snakes on a Plane), but the following selections have the benefit of featuring clever, well-chosen and more meaningful monikers.
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“My colleagues, students, and wife think I’m nuts to like National Treasure,” admits master film historian David Bordwell. He then launches into an extremely compelling defense of why the Jerry Bruckheimer franchise is “more informative about American history than Fahrenheit 9/11. More brain-teasing, and far more enjoyable, than I’m Not There,” and, perhaps most crucially, evidence that Bruckheimer is “the most astute producer now working in Hollywood.”
Of course, I enjoy the dig at I’m Not There, but the whole post is worth a read, if only for the novelty of watching an academic explain why a “dumb” Hollywood movie is a lot smarter than knee-jerk critical cynicism would lead us to believe.
Rudolf Arnheim, the author of seminal film theory text Film As Art, died in June at the age of 102. Like Chris Campbell, I’m just finding this out now, but as Arnheim was one of the few theorists whose work I really connected to in grad school, I thought a late mention was better than none at all. A few essential Arnheim links follow after the jump.
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