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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• “Some believe that with the country reeling from the economic breakdown on Wall Street, moviegoers will go for comedy,” says Variety, which predicts My Best Friend’s Girl to top the weekend over Lakeview Terrace. Of course, there’s also Ricky Gervais yukking it up in Ghost Town, but The Hollywood Reporter notes that film has tracked so poorly that Paramount cut back its screen count. I guess moviegoers won’t go for just any comedy in depressing times.
• Forget all the rumors about Russell Crowe or Colin Farrell playing Watson to Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s adaptation. Jude Law is now reportedly in talks to play the detective’s associate. And so I must elementarily deduce that Sherlock Holmes will surprisingly not be a hit.
• The kid from A Christmas Story will make his directorial debut with Couples Retreat, which will star his usual collaborators Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, as well as Jason Bateman.
• Luke Wilson and Giovanni Ribisi have been cast in a film about the beginnings of the Internet porn industry. But will any of its target audience leave the computer long enough to go see it?
• Finally, though this isn’t big news, the 3-D animated adaptation of my favorite kid’s book of all time, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, has rounded out its voice cast with James Caan, Anna Faris, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Bruce Campbell, Tracy Morgan and Mr.T!. I can not wait.

If you took one look at the existence of the new movie Ghost Town and dismissed it on account of its familiarity, you’re ignoring the potential of one of the most valuable plot devices available to fiction. Sure, the employment of ghosts in a narrative may also be evidence of laziness, as the device is just as much a convenience as it is a useful tool for storytellers. Not everyone can be Shakespeare, and of course there is a lot of redundancy and (excuse the pun) lifelessness in the majority of movies involving ghosts.

However, ghosts can also be highly representative and/or serve a film on a deeper level than the surface story. To use another pun, ghost movies are not always so transparent. Like zombies, their plot-device sibling, ghosts have a way of signifying greater ideas, subjects and themes, and aren’t always merely about scares and talking-to-thin-air gags. In a conversation with Cinematical’s Erik Davis, Ghost Town director/co-writer David Koepp had this to say about the significance of ghost stories:

Part of the reason they’re so enduring is because, well, first off all they give hope — because if they are ghosts, then it means we don’t die when we die. But also because they work really well in a number of genres. Ya know, in a drama like Ghost, or a horror movie, suspense or comedy in our case — I just think they offer so many dramatic possibilities; to have someone that’s dead, but still around to talk about it really suggests a lot of great situations.

Okay, so that bit of promotional fluff is actually more about the literal dramatic qualities of the ghost device than the figurative and subtextual, but the quote at least jumpstarted my thinking. Initially I had thought about simply outlining how ghosts have been applied to different film genres, but then I fortunately switched my goal to seek out ten specific ghost films (from the seemingly thousands out there) that utilize the device for more meaningful purpose.

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