Harold and Maude.
WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
The opening is the assembly line of the cake factory that Travoltas character works at.
White cakes getting coated in chocolate.
It establishes the premise of the movie perfectly.
I’ll second Vertigo - I love that opening. Clearly imitating that style is Charade, which I just saw last night and can’t get that freakin’ song out of my head.
I would vote for Dark City, but only if you pretend that opening text and voice-over never happened.
Also, I really enjoyed the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining.
While Waterworld was a fairly forgettable movie, I got chills when the Universal globe flooded. Oooo!
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Most of the Bond films
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (where he runs around naked except something always blocks the view)
Bullitt - That excellent Lalo Schifrin theme playing over the unique credits providing the transitions to different camera angles and scenes of the Ross character’s escape. Cool music, opening credits taken care of, and the set-up for the plot taken care of in an exciting way in the first few minutes, all with a bare minimum of dialogue.
Blue Collar - A perfect combination of music and mood. Captain Beefheart singing a hard edged faux-blues song with industrial noise as percussive accents over views of assembly line workers in an auto plant. As the main characters, their job frustrations, and the drudgery of their lives are introduced; the viewer can relate whether or not he has been in such an environment.
An other vote for Star Wars.
Don’t forget, after the opening crawl, the camera pans down to reveal the desert planet of Tatooine. Suddenly, Princess Leia’s little ship bursts on the scene being fired upon by laser bolts and firing back in turn. We then see the pursuing ship, from below, filling the screen, seemingly going on and on forever.
Boogie Nights - I love the way the camera drops in from the sky, through the front door of the club, and flies around for something like 2 or 3 minutes introducing all of the main characters, apparently without a single edit. How did they do that?
Mostly because it’s one of my favorite movies ever, but The Silence of the Lambs; simple font, creepy low-frequency-ish score, the play on the traditional horror film trope of the killer’s point-of-view camera angle used to track Clarice as she runs through the woods on her workout. And the lingering shot of the signs nailed to the tree “HURT-PAIN-AGONY-LOVE IT” really set a psychological tone for the film to come.
I also like the opening of Trainspotting. It may be a heavy-handed, meet-the-cast! introduction to the film but it’s fast, exciting, and I like Renton as the narrator.
And, perhaps in that same vein, Desperado. Steve Buscemi is absolutely hilarious. " . . . a bunch of real low-lifes. Not a class-act group of guys like you got in here . . ."
Oh, and Romancing the Stone. I love everything about the beginning of that movie. We see Angelina rescued by Jesse, who appears on the ridge in silhouette in the fantasy sequence and the book poster Joan has in her apartment. And the cut to Joan sobbing at the typewriter, frumpy and alone with her cat, Romeo. The opening did so much to construct Joan as the shy, introverted, lonely romance novelist, and set the tone for her transformation over the course of the film. Love it.
Okay, I’m kind of a cheeseball. I’m sorry.
Gotta be the Blues Brothers. Joliet Jake is sleeping (?) when the guards come to release him from prison…and he is led thru the prison (insert sounds of doors slamming, etc.) while the credits roll. Everything looks bleak. He meets Frank Oz. ( “One soiled.” hee hee) signs his name with an ‘X’ and eventually gets into the Calumet County Police Car to meet his brother Elwood.
Oh yea, and I want to second Star Wars too…the music, the scrawling words, the space scene.
I’ll second Superman. I don’t think I can improve upon CalMeacham’s description, except to say that when the old-style movie curtains open and the “projector” starts, the title card “June - 1938” appears briefly, then the shot of ACTION COMICS #1 and the child’s opening narration. Brilliant.
The opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West is amazing. Stylistic horrormeister Dario Argento wrote the screenplay for that segment, as well as a couple others in the film.
– CH
Delicatessen
This movie is definitely an aquired taste. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but I believe that all the credits are actually incorporated into various elements in a room (newspaper, labels, etc.) The camera flys around a room focusing on these different elements.
The above description is limited by shitty memory, but the sequence is really impressive nonetheless.
Dead Man on Campus Along with “Seven,” this has got to be one of Imaginary Forces’ best pieces (BTW: I’m a design geek) D.M.O.C.'s sequence presents “ways to kill yourself” in the form of a college test booklet. Very creative.
Another tip of the hat to the pure silliness of “Grail.”
Okay, I’ll try this again.
Silverado has a great opening; Scott Glenn, in a remote little cabin, is awoken by three men sent to kill him. He dispatches all three, then the camera follows him out the door to show the surrounding snow-covered Rockies.
Speaking of westerns:
High Noon; the credit sequence shows the three bad men joining together and going to the station to wait for Frank Miller, who, as the song tells us, “Swore it would be my life or his’n”.
The Cowboys opens with John Wayne working on breaking a green horse, just the two of them in the corral. Neither of them is giving up; Big John is no rougher than he needs to be, but keeps at it until he has the horse settled, in spite of rope-burning his hands. That scene tells us all we need to know about the character.
The Transformers: The Movie
Unicron eats some random planet, and then we get a trash-metal version of the “More than meets the eye” theme song. Killer!
Mallrats
The comic book covers with each character on them were pretty cool.
The Naked Gun movies
For all the weird places the car went. My favorite (I think it was from 2 1/2) was when Zsa Zsa Gabor slapped the siren and said “Ugh! Happens every fucking time when I go shopping.”
btw, 1000th post! w00t!
Batman - the camera follows the edge of the sculpted bat-symbol, you’re wondering what you are seeing, and then it pulls back - great shot! Doesn’t work nearly as well at home, though, on the small screen and without big theater sound.
But my all-time favorite, and anyone who has seen it knows why, is Barbarella.
I see now on the IMDb that there are three versions of Barbarella. Those of you who saw the PG-rated version probably have no idea why I love the opening credits. (And I’m jealous of the guys in Australia.)
Slightly off topic, but the CLOSING credits for Buckaroo Banzai are pretty cool.
Brian
The Shining: Great bird’s eye view of the colorado landscape.
Another vote of agreement for Superman, especially the moment when the title comes up.
And while I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but the one that came to my mind – so it’s definitely pretty memorable – is The Crowd (1926 or 1928, I don’t recall, but it is a silent movie). Opening sequence has a few brief scenes we see Johnny Sims (has the computer game ever made a joke about this?) grow up and what he thinks his life is going to be like. Then we have the shot : From the streets of New York (shots of real traffic & people, IIRC) high up to the skyscraper, then approaching the building, then inside, and there’s a sea of desks; men at typewriters busily working away, and we proceed over them until finally, there is Johnny Sims, #137, “one of the seven million people who believe New York depends on them.”
Another good opening and the best one of the James Bond series is “The Spy who Loved Me”. You get all the important characters (including agent-XXX and her lover, and what Bond does to him) set up so it’s not just a pointless teaser, one of the greatest ski chases of the series followed by Bond’s best escape ever – skiing straight off the cliff and then falling for what seems like forever. But the audience knows he has to have some way out, and the Union Jack parachute opens and the credits begin (also one of the better theme songs, too).