Vanilla Sky.
Seriously, what the hell is that? A winter movie? The name of a stripper? A film set in an ice-cream parlor? Romantic comedy? Courtroom drama? I got nothing.
Is that the movie with the wedding vows that begin with “I am an asshole…”?
Quoting:
Martha and Bill
from the movie, Serial
Reverend:
Fellow members of the human community, this is the wedding of two separatenesses.
Martha:
You-ness, One-ness, Us-ness, We-ness.
Yours-ness, My-ness, Our-ness, Happiness.
Now, I want to know where your head is at.
Bill:
Thank you Martha for pushing my button.
Thank you for wanting me to participate in your life for I am an asshole and being an asshole is neither good nor bad, it just is.
Reverend:
I think that says it all. I now announce you pair-bonded for as long as your relationship continues.
This one still bothers me. I still haven’t decided whether I like it or not.
My vote is * The Truman Show * . I thought it was a sort of documentary on a talk show named The Truman Show, like The Howard Stern Show. I thought i would get a boring commentary on how Truman fought his way from obscurity to be the great talk show host. Instead I got one of my favorite movies of all time.
Must have been a phase that Liam Neeson was going through, because Takenwas similarly badly named.
I couldn’t help notice all the characters constantly say “she was taken”, “they took her”, to make the word seem commonly used for this situation. They seem to avoid using the word kidnapped at all costs
*The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Frankenhooker*
Firewalker. A truly horrible movie, with a great Ebert review with a fantastic last sentence:
And the absolute worst of all time: Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Saffire
Bad puns almost always ruin it for me too, like Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel
I love the movie Ronin, but you could be excused for thinking it was a film about rogue samurai. It’s Not About the Fucking Suitcase, Dammit might have been more descriptive, but probably not a great marketing choice either.
Gladiator, on the other hand, tells you right up front what is in the box.
On, but Firewalker is another fabulously Bad Movie. It’s Chuck Norris and Louis Gosset Junior trying to be Buddies and Trying to be Funny, and failing miserably. It’s far better entertainment than if they’d succeeded.
But the title doesn’t make a lick o’ sense.
Agreed. However, in the household discussion of tonight’s blockbuster Sharknado, we decided that a scarier version for our area would be…
…Squirrelwind.
It always sounded like the name of a feminine hygiene product to me-“K-Pax: for that difficult time of the month…”
Along the same lines, I know plenty of guys (myself included) who balked at seeing a movie called “The Princess Bride”, which turned out to be all kinds of awesome.
I’m rather partial to A Boy and His Dog. Simultaneously perfectly descriptive and not at all what one might expect ;).
Oh yes. But I’ll offer up the immortal Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. A movie named after a spelling mistake -* that they thought was so brilliant they decided to keep*. Not only does it give you no idea of the movie whatsoever, it doesn’t even look like a movie title. Or English. Or anything much really, except maybe a spellchecker test string.
For me good ones include The Ladykillers, A Fish Called Wanda, 12 Angry Men, and The Intouchables.
You can’t copyright a title in any case.
The truly awful title that immediately came to mind was so bad they had to change it before release - Dancing About Architecture, which eventually became the not-much-better Playing by Heart.
Bad title for a bad movie.
Star Trek Into Darkness. Removing the : did not do the title any favors. Nobody actually Star Treks in Star Trek, except for that clunker of a line in First Contact when Zephram Cochrane asks them if they’re “astronauts… on somekinda Star Trek?” Sounded dumb then, sounds dumb now. Star Trekkin’ across the universe…
You might have been thinking of Good Will Hunting. Agreed. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that the title is the only bad thing about that movie.
Serenity–great movie with a bad name.
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things–Bad movie with a great title
Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx–What were they thinking? “If we build it, they will come”? I hear it was a great film, but I’ll never know for sure.