Quick Change may not have been a great movie, but it was definitely a good movie. If you’re like me, though, you may be struggling here: “Quick Change…Quick Change…which one was that again?”
Oh, right, it’s the one with Bill Murray, Randy Quaid, and Geena Davis; Bill Murray dresses as a clown and robs a bank (but he’s a sympathetic bank robber and we’re rooting for him and his friends to get away with it); his bank robbery plan goes off without a hitch, but then the protagonists struggle mightily with just getting to the damned airport and various wacky high jinks ensue. Yeah, you know…Quick Change
I’m not going to be able to completely fulfill the requirements of the OP, though, because I can’t really come up with a good title.
Clown Bank Robbery? The Clown Caper? Escape from New York? (No, I suppose not.)
But Quick Change isn’t it.
Sorceror was a great William Friedkin movie (mentioned in another current thread), a remake of the French film The Wages of Fear with a thoroughly wrong title. It sounds like a Fantasy film, a Dungeons and Dragons epic, rather than about a bunch of down-and-out losers trying to transport nitroglycerine through the jungle without setting it off. I didn’t know where they got that title from for years. (It’s the name of one of the trucks, although they don’t point this out or have a lingering shot of the name painted on or anything. Nor is it important to the plot).
VisionQuest sounds like another fantasy movie, but it’s a coming-of-age film about a teenage wrestler. It’s adapted from a book of the same name, but you’d think they’d have changed it to improve the audience
October Sky isn’t awful, but what was wrong with The Rocket Boys, the title of the book it was based on? I doubt if anyone would think that this was a juvenile SF movie, like Destination Moon. Yeah, it’s really clever that “October Sky” is an anagram of “The Rocket Boys”, but what was wrong with The Rocket Boys?
Which is why it’s kinda been retitled “Live Die Repeat” on the packaging.
I’ll nominate “Manhunter”- the first movie version of Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon”
Which reminds me the 1962 B&W Mario Bava vampire movie starring Barbara Steele which was titled “Black Sunday” in the U.S.
but was titled in Europe the equivalent of “Mask of the Demon”, which is more accurate.
“Black Sunday” of course was the title of Thomas Harris’s thriller about a blimp set by terrorists to explode at the Super Bowl.
One problem with “Greed,” is that there’s a really famous silent film called “Greed” which is 8 hours long. I don’t think anyone will ever greenlight a film called greed, for fear of people thinking it’s a remake of the earlier film, and also exhaustingly long.
But the original book is called that, and if you want traffic from Burroughs fans you have to use his title.
Oooooo. Yeah. That one is on the US publishers of the book. It does make me shudder, though.
Yup. Thanks for saying it.
Now, this is one of my favorite film titles. I guess we’re running out of people who immediately recognize “Northside 777” as a phone number.
The Victors is one of the most brutal dark uncompromising war films I have ever seen. However, its title, The Victors, makes it seem like a celebration of Allied soldiers when its anything but. And yes I get the irony but had it had a title that better reflected the true nature of the film I feel it would be far better known.
Slight hijack here: I think retroactively Sorcerer’s Stone is better than Philosopher’s Stone. The common complaint I hear is that the Philosopher’s stone is a real thing but the Sorcerer’s Stone is made up. But if you look at the rest of the books, they’re all about made-up things. And there’s always a bit of mystery before you read it. You don’t know what the Chamber of Secrets or the Deathly Hallows are. but if you know what the Philosopher’s Stone is upfront it kills some of the mystery.
Yeah, but you could make the same argument about A Princess of Mars, and they still changed the title to John Carter. Without the “of Mars” until the end titles.
(Yes, I know it’s a different Burroughs. It’s a joke, son.
Read Philip Jose Farmer’s short story The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod to get an idea of how William Burroughs would have written something by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Farmer said he tried it the other way around, too, but it didn’t really work.)
The Hudsucker Proxy is my favorite Coen Bros. film. But I’m sure the title has put some folks off. I probably would have never watched it based on the title alone. I’m not sure what a better title would be; I mean, it’s 100% accurate. Just not something you’d pick off the video shelf back in the day.
And as far as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly goes–that’s up there with one of the best titles of all time. Plays right into the archetypes of the genre.
Until I saw the scene from whence the title comes, I thought it sounded rather romantic.Now I don’t find it “off-putting” exactly, just much less romantic.
Either way, it doesn’t really suit the film. The Colonel seemed to have lots of problems besides lack of feminine companionship.
The Coen Brothers are big on enigmatic titles that don’t give much of a clue as to what the movie is about. Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, etc. But yeah, that one’s probably the worst. Something like The Hoop might have given a better hook to the plot.
The issue is that the Sorceror’s Stone is the Philosopher’s Stone, and I’m not aware of other things in that universe that have such a strong correspondence but are called something different (yet not obviously humorous). Maybe there are and I am just unaware of their mythological origins myself, or maybe I just didn’t pay much attention to Harry Potter after I decided that they were condescending to me. The actual first movie was pretty good, though. Great visuals.
The closest thing that is so annoying to me is the names in A Song of Ice and Fire. There are a lot of names that are close to perfectly good normal names, and some are even pronounced like real world names in the TV series, but they try too hard to be ever so slightly different thus exotic. (His names that are exact real world names, or completely-made-up names, are fine with me.)
Disagree, I think it’s a great title. It’s a succinct representation of the entire motivation for Clarice’s character and the whole plot of the film. “You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again, to that awful screaming of the lambs.”
Steve Coogan’s film Greed opened in the US on Feb 28 and was one of the very last films I was able to see before the theaters shut down.
I’m being “whooshed” for not watching The Simpsons? Please. I was a film projectionist and we showed that film at the art house where I worked, and made a TON of money from it. The movie didn’t play in places where random kids would have gone to see it just because it was an R film or had the word “Naked” in it. The Simpsons joke is disingenuous.
We got lots of foot traffic from people familiar with Burroughs.
